Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This is a study of how the elite subject is made at Canadian secondary schools. I show how the bodies of racial others are crucial to this making. This dissertation analyzes encounters with racial others both behind and beyond elite schools' ivy-covered walls. These encounters are linked through a racial process of becoming in which whiteness and elite status are inextricable. This new Canadian elite subject is the gendered global citizen of our intensified neoliberal and racially structured world. I theorize two encounters that consolidate this subject. The first is a multicultural encounter with East Asian international students behind the ivy at three southwestern Ontario elite schools. I conduct a document analysis of archival material to consider how anxiety about increasing numbers of students of color coincided with a shift to co-education. Second, I theorize a humanitarian encounter beyond the ivy between girls of an elite private school and the South African children and staff of a school they visited for the purpose of volunteering abroad. The analysis of the multicultural encounter suggests that schools are compelled to seek further encounters with difference abroad. The analysis of the humanitarian encounter reveals the micropractices that constitute the elite subject in the making, in this case, high school girls. These historical and empirical analyses are considered together with contextual information on ten elite schools in southwestern Ontario. My approach is to track the continuities and shifts that characterize elite school encounters. I do this by following routes to elite subjectivity. I theorize moral distinction as a route to elite status, and the rhetorical, discursive, and emotional structures that facilitate this process of becoming. This is a gendered process, and I am particularly interested in the making of elite femininities. This study offers three main findings. First, the processes of becoming elite both behind and beyond the ivy share a racial logic. Second, elite schools sell whiteness. Third, the volunteer abroad encounter, as part of the business of selling whiteness, reinforces students' sense of elite, racial and moral superiority.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Leila Angod
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2331914749