Whiteness studies has become a popular topic for many critical intercultural communication researchers and pedagogues. Since my encounter with whiteness studies, I have been struggling with a practice of whiteness pedagogy. As a nonwhite pedagogue, I often experience dissonance in translating whiteness research into whiteness pedagogy. In this article, I analyze and make sense of this dissonance. I weave both my and my students’ stories and my ethnographic observations of “communication and race” classrooms in pursuit of a relational pedagogy of whiteness. I call for pedagogical love as a site of critical labor that creates difference and potentially interrupts racist systems and structures local to our everyday lives.
Critical intercultural communication education: cultural analysis and pedagogical applications
