Dr Vron Ware

Research Fellow

Sociology

Research Interests

Whiteness

Over the past twenty five years I have studied questions of race and culture in contemporary Britain, both as a journalist and an academic. I worked with Searchlight anti-fascist journal from 1977-1983, and my pamphlet on women and the National Front was published in 1978. My first academic book Beyond the Pale: white women, racism and history investigated the power and allure of whiteness as a racial category, arguing for a gendered reading of colonial history to make sense of contemporary racisms. This intervention, addressed to feminist debates about race and gender, was instrumental in the growth of a new international field of study which has since become known as Critical Whiteness Studies. A second book, Out of Whiteness: color, politics and culture, written with Les Back, took issue with the conservatism inherent in much of this work, and continued to explore our respective obsessions with the cultural politics of anti-racism. This book also considered some epistemological problems inherent in researching racism, as well as arguing for a broader, transnational dialogue about white supremacy that looks beyond US-dominated tropes of racialisation.

National Identity: Britishness/Englishness

My most recent book, Who Cares About Britishness? A global view of the national identity debate (Arcadia, 2007), was commissioned by Counterpoint, the British Council’s cultural relations think tank. The research draws on conversations with young people in South Asia, East Africa, Ireland and the UK, exploring questions of belonging, exclusion, historical memory, transnational identity and citizenship in different national and urban contexts.

Issues of whiteness and national identity are also relevant to my research on the English village as a site of globalisation. Over the past decade I have completed a study of a village in Hampshire from 1939 to the present, looking at various indices of socio-cultural change and attempting to tell a different kind of story about rural development.

My research interests can be summarised as follows:

• race and gender, whiteness, history and politics of antiracism, transnational feminism, postcolonialism, British/English national identity, Islamophobia, feminism in the Muslim-majority world
• communicative citizenship, intercultural dialogue, cultural diplomacy
• life-writing, landscape, place, social ecology, urban/rural divide, heritage

Recent Publications

Books

Who cares About Britishness? A global view of the national identity debate London: Arcadia Books, 2007.

Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, & Culture (with Les Back) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Branquidade: Identidade Branca e Multiculturalismo (Whiteness: White Identity and Multiculturalism) Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2004. (edited collection).

Beyond The Pale: White Women, Racism & History London/New York: Verso, 1992.

Essays

‘Info-War and the Politics of Feminist Curiosity: Exploring New Frameworks for Feminist Intercultural Studies’ Cultural Studies Forthcoming 2006 No. 20:6

‘The White Fear Factor’ Wasafiri special issue on Terror in Contemporary Writing and Representation, 51, 2007.

‘The Future of Feminism: What Other Way to Speak?’ in Women and Others eds. Celia Daileader, Amilcar Shabazz, Rhoda Johnson, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006.

‘Mothers of Invention: Good hearts, Intelligent Minds and Subversive Acts’ in Weiß - Weißsein - Whiteness (working title) eds. Martina Tissberger / Gabriele Dietze / Daniela Hrzán / Jana Husmann-Kastein, Peter Lang Verlag, 2006.

'The Power of Recall: The Significance of Place in Writing Against Racial Identity' in Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice ed. Karim Murji and John Solomos, Oxford University Press, 2005.

'The Man with Odd Socks' essay on segregation in the American city for Multiculturalism and Translating Difference, OpenDemocracy, September 2004 http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-1-111-2089.jsp

‘Rediscovering Personal Whiteness: a Very Postmodern Thing’ in The Blackwell Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies eds. David Theo Goldberg & John Solomos, Blackwell, 2002.

'Global Whiteness: a Multilateral Approach'. Souls Volume 4, No. 2, Fall 2002.

‘Perfidious Albion: Whiteness in the International Imagination’ in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness eds. Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexica, & Wray, Duke University Press, 2001.

‘A Room with a View’ in White?Women: Critical Perspectives on Race and Gender eds. Heloise Brown. Madi Gilkes & Ann Kaloski-Naylor, Raw Nerve Books, York, 1999.

'Purity & Danger: Race and Gender in Tales of Sex Tourism' in Back to Reality? Reader In Cultural Studies ed. Angela McRobbie, Manchester University Press, 1997.

‘Island Racism: Gender, Place and White Power’ in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social & Cultural Criticism ed. Ruth Frankenberg, Duke University Press, 1997.

'Defining Forces: Feminism & Historical Memory of Empire' in The Postcolonial Question eds. Iain Chambers & Lydia Curti, Routledge, London/New York, 1995.

Other Interests

Film

1989 Hilda at Darjeeling - TV documentary for Channel Four (co-directed and co-written with Mandy Rose) about the experiences of British women in colonial India, screened in February 1989.