Regular Article

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

“Re-Hooking” in the Field: Negotiating

Volume 23: 1–9
© The Author(s) 2024
DOI: 10.1177/16094069241226812
Power, Privilege, and Whiteness in journals.sagepub.com/home/ijq

Qualitative Inquiry

Angela Kraemer-Holland1 

Abstract
This paper outlines my experience as an early career researcher engaging with my power and privilege embedded in my white,
English-speaking identity while working with Mexican American male-identifying research participants. Utilizing critical race
theory as a framework, this paper chronicles my reflections on un/hooking from whiteness within the context of scholarly
inquiry. Specifically, I draw inspiration from a qualitative research project to anchor the discussion of privileged epistemologies
and power structures embedded in the inquiry process and academia more broadly, and how race can intersect with how we
negotiate our roles, methods, and subjectivities as qualitative scholars. More broadly, this paper explores notions of knowledge
and agency in educational inquiry against the question of whose stories are told, how, for whom, and by whom. This paper
contributes to the conversation and efforts toward disentangling from whiteness and the epistemologies around which
research, higher education, and society are structured to instead magnify the voices and experiences of participants through
more egalitarian inquiry practices.

Keywords
critical qualitative inquiry, hegemonic whiteness, epistemology, critical race theory, researcher subjectivity, qualitative
interviews

Introduction: Finding the Hook to Unhook
My experience studying in Mexico as an undergraduate student
cultivated my desire to pursue teaching. Additionally, this ex-
perience fostered a desire to better understand students’ and
teachers’ bilingual and bicultural experiences, and how these
intersect with imperial structures that shape public education
within the United States (U.S.)—a desire that, in retrospect, may
have inspired the research project underscoring this paper. As a
former P-20 teacher-turned teacher educator and researcher, I
have and continue to engage with structures that maintain in-
equities along various lines, ones that similarly maintain my
privilege and subsequent success within national and global
educational systems that were “made for [me]” (Martin & Garza,
2020, p. 11) and those like me (cisgender, white, and native
English-speaking). Through interrogating how such privilege
enables possession of various forms of capital and power within
educational and qualitative inquiry contexts (Bourdieu, 1993;
Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Yosso, 2005), my status as a
white cisgender woman with social, linguistic, and cultural
capital–allowing me to occupy scholarly conversations that
enable knowledge dissemination of participants’ stories with
whom I work–came into much sharper focus (Foster, 1999;
Parker, 1998). Not only did this realization highlight academia’s
racial and educational power hierarchies underscored by a
politics of academic exclusion (Esposito & Evans-Winters,
2021); through inquiry, I realized my scholarly and civic re-
sponsibility to amplify participant perspectives within scholarly
spaces by facing my “good white liberal” positionality (Hayes
et al., 2016, p. 123).
1
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Kansas
State University, USA
Corresponding Author:
Angela Kraemer-Holland, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College
of Education, Kansas State University, 204 Bluemont Hall, 1114 Mid
Campus Drive North, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA.
Email: akraemer@ksu.edu

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2 International Journal of Qualitative Methods
This paper is inspired by a larger qualitative inquiry project at
a U.S. minority-serving institution in 2022 that examined the
intersectionality underscoring the educational experiences and
emerging teaching philosophies of Mexican American male-
identifying preservice teachers. Although I attempted to position
myself in the inquiry context background, I realized I did not
accomplish this aim, failing to foreground participants as co-
creators of scholarship (Mayan & Daum, 2014; Milner, 2007),
privileging white knowledge and the white researcher-as-
knower. Consequently, this reflective paper draws inspiration
from this now-paused inquiry project that illuminated my per-
sistent attachment to my own whiteness and the white privilege
entrenched in the academy. I take up Hayes and Hartlep’s (2013)
concept of “un/hooking from whiteness” as a way to engage with
not only my position as a white person in academia, but also how
unhooking—or disentangling—myself from racism, whiteness,
and white privilege is incredibly difficult, messy, haphazard, and
often unsuccessful; particularly within the context of academia, a
space premised on upholding whiteness and inequitable struc-
tures around knowledge production (Esposito & Evans-Winters,
2021). Utilizing theoretical tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT)
Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Milner, 2007), I position whiteness,
then, as the hook that draws us back in, often subconsciously, no
matter the risks we take or our seemingly valiant anti-racist
efforts. From there, I grapple with how to “reposition” the
whiteness hook (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013) from mere ac-
knowledgement of white privilege toward utilizing it as a pro-
ductive tool to address inequitable structures within and beyond
the academy. As conservative, U.S. public discourse continues to
weaponize CRT and similar anti-racist scholarship and broader
justice-oriented social and educational initiatives (Gross, 2021),
this paper contributes to the importance of unhooking from
whiteness in inquiry (Hayes et al., 2016), alongside amplifying
perspectives from communities of the global majority within
educational research and public discourse.
Critical Race Theory, the Mexican American
Experience, and the Whiteness Hook
Although some might view racism as a matter of discourse,
fundamentally inequitable discourses similarly re/produce
inequitable systems of privilege and power. Building on the
fusing of critical legal studies and radical feminism, Critical
Race Theory (CRT) seeks to transform inequitable social
organization and the intertwined relationship between race,
racism, and power along economic, historical, contextual, and
subconscious lines (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). CRT posi-
tions racism as deeply embedded within the American social
fabric (López, 2003), and as a perpetuating form of material
advancement of whiteness—and thus, difficult to address and
eradicate. Bonding colonialism, capitalism, and the subse-
quent displacement of perspectives from the global majority,
whiteness encompasses a privileged consciousness and re-
gime that oppresses those who exist outside of these racialized
boundaries and privileged perspectives (Calderón, 2006;
Grande, 2004), while entrenching white voices and ways of
knowing as unequivocal. In this way, whiteness becomes
property that ensures capital and absolves structural respon-
sibility (Harris, 1993). The often-utilized colorblind and
neutral approaches to racism in the U.S. maintains its image as
an allegedly post-racist society through well-intentioned
discourse (Lockard, 2016; Melamed, 2006), yet also ob-
scures the structural racial inequities embedded in economic,
historical, and educational structures and hooks the “good
white liberal[s]” (Hayes et al., 2016, p. 123) onto the very
whiteness they allegedly aim to dismantle.
My line of inquiry aimed to unpack participants’ teaching
realities at the intersection of race, language, and gender–a
central component of CRT (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995)–a
process that I assumed I had sufficiently engaged with through
various iterations of scholar positionality statements and an
awareness and capacity to define “white privilege” from a
scholarly standpoint; yet still unaware how whiteness had–and
still–hooked me as an early career scholar. Although I felt I
was cognizant of my privilege as a white, English-dominant
person in academia–particularly through public admission
(wasn’t that enough?) (Lockard, 2016)–I initially believed
such awareness to be sufficient for beginning my inquiry
project on–rather than with–participants of the global ma-
jority. It was not until much later that I realized the significance
of the on/with distinction in inquiry more generally, and how
my adherence to the former suggested that the whiteness hook
still held me as a scholar–particularly, in how I conceptualized
knowledge, and who held responsibility to produce and
disseminate it. Although I acknowledged my whiteness-as-
property within the research context, I had not yet realized
how this hook entrenched–and normalized–the exclusion and
Othering participants–in inquiry and beyond (Krumer-Nevo,
2012)–have historically faced.
Contextualizing the Pursuit of Belonging in the
Mexican/American Experience
Participants in my inquiry project identified as Mexican or
Mexican American and were enrolled at various stages of their
teacher licensure program. Historically, exclusion, difference,
and displacement deeply undergird the Chicanx and Mexican
experience and discourse (Elenes, 1997), reflective of a cul-
tural and linguistic in-between that exposes the tensions
embedded within the bilingual-bicultural experience for
Chicanx, Mexican, and Mexican Americans in the U.S.
(Anzaldúa, 1987; Jaramillo, 2012). Similarly, notions of be-
longing emerged as an integral focal point for participants in
their prior educational and current teaching experiences, as
well. From this perpetual state of difference, feelings of be-
longing and recognition represent constant pursuits against a
backdrop of the U.S./Mexico dichotomy entrenched within
whiteness, racism, and nativism (Elenes, 1997)–elements that
Kraemer-Holland
inequitable social structures perpetuate and institutionalize on
individual and collective levels (Jaramillo, 2012; Krumer-
Nevo, 2012). Despite sharing a national border, economic
power often bends toward the United States (Laboe, 2022),
leading to the association of social and cultural capital with
whiteness and white ways of knowing/being/doing that can
cultivate perpetual Othering (Krumer-Nevo, 2012).
Although such hegemonic and institutionalized forms of
Othering and racism are similarly entrenched within educa-
tional structures (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021), the
proliferation of scholars from the global majority in the U.S.–
and the insurgence of decolonizing, critically-oriented
scholarship–reflects a changing tide within higher educa-
tion, in particular. Nevertheless, whiteness remains an ever-
present positioned hook within academia (Hayes et al., 2016;
Hayes & Hartlep, 2013), one that either stubbornly or in-
tentionally informs our pedagogies, scholarship, and inquiry
practices toward a persistent ethos of participant-Othering
through exclusion, difference, and displacement (Krumer-
Nevo, 2012).
Whiteness, Othering, and Participant Connections. As a result, I
remained unaware of how the whiteness hook enveloped my
research design, despite my scholarly–yet superficial–recog-
nition of knowledge and representational inequities within and
beyond my inquiry context and academia more generally. And
so, in retrospect, not only had I not sufficiently engaged with
how dynamics of racial and linguistic Othering would in-
tersect with an academic context hooked onto whiteness; I had
also not interrogated how these elements would simulta-
neously shape my work with former student-participants.
Participants had previously been enrolled in courses I
taught; and, although recruitment and study participation did
not occur until after course grades were posted to avoid co-
ercion, I only fleetingly considered how participants’ positions
as former students might have shaped the inquiry context.
Primarily, participants might have felt obligated to participate
because they had an academic connection to me, the re-
searcher. From there, this connection may have shaped their
responses in interviews and focus groups. Although I might
have executed adequate measures to mitigate participant co-
ercion, I failed to account for how the inequitable power
dynamic between instructor and student carried over into the
inquiry context–to the distinction between researcher and
participant–and how academia’s positioning of researcher-as-
neutral knowledge producer kept my project hooked on
whiteness (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021).
Interrogating My [Hooked] Methods
Inquiry involves the simultaneous investigation of another
person, topic, or phenomenon; as well as ourselves (Dillard,
2000; Godwin, 2020), since our personal and professional
identities deeply undergird our scholarly pursuits (Chapman,
2007; Milner, 2007). I realized I had not deeply scrutinized
3
how design aspects could consequently hinder the inquiry
context, relationships with participants, and subsequent
knowledge dissemination. I believed that I had embraced
qualitative inquiry’s capacity to position experience as a
source of understanding. However, as an early career scholar, I
was unsure of how to ensure my participants’ experiences and
stories remained at the center of the project (Fernández, 2002),
particularly as I fell back onto a familiar procedure through
semi-structured, phenomenological interviews (Seidman,
2019). Hoping to foster an additional layer of “conversa-
tional relation[s]” (Rossman & Rallis, 2012, p. 286) and a
community-of-practice between participants regarding edu-
cational and teaching experiences as Mexican American males
(Lave & Wenger, 1991), I instituted focus groups. Although I
aimed to create a sense of belonging among participants
within a predominantly white and female profession (see
Carter Andrews et al., 2021; Sleeter, 2017), in retrospect, I
enacted the very familiar guardrails I critiqued, the gates that
excluded different ways to create and circulate knowledge—
whiteness still hooked me.
However, the research context often illuminates issues and
structures of power between the researcher and participant
(Milner, 2007; Subedi & Rhee, 2008), even if mutual trust and
respect underscore the researcher-participant relationship.
From previous class discussions, participants knew that I
began teaching in Mexico and spoke Spanish; and so, my
limited understanding of life in Mexico, programmatic di-
lemmas, or teaching experiences underscored some degree of
trust and some level of emic understanding. However, I be-
came increasingly cognizant that I did not share my partici-
pants’ bilingual and bicultural experiences through listening to
individual interviews and the shared experiences between
participants in focus groups—already-limiting and narrow
forms of data collection that limited participant co-creation of
knowledge. It was during data collection that I more deeply
wondered how much my role as a researcher–and particularly,
my role as a white researcher–impacted my interactions with
participants, my understanding of their responses, and how
these would confine knowledge dissemination. From there,
during my data collection process, I realized that the study
design did not involve my participants as knowledge co-
creators and disseminators. To what was I clinging, expect-
ing, or even privileging in my chosen research design? How
hooked was I still, onto whiteness and white knowledge
forms?
Attempting to Unhook From
Research(er) Whiteness
The Hook of White Researcher-as-Knower
By pursuing lines of inquiry to address, engage with, or
sometimes solve a particular problem or question; new
knowledge emerging from inquiry can maintain or upend our
deeply-ingrained epistemologies, subjectivities, and broader
4 International Journal of Qualitative Methods
normalized hegemonies (Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017).
Although I hoped to position myself in the background of the
study context– functioning as a conduit between questions and
participants’ stories–I realized that my research design hardly
cultivated this desire. Instead, it remained hooked on
privileging white Westernized ways of knowing and inequi-
table power structures often apparent in research (Esposito &
Evans-Winters, 2021). Therefore, I attempted to “locate
[myself] in the tensions” (Lather, 2006, p. 47) through in how I
conceptualized what is seemingly worth knowing, who de-
cides, and how these issues were shaping my inquiry context
and the negotiation of power and knowledge production.
Post/positivist approaches to research still normalized in
the academy foster an entrenched dichotomy between “fact”
and bias or value (Antony, 1993; Hankinson Nelson, 1993; St.
Pierre, 2011), privileging finite definitions of the former and
viewing the latter as an issue researchers must remedy.
However, such a juxtaposition is not clear-cut—because no
research design–or researcher–is value-free, an idea I only
superficially understood at the time of data collection. Despite
my position that all people hold knowledge forming capa-
bilities (Foucault, 1975), I–and my research design–were
chained to the academy’s whiteness hook in its privileging
of Westernized ways of knowing, being, and knowledge
production—positioning these as unequivocal. As a result,
aligning with narrow conceptions of “research” and scholarly
productivity embedded in the academy often exclude
knowledge forms of other groups (Denzin, 2017; Esposito &
Evans-Winters, 2021), sustaining inequitable power structures
between researcher and participant often emerging in inquiry.
By framing knowledge and research as seemingly neutral
(Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Longino, 2001), apolitical
(Hankinson Nelson, 1993), and capital-dependent (Koro-
Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017), scholars like myself simi-
larly view such entrenched practices and beliefs as normal-
ized, despite their egregiousness at privileging whiteness.
From there, participants are subjects, rather than co-creators of
knowledge, entrenching the researcher-as-knowledge pro-
ducer paradigm (Fine, 2006, p. 613), and knowledge as an
extractable value-free commodity from work on—not with—
participants (emphasis added). This allows us to overlook
historical “wrongs” (Lockard, 2016), and how we co-opt
participant knowledge for academic boundaries and pub-
lishing accolades within a context entrenched in whiteness
(Denzin, 2017; Jordan, 2023).
Although research participants—and communities em-
bedded in inquiry—hold agency within the research context,
the context itself is often premised on distance, anonymity,
and narrow interpretation to align with more powerful in-
terests (Lockard, 2016). As data collection progressed, I felt
uneasy about the distance, anonymity, and what I perceived to
be a passive exchange of information that I stored on my
protected drive for later use–in truth, for my own scholarly
benefit. I had not sufficiently engaged with the possibility of
emerging from the safety of my workspace and surrendering
some of my knowledge authority. Although we are obligated
to challenge hegemonies as public intellectuals, faculty like
myself often maintain existing academic hegemonies through
enacting scholarship premised on capital, competition, and
narrow metrics (Denzin et al., 2017; Dimitriadis, 2016), which
sacrifices opportunities for more public, stakeholder-included,
and activist scholarship (Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella,
2017)—and, for more expansive and inclusive conceptuali-
zations of “data” collection–whatever “data” might mean. As a
result, the whiteness hook remains enmeshed with our
scholarly pursuits and practices.
Further, because the whiteness [epistemological] hook
pervades much of the academy and academic practices
(Denzin, 2017; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021), episte-
mologies and practices of people of the global majority are
often positioned as too emotion-laden and thus, devalued
(Elenes, 1997; Milner, 2007). As a cultural, racial, and lin-
guistic outsider, I questioned whether I could effectively re-
ceive and represent participants’ stories and experiences.
Toward the end of data collection, after asking each participant
“what [it] means to be Mexican” during individual interviews,
I realized how much my position as a white person, white
scholar, former instructor, and how I viewed knowledge
production and dissemination as mostly my responsibility
deeply complicated the telling of participants’ stories as young
men of Mexican descent, especially since people of the global
majority have historically been exploited and misrepresented
in educational research (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021;
Milner, 2007). How I initially perceived “research,” knowl-
edge production, what was worth knowing, and who decides–
needed to be challenged, and for good reason. Interrogating
how we perceive systems of knowing and our environment
demonstrates a genuine pursuit toward new knowledge and
seizing the whiteness hooks that restrict us professionally and
personally (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013; Ladson-Billings,
2000). However, these are often difficult to pinpoint in
ourselves–delaying the realization of how embedded and
hooked we are onto privileging whiteness, its properties, and
its systems within our research designs and within the
academy.
The Hooks of White Privilege, White Talk,
and Confession
Faculty engaged in inquiry often feel entitled to produce
knowledge about the participant-Other (Fine, 1994; Krumer-
Nevo, 2012), entitlement stemming from the obscured yet
intertwined relationship between researcher and participant.
As a result, the question of authority and agency over and
within knowledge production and dissemination–and whether
inquiry maintains or challenges the whiteness-hooked status
quo–still nagged at me. Toward the end of the last focus group
interview, one research participant asked what I was un-
covering. I discussed the significance of the intersection
Kraemer-Holland
between race, language, and gender in their educational
experiences – which underscored a desire for belonging – and
how participants negotiated issues of teacher blame and
teaching dilemmas within their schools and the teaching
profession. I weighed whether to disclose emergent findings;
and in the end, decided to share some sparingly, because I felt
it was important for participants to know because we had an
established connection before the start of the project. I felt as if
I were bestowing the extractable knowledge on participants.
And, an established connection before the start of the project–
if that did not exist, then what? I would tell participants
nothing? Share nothing with them? I naively assumed–in
addition to confession-like positionality statements (Pillow,
2003)–that this is what researchers do.
By being initially guarded about my findings, I missed an
opportunity to unhook, to upend whiteness-hooked
researcher-participant hierarchies. More poignantly, why
wonder how to interrogate racial or researcher-participant
hierarchies, when one remains hooked onto the exclusivity
of knowledge? Like any well-intentioned white person
(Lockard, 2016), I placated principles of diversity in inquiry,
yet remained a gatekeeper to constructing and sharing
knowledge. The question of who can and should conduct
education research with and about communities of the global
majority brings both racial hierarchies and ethical dilemmas
increasingly into focus (Banks, 1998; Hamilton, 2019;
Walther et al., 2015). These dilemmas forced me to question
the more significant issues of power and constraint over
representation of participants’ stories, participants’ relation-
ships to knowledge production, and the enduring presence and
my internalizing of the whiteness hook.
It is difficult to name what we do not recognize. Well-
intentioned white people haphazardly engage in anti-racist
work, instead utilizing their white privilege and discursive
tools like white talk and confessions as a way out of re-
sponsibility for future and more deliberate action (Ahmed,
2006; Lockard, 2016). As a “good white liberal” (Hayes et al.,
p. 123), I supported, even enacted, inquiry that aimed to
engage with oppression and discrimination—but only if such
lines of inquiry did not disrupt my neatly-carved epistemol-
ogies. Sullivan (2006) argues that white privilege is more
insidious than white supremacy, due to its covert, invisible
domination through difficult-to-transform unconscious habits
residing in the background of white people’s lives (Sullivan,
2006). I failed to see the “unconscious habits” (Lockard, 2016,
p. 2) of white privilege normalized within and by the academy
in my project, and in my scholarly practices. By only offering
some aspects of findings and analysis with participants–and
rationalizing that “some,” and however I defined this, was
enough–I “white talk[ed]” (McIntyre, 1997) myself out of
responsibility for perpetuating racism and oppression through
passive data collection procedures and gatekeeping findings,
self-theorizing that the project’s underpinning was somehow
noble. White talk functions as a distancing strategy that, in this
case (Bailey, 2015), minimized the ways in which
5
communities of the global majority have historically been
exploited in the name of “research” (Esposito & Evans-
Winters, 2021).
Although I acknowledged my complicity within acade-
mia’s hegemonic whiteness hook by perpetuating the
researcher-as-knowledge producer paradigm, admissions of
privilege or racism often fail to accomplish intended anti-racist
ends (Ahmed, 2006). Such admissions or acknowledgements
are increasingly tempting to substitute for genuine anti-racist
work (Lockard, 2016); and, in many academic spaces, such
“confessions” represent a widespread cross-discipline truth-
producing act that creates the appearance of purifying one’s
behavior. These confessions of privilege–what some might
say I’m doing here–are powerful in that they seemingly purify
and transform “who we think we are” (Lockard, 2016, p. 16)
as fundamentally racist. Such an acknowledgement–or con-
fession–shows we are somehow morally better than other,
unaware, white people, while situating racism around com-
fortably defined boundaries and failing to enact any anti-racist
outcome. Without dimming the pervasive misogyny in the
academy (Miller, 2019), I realized that as a white, econom-
ically advantaged woman, I straddle the oppressed-oppressor
line from oppressed womanness, while remaining a social and
racial oppressor (Sullivan, 2006, 2014). Even as racism exists
in plain sight, our own racism and privilege remains obscured
as an unbreakable hook, despite the proliferation of spaces in
which confessions as attempts to unhook are expected and
normalized (Lockard, 2016; Sullivan, 2014).
Remaining Personally and
Professionally Hooked
Although some scholars argue that knowledge about com-
munities matters more than who conducts inquiry about such
communities (Banks, 1998; Tillman, 2002), those of us in the
academy hold scholarly and civic responsibility to scrutinize
what is privileged, legitimized, and in/excluded to disrupt the
institutionalized, inequitable power structures (Koro-
Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017). For me, this meant grappling
with my privileged racial, linguistic, and professional capital
within inquiry and larger scholarly spaces. I admonished how I
utilized whiteness to collect data, to represent my participants’
stories, and to gate-keep my findings. Drawing upon CRT
seemed a merely discursive endeavor enmeshed with a su-
perficial recognition of the whiteness hook on my inquiry
practices; where my research design and execution failed to
disrupt colonizing notions of research on communities of the
global majority (Banks, 1998; Tillman, 2002). I missed op-
portunities to enact egalitarian, justice-oriented methods re-
flective of inquiry with participants–rather than on participants
(emphasis added) (Carter Andrews et al., 2021). Sentiments of
and pursuits toward belonging and recognition emergent in the
Chicanx, Mexican, and Mexican American experiences have
led to the creation of alternative methodologies for research
6 International Journal of Qualitative Methods
with communities of the global majority, positioning them at
the forefront of knowledge construction to challenge white-
ness and its ways of knowing (Hartlep, 2016; Solórzano &
Yosso, 2001). More egalitarian practices of testimonios and
cultural intuition to illuminate participants’ stories of bilin-
gualism, schooling, and education eluded me (Hamilton,
2019; Solórzano, 1998). My lack of knowledge and famil-
iarity with culturally and historically grounded methodologies
within Latinx communities’ political history speaks to my own
blind spots (Bernal, 1998; Lockard, 2016), as well as the
academy’s hook onto whiteness that fails to normalize these
alternative methodologies. Through individual and focus
group interviews, reflections, and artifacts–some procedures I
had initially adopted–I could have more deliberately elevated
participant representation as knowledge co-creators to chal-
lenge racial, social (Hamilton, 2019; Milner, 2007), and ed-
ucational hierarchies in inquiry and knowledge production
(Bernal et al., 2012; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001).
Therefore, the anticipated–and unanticipated–obstacles I
faced in this short project complicated how I understood and
grappled with the internal whiteness hook(s) and those within the
academy. Because teacher education is often tailored toward the
needs of white teachers and researchers, policies, courses, and
institutional structures that overlook the needs and perspectives
of practitioners of the global majority (Esposito & Evans-
Winters, 2021; Gay, 2000); I wondered how, or whether, par-
ticipants could be more involved in establishing structures and
protocols for data collection, analysis, and knowledge production
to both align with more egalitarian approaches, and to challenge
the pervasive whiteness hooks in teacher education and the
academy writ large. Consequently, I questioned what it would
look like to redefine the parameters of my research, to reimagine
how my participants’ stories are told against pervasive power-
inequitable research paradigms, and whether I was capable of
enacting such work. Attempting to unhook from academic
whiteness–although desirable–might relieve me of my respon-
sibility to continuously disrupt individual and structural forms of
whiteness, a potentially problematic scenario that could jeop-
ardize continued anti-racist work (Lockard, 2016). And, amid
scholarly misrepresentations of historically marginalized com-
munities and institutionalized whiteness hooks in academia
posing additional challenges to un-hooking (Fasching-Varner
et al., 2013; Hayes et al., 2016), I found both a responsibility
and opportunity to not unhook, but to “re-positio[n] the hook”
(Fasching-Varner et al., 2013, p. 71) alongside participants,
leaning into agency through authorship (Rossman & Rallis,
2012).
Conclusion: Toward “Re-Positioning” the
Whiteness Hook(s)
Awareness without action rarely leads to future anti-racist
work (Lockard, 2016). At the 2023 AERA conference, an-
other scholar illuminated the importance of unpacking
researcher subjectivity in racially, linguistically, and culturally
divergent researcher-participant relationships, particularly to
reframe expertise and storytelling agency within these rela-
tionships (However, I realize that engaging and presenting at
academic conferences illustrates hegemonic academic
whiteness hooking me back in.) Supporting immersion within
participants’ communities, practices, and daily lives to hu-
manize participants’ stories in inquiry, this scholar also dis-
cussed presentations and publications with participants,
complicating—and rightfully so—the notion of whose voi-
ces exist in scholarly spaces, to tell whose stories, and on what
grounds. As an early career scholar, I was unaware such an
option was proverbially allowed (emphasis added) in the
perpetually exclusionary academy (Hartlep, 2016; Koro-
Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017), let alone possible. It was
this very recent conversation that inspired my decision to re-
position some of the academic whiteness hook(s) toward
cultivating co-authoring, presenting, and inquiry opportunities
to situate participants as knowledge co-creators.
As both a reflective (and reflexive) process, this paper
highlights the tensions that emerged in examining my own
power, privilege, and subjectivity; and how this internal work
has encouraged me to reexamine institutionalized practices
within the academy, my own capital and privilege, and how
these intersect with–and complicate–egalitarian inquiry and
attempts toward genuine anti-racist work. More broadly, this
reflective paper grapples with the questions of whose stories
are told, in what spaces, by whom, and for what purpose
(Brunsma et al., 2013; Foster, 1999; Smith, 2014). Finally,
these reflections illuminate the importance of disrupting
privileged epistemologies and normalized whiteness in edu-
cational inquiry and the academy, reinforcing the ways in
which our roles intersect at “tension and responsibility, but
also power and possibility” (Hamilton, 2019, p. 200) in the
vibrant truth-telling of peoples’ stories (hooks, 2001). Not
only did transferring educational institutions in the middle of
the project force me to pause this inquiry; but this reflective
and reflexive opportunity encouraged deeper engagement with
my positionality, research design, and how to re-position
whiteness hooks onto co-creation and project revision to-
ward more egalitarian and genuinely anti-racist ends. And,
although the research project that inspired this paper initially
felt like a failure (see Wohlfart, 2020), circumstances coa-
lesced to serendipitously reinforce the importance of re-
searcher subjectivity and reflexivity when designing
qualitative inquiry with racially and linguistically divergent
researcher-participant backgrounds, consequently offering a
way to re-position whiteness hooks onto something more
agentive.
Nevertheless, it is important to challenge the ways in which
white privilege tempts us to feel hopeful about our efforts
toward alleged anti-racism. It is worth noting that writing for
an academic journal, for narrow impact factors, to an academic
audience, is at the very least one small dimension of why the
work that I do—and the systems in which this work and I am
Kraemer-Holland
embedded—complicate efforts toward critical public schol-
arship and re-positioning whiteness hooks. Further, engaging
participants in current co-authoring opportunities has also
highlighted the pervasiveness of the belief that the academy
remains a more valued space for knowledge dissemination.
Such tensions illuminate how I still am hooked onto academic
whiteness, thereby operating within the realm of a scholarly
“racist anti-racist” (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013, p. 88),
perpetually seeking ways to interrogate and re-position these
hooks. As I continue to question my inquiry practices “on
[my]self and the world” (Sullivan, 2006, p. 197) I realized the
importance of giving up knowledge-producing authority and
the privilege of being or feeling “right” (p. 184). Conse-
quently, in the spirit of Lockard (2016), Ahmed (2006), and
Sullivan (2006; 2014), this paper is less focused on what
actions I can take to make myself feel better—because that is
not the point (or at least, it should not be). Because I, we, white
people, have a responsibility to transform the conditions and
systems in which we are embedded, if we are to claim our
positions as racist-anti-racists (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013).
That does not mean that I cease to imagine creating and
conceptualizing knowledge differently (Dimitriadis, 2016), or
that I will cease more complicated efforts to unhook from
whiteness—albeit a messy, haphazard, and imperfect pathway
toward that unhooking. Instead, “repositioning the hook”
(Fashing-Varner et al., 2013, p. 71) reflects efforts toward
transforming whiteness (Sullivan, 2014)—of using my priv-
ilege against itself—toward vulnerably acknowledging the
effects of my scholarly actions and course-correcting for the
future (Bailey, 2015).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, au-
thorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Angela Kraemer-Holland  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4681-6649
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