NYU Press Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies

A white woman studies upper-class eighth grade girls at her alma mater on Long Island and finds a culture founded on misinformation about its own racial and class identity. A black American researcher is repeatedly assumed by many Brazilian subjects to be a domestic servant or sex worker. Racing Race, Researching Race is the first volume of its kind to explore how ideologies of race and racism intersect with nationality and gender to shape the research experience. Critical work in race studies has not adequately addressed how racial positions in the field--as inflected by nationality, gender, and age--generate numerous methodological dilemmas. Racing Research, Researching Race begins to fill this gap by infusing critical race studies with more empirical work and suggesting how a critical race perspective might improve research methodologies and outcomes. The contributors to the volume encompass a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, women=s studies, political science, and Asian American studies. Review Absolutely critical reading. This volume powerfully explores how scholars' own racial background shapes the analytical lens with which they view whiteness, blackness . . . the exoticism and eroticism of racial 'others' and the domain of white privilege.--William Darity Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University Essential reading for all those whose research explicitly engages racial issues, and for all those who do not realize that their work inevitably engages racial issues.--Ruth Frankenberg, author of White Women, Race Matters and editor of Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Cultural Criticism Timely and challenging, this innovative book engages questions and dilemmas that researchers on race and racism rarely talk about in public. Refreshingly clear and comparative in scope, it is a must reading in all courses about race and ethnic relations, calling for a fundamental rethinking of research agendas in this field.--John Solomos, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick A remarkable collection of essays interrogating the political, methodological and ethical dilemmas of conducting research in racially stratified societies. These theoretically astute and ethnographically rich case studies compellingly demonstrate how the production of knowledge is framed and mediated by the racialized subject positions held by social scientists. Racing Research, Researching Race will no doubt incite a critical and long overdue discussion of the racial politics of ethnographic fieldwork.--Steven Gregory, author of Black Corona, and Professor of Africana and American Studies at New York University Points to the ethical dilemmas of researchers researching race among communities that are at once 'victims' of racism and active in the continued process of racialization.--Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?, and Professor of Humanities, York University (Canada) About the Author France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author and a co-editor of ten books, including Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market and A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy. Jonathan Warren is Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.