Dear all, 

Please find details below of a call for papers for a conference that list 
members may be interested in. 

The conference enjoys the generous support of the the SPA Small Grants 
Scheme and one of the core aims is to bring debates on white ethnicities to a 
broader audience of scholars and practitioners in social and public policy and 
organisation and management studies. 

Thanks Shona 

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White Spaces? Racialising White Femininities and Masculinities

A 2-Day International Conference

8-9 July 2009
Weetwood Hall Hotel, Leeds, UK.

Call for contributions 

This conference is an opportunity to draw on and extend insights from the 
international and interdisciplinary field of ‘white studies’ (Bonnett, 1996; 2007) 
in organisational and policy analysis. These new theoretical understandings of 
whiteness and white identities and ethnicities have been developed and 
debated in the US, Australia, New Zealand and more recently Europe, including 
the UK.  These developments have taken place within disciplines such as 
communication and cultural studies, sociology, critical race theory, feminism, 
social geography, history and literary studies. They have profoundly changed 
conceptualisations of racialisation and gendering, that is the processes by 
which we are produced as raced and gendered beings.  For example these 
debates trouble the distinctions between ‘race’, racism and anti-racisms 
paving the way for more fluid understandings of the productiveness of power, 
its uneven and distributed nature. Such approaches develop forceful critiques 
of the work that goes into creating and maintaining racialised privileges. They 
also open up the possibilities for more ‘positive’ and unpredictable 
racialisations. 

The key themes and questions to be explored are: 
•	How can we understand whiteness in organisations – as property, 
identity, discursive position, privilege, relations, embodied practices, emotions, 
imaginaries, temporalities?
•	What codes of whiteness are reproduced in contemporary social 
politics?
•	How do these codes configure relations with the past and future as 
well as the present?
•	What new constituencies and claims can be brought into being 
through concepts of whiteness, white making, white spaces, white gendering 
and gendered whiteness?
•	What is the relationship of these codes and constituencies to 
organisational practices and other social relations? For example those of class, 
gender, age and sexualities?
•	How does this play out in different organisational contexts? Are 
there differences in public and private sector whitenesses? 
•	How does this play out in different national contexts? 
•	How does organisational policy and practice sustain whiteness?
•	What are the dangers in making whiteness an object of 
organisational analysis given its power to attach itself to a range of political 
and social agendas including ‘progressive’ postures?
•	What do these questions mean theoretically, methodologically and 
practically for critical organisational analysis going forward?
•	What does this mean for scholars working in this area?

The conference builds on the success of an earlier conference stream at the 
2007 Gender Work and Organization conference. The aim is to extend and 
consolidate this earlier work and the debates it engendered to connect with 
other work in this area in order to establish an ongoing forum for future 
collaboration and collective work. It aims to bring together contributors to the 
initial stream with a broader range of contributors from different international 
contexts and disparate fields, including feminist social politics, organizational 
sociology, public policy, management and governance. The conference also 
seeks to include a broader range of postgraduate students and participants 
outside academia with an interest in critical ‘race’, feminist and other cultural 
perspectives on organisational power.

Because the conference aims to facilitate ongoing collaborations amongst 
participants, its design aims to maximise debate around how these new 
agendas might be incorporated into organisation, management and policy 
studies fields and into organizational practice more broadly; and how this sort 
of work may be developed going forward. Thus, it uses a variety of formats for 
conference contributions including larger key note and plenary sessions, 
smaller paper sessions and facilitated dialogue and debate sessions focused 
around particular conference themes. In order to maximise the number of 
contributions we are also welcoming proposals for poster presentations which 
will be displayed in the communal conference areas and will serve as points of 
further discussion and debate. 

Speakers to date include:

Catherine Hall, University College London, UK, 
Aida Hurtado, University of California, USA 
Gail Lewis, Open University, UK 
Nirmal Puwar, Goldsmiths, UK 
Mick Rowlinson, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Vron Ware, Open University, UK
Runnymede Trust, London, UK
Diane Grimes, Syracuse, USA
Berit Gullikstad, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Shona Hunter, University of Leeds, UK
Pauline Leonard, University of Southampton, UK
Jennifer Mease, University or North Carolina, USA
Patricia Parker, University of North Carolina, USA
Elaine Swan, Lancaster University, UK

Proposal Submission
We are looking for other papers or poster presentations which engage with the 
key conference themes and issues. 

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be forwarded to Shona Hunter at 
[log in to unmask] by 19th December 2008. 
As paper slots are limited suitable proposed papers which cannot be included 
in sessions may be invited to submit posters for presentation.

Notification of decisions on paper and poster proposals by 30th January 2009.

Conference and registration details 
•	The conference will be held at Weetwood Hall, Leeds, UK
•	There will be a limited number of subsidised places for postgraduate 
research students and participants without an academic affiliation
•	Registration will open 19th January 2009

Further information on venue, booking and programme will be circulated in 
November 2008.

Any interim inquiries about the academic content of the event should be 
directed to: 
Shona Hunter [log in to unmask]

Any interim inquiries of a practical nature should be directed to:
Marie Johnson [log in to unmask]