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This Personal Interest Project is centred on my own realisation, deconstruction and re-articulation of self; essentially this is a discovery of how my own experience is constituted and how I am thus constituted through experience. This is a project that I have been consistently interested and challenged by, as it attempts to explain the encounters of a young white female (myself) with the knowledge that she is white.
This project is founded within my own reactions and responses; it is derived from one particular day in 2007 when I chose to cross a road to avoid three Indigenous youths, more importantly the 17 years of socialisation that led me to believe and feel that situations like these were ok. This socialisation is directly influenced by my skin colour, and how this pigment places me within the world. I am white. And this socialisation process is whiteness.
Within this project I am attempting to unmask and engage with my own whiteness. This is fundamentally difficult, because as a seventeen year old female I have spent seventeen years believing and thinking that I am not white in the theoretical sense; and that my experience as a person has never been affected by my skin colour. This project aims to document every step of my discovery as I now become the subject of research, the subject of criticism and the subject of a so called ‘objective’ examination of myself. Due to the nature of my PIP topic; opinions, reactions and responses different to that of my own are essential to inform my own personal reflections and realisations.
This inquiry into my own subjectivity is compelled through three essential steps; realisation, deconstruction and re-articulation. This consecutive inquiry examining the ‘ness’ in ‘whiteness’ is inherently bound within the conceptual framework of society and culture, and how individual experience is constituted within each. Evidently I have utilised and explored fundamental concepts of equality and difference, power, time, environment and persons; each remaining crucial to the construction of my own conclusions about the impact of the ‘ness’ on white and non-white people.
Throughout the course of the project five methodologies are utilised to develop my hypothesis and inquiry, including; an open-ended questionnaire, observation, content analysis, participant observation and personal reflection. The final state to my inquiry is inherently bound within my own re-articulation of whiteness; this is centred upon the previous stages attempts to evoke concepts of determined futures
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