Barbara Applebaum is professor whose training is in philosophy of education, but whose work and teaching are interdisciplinary in nature.
Her academic research focuses on the ways in which whiteness is reproduced through education, especially in the guise of good intentions and, more specifically, within the context of social justice pedagogy.
Among the journals in which her publications appear are Hypatia, Philosophy of Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education and Educational Theory. Her recent work addresses such topics as the non-performativity of white virtue-signaling, challenging the comfort of white willful ignorance, a critique of implicit bias training on college campuses, and when comforting white discomfort is a form of complicity.
Her 2010 book, Being White/Being Good: White Complicity, Responsibility and Social Justice Education (Lexington Books), examines the meaning of white complicity and its ethical and epistemological assumptions, and it offers recommendations for how white complicity can be named and disrupted.
Her 2022 book, White Educators Negotiating Complicity: Roadblocks Paved with Good Intentions (Lexington Books), invites white educators who consider themselves “well-intentioned” to examine the challenges that make it difficult for them to critically consider their pedagogical practices, assumptions, and habits that are complicit in perpetuating unjust racial systems.
Her future project attempts to apply the scholarship around epistemic injustice to better facilitate communication across different positionalities, especially among university students.
Research Focus: critical whiteness studies; epistemic injustice; feminist philosophy; philosophy of education; ethics and education
My current scholarship focuses on three related areas: teaching critical whiteness studies, how white teachers committed to social justice negotiate their whiteness, and what can be gleaned about the conditions of just dialogue from the scholarship around epistemic injustice.
CFE 710: Critical Whiteness Studies and Education
CFE 700: Epistemic Injustice in/and Education