Papers by Alexandre Da Costa
Critical Education, 2024
The earliest School Resource Officer Programs in Canada date back to the 1970s. This study examin... more The earliest School Resource Officer Programs in Canada date back to the 1970s. This study examines how police officers, teachers, school administrators, students, and journalists use a discourse of relationship-building between police and youth to frame School Resource Officers (SROs): who they are, the work they do, their roles in students' lives, and their value to the school community. Analyzing this discourse during the emergence of SRO Programs in Edmonton and Calgary, the study illustrates how relationship-building positions SROs positively within the school community, helping normalize police presence in schools. The findings help inform critical understanding of the contemporary persistence of the relationship-building discourse as justification for SRO programs, which often eclipses consideration of program ineffectiveness and harmful effects. Overall, the relationship-building discourse remains an institutional ruse that elides the key question: what do police in schools actually do to support the education of youth and to create equitable schools?
Whiteness and damage in the education classroom
Whiteness and Education, 2024
This paper analyses relationships between whiteness and damage in the university classroom throug... more This paper analyses relationships between whiteness and damage in the university classroom through a focus on two contemporary areas of critical education in Canada: raising white racial consciousness and truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. First, whiteness is damage-producing – it orients anti-racist education towards white students and their needs, there by harming the well-being and constraining the education of non-white students. Second, whiteness gravitates towards what Unangax scholar Eve Tuck calls “damage-centred approaches,” which objectify non-white suffering, pathologising Indigenous peoples whilst obfuscating the ongoing reproduction of racism and colonialism. As such, white educators must remain assiduously vigilant about a key tension regarding whiteness and damage: that our pedagogical focus on racial and colonial oppression can simultaneously raise critical consciousness and divert attention away from more fundamental interrogations of whiteness, agency, and relationality within a systemically racist social order. The article closes with some considerations for educators in terms of addressing complicity in their institutions.
João H. Costa Vargas, The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), pp. xii + 339, $120.00, hb, $30.00, pb
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2020
Afro-BrazilianAncestralidade: critical perspectives on knowledge and development
Third World Quarterly, 2010
Abstract This article ‘thinks with’ an Afro-Brazilian mobilisation of ancestralidade (ancestralit... more Abstract This article ‘thinks with’ an Afro-Brazilian mobilisation of ancestralidade (ancestrality) as a means to explore, unmask and mark the centrality of ‘race’ in development. In contrast to thinking about race as cultural difference necessitating inclusion in development, thinking with Afro-Brazilian knowledge aims to rework the very category of development. ‘Thinking with’ engages critical knowledge emerging out of Afro-Brazilian struggles to forward a theory and practice of substantive political, institutional and social transformation. The article juxtaposes the culturalisms of national ideology and multicultural development policies with ancestralidade as a dynamic political practice that contests capitalism's racialised hierarchies while embodying another sociality of development. An analysis of one cultural centre's efforts to restructure the school curriculum demonstrates that the ‘past’ of racialised capitalism and ancestral memory are each contemporary projects which evince the relational fo...
Journal of Historical Sociology, 2010
This paper examines the Afro-Brazilian afoxé as a form of cultural struggle that critically conte... more This paper examines the Afro-Brazilian afoxé as a form of cultural struggle that critically contests narratives and practices that reproduce racial inequality in contemporary Brazil. Through their afoxé in the interior of São Paulo, the Orùnmilá Cultural Center mobilizes Afro-Brazilian knowledge and cultural practices to challenge culturalist treatments of Afro-Brazilian "difference" in the management and representation of carnaval. I explore how such treatments reflect broader state-orchestrated attempts to undermine black anti-racism and the implementation of substantive policies to address racial inequality in various spheres, including education and culture. The afoxé and the Orùnmilá Center's broader work constitute an important, contemporary means through which black organizations in Brazil make visible and vocal public claims for representation and selfdetermination. Such work pushes policy-makers and academics to reinterpret the terms of black inclusion vis-à-vis subaltern or "other" cultures, historical experiences, perspectives, and participation in societal transformation. ***** The 2007 Carnaval in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, was a week away and preparations for the Afoxé Omó Orùnmilá (Afoxé Children of Orùnmilá) were moving at a brisk pace. 1 As I entered the Centro Cultural Orùnmilá (Orùnmilá Cultural Center), an Afro-Brazilian organization that works to address racial inequality, I walked towards the makeshift table to assume a spot gluing cowries to afoxé outfits. Before I could sit down, Orùnmilá's president, Pai Paulo, came to me anxiously with a booklet in hand. 2 "Read this and tell me what you think," he said, awaiting my response. 3 The booklet was the insert accompanying the Municipal Culture Secretariat's official 2007 carnaval CD. The latter contained recordings of carnaval groups' enredos, or theme songs. On the cover of the booklet, three mask-like drawings smiled at me with red lips and shiny white teeth. A speckle of colorful confetti and streamers hovered above them, surrounding the words indicating the 2007 theme: "Carnaval: Everyone's Happiness." I opened the sleeve and scanned the short paragraphs on the inside cover: 1 Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa teaches in the Department of Global Development Studies and the Cultural Studies Program at Queen's University, in Kingston, Canada.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2010
Twentieth century Brazilian social thinker Gilberto Freyre's work has had a tremendous and long-l... more Twentieth century Brazilian social thinker Gilberto Freyre's work has had a tremendous and long-lasting impact on academic and popular understandings of Brazilian culture, history, and race relations. Freyre is perhaps best known for his positive reassessment of the consequences of racial and cultural mixture for the development of Brazilian society. Because this came at a time when Latin American nations with large mixed-race populations confronted Eurocentric theories of race, modernity and development, Freyre was an innovator who sought to understand Brazilian society from the specificity of its historical social and cultural experience. Freyre's ideas remain controversial, interpreted and used to different ends in current debates over racial inequality and policy in Brazil. Considering this legacy, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics is a welcome contribution that situates Freyre and his work within the personal experiences, social contexts, intellectual influences and interests, and historical moments that shaped his thinking. Burke and Pallares-Burke's intellectual history succeeds at painting a detailed view of how Freyre's thinking came into being, how it challenged orthodox approaches and ideas for understanding history and society, and how its complexity remains under-examined. Burke and Pallares-Burke aim for a critical appraisal that points to weaknesses while characterising Freyre as a major social thinker from outside the 'centre' of Europe and North America. His interests in 'gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, cultural patrimony, and the problems of the periphery' were pioneering in the early and midtwentieth century and remain topical today (p. 18). The first two chapters introduce Freyre's perspective on these topics and provide a portrait of Freyre as a young thinker who absorbed variously from mentors, literary and intellectual figures, and voyages overseas. The other five chapters analyse and discuss his key works, look at his role as a pubic intellectual, situate him as a social theorist within sociological and historical traditions, and argue for the importance of his work today. Burke and Pallares-Burke draw their complex picture of Freyre in four main ways: (i) through details about his intellectual influences (professors, literary figures and scholars); (ii) using comparisons with other contemporary thinkers (Jorge Luis Borges and Fernando Ortiz); (iii) examining overall trends in his work (his comparative
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Papers by Alexandre Da Costa