Browsing by Subject "dekolonialismi"

This Master's thesis explores how school and student welfare services form a multi-level institutional space of whiteness in which the legacy of colonialism, the primacy of Western knowledge and racism are intertwined. Although the Finnish education system is often perceived as egalitarian, previous research has shown that educational practices and policies are white-normative and perpetuate and produce racism. However, there is a lack of research examining school student welfare services specifically from the perspective of whiteness. To fill this research void, this thesis asks in what ways school and student welfare services produce and maintain a space of whiteness, and how it is challenged. This thesis takes as its starting point the debates that challenge and deconstruct the Western production of knowledge by decolonial thinkers. The thesis is guided by issues raised by black feminists about structural racism and the white normativity of social institutions. The nine interviewees in the study were curators and psychologists working in student welfare services in the metropolitan area. The interviews were conducted as remote meetings in spring 2021 and again with four interviewees as face-to-face meetings in spring 2023. The analysis of the interviews was based on "thinking with theory" and "writing against racism", which in this thesis were based on decolonial premises. The results of this thesis suggest that school and student welfare as physical, social and mental spaces are permeated by whiteness. As such, they reproduce whiteness, as there is a lack of ability or willingness to recognise structural racism. The schools and student welfare services as spaces of whiteness, silence both the cautious efforts to resist whiteness and the efforts of students to report experiences of racism. Racism is repeatedly moved beyond the spaces of school and student welfare in the narratives of the interviewees. Based on the findings of this study, I suggest that in school and student welfare there could be a decolonially informed third space based on temporality, where Western assumptions about knowledge and knowing are abandoned and negotiation takes place relationally. In student welfare, this third space would also extend beyond the school, which means that racism must be understood as a phenomenon that has consequences that do not remain outside the school, even if racism is not recognised in the school and student welfare spaces.