White governmentality, life history, and the cultural politics of race in remote settings

This chapter explores subtle reproductions of race in contemporary Australia through detailed analysis of life history interviews of 'white' teachers living and working in non-white contexts—specifically, remote Indigenous communities in central Australia. It suggests that correlations between teaching and voluntouring in remote settings, however thinly drawn here, reveal something about race in its contemporary emergence. The chapter discusses the worth of the findings for critical explorations into race in education today, before arguing the following. That poststructuralist orientation to researching race continues to provide powerful conceptual insights. The investigations into race in remote settings offer potential value to broader global debates and insights from the emergent field of voluntourism studies may advance our understandings of race in education in the global context of neoliberalism. It is offered not in an absolute sense, but with a view to highlighting the collective work now required to move the discussion around race and education strategically forward amidst an era of advancing neoliberalism.