Abstract
This chapter draws from phenomenology and social psychology to describe and explain what can happen to students of underrepresented groups in educational settings with an eye toward understanding the embodied dimension of the harms that they can suffer. It does so by describing what can happen when students experience stereotype threat (ST). ST occurs when environmental cues make salient to a person the negative stereotypes associated with their group, thereby triggering physiological and psychological processes that have detrimental consequences for their performance on certain tasks, on their behavior more generally, and on their self-understanding. The chapter makes the claim, contrary to what was originally thought within the ST literature, that the harms that result from ST don’t just cease when students leave classrooms, but rather become a background horizon against which they experience themselves in the world. This contribution begins to develop the larger negative implications that ST can have, specifically in its embodied dimension.
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Related Further Reading
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Freeman, L. (2018). The Embodied Harm of Stereotype Threat. In: Travis, S., Kraehe, A., Hood, E., Lewis, T. (eds) Pedagogies in the Flesh. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59599-3_3
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