Decolonizing Geographies of Whiteness Wendy S. Shaw Geography, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; w.shaw@unsw.edu.au Engagement with the study of whiteness is slow within the discipline of geography despite repeated calls for it to be placed on the research agenda, and regardless of a strong heritage of critical “race” and postcolonial scholarship. This paper considers this reticence, and the problems inherent in Whiteness Studies more generally. It then offers examples from inner Sydney, Australia, that avoid some of the more pressing shortcomings of studying whiteness. By prizing open the essentializing bounds of hegemonic ethnicity, this paper identifies whiteness as context-specific, processural and contestable. Introduction The emergence of whiteness, as a topic of geographical research, is part of a genealogy of engagement with issues of “race” and racialization. The classic accounts of DuBois (1899), Weaver (1948) and Morrill (1965), Harvey’s “Marxist” project (1973) and Ley’s “Humanist” project (1974) provided a disciplinary foundation for critical race studies in geography (Jackson 1985a, 1985b, 1987; Jackson and Smith 1981; Peach 1975; for review see Anderson 1998). A consequence is the persistence of a research agenda based largely on the experiences of segregation in the “north”, and in particular, in the US. In 1992, Helga Leitner reported on a shift, from considerations of “race” to more nuanced geographies of racialization (Blaut 1992; Jackson 1987). She remained, however, “disheartened” by an ongo- ing disciplinary proclivity for reducing “the notoriously complex and elusive concept of cultural assimilation ... to a single variable [race]” (Leitner 1992:106). The discipline may have taken a useful turn in the- orization, but, in practice, simplistic racial categorizations prevailed. Leitner (1992) also noted the emergence of a second body of research that used qualitative analyses from case studies and broader concep- tions of culture, and included considerations of class and gender (Smith 1989, 1990). Most significantly, these studies sought to contextualize racialization (Leitner 1992:109). C  2006 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA