ABSTRACT
A broadly defined study of privilege—not only class, but the intersection of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality (to name a few)— represents an important pursuit of social justice scholarship. In 1946, Kurt Lewin (founder of modern social psychology) recognized this: “In recent years we have started to realize that so-called minority problems are in fact majority problems, that the Negro problem is the problem of the white, that the Jewish problem is the problem of the non-Jew, and so on” (Lewin 1946, 44). Despite his early claims, privilege has long remained an underscrutinized topic in the social sciences. However, an increasing body of critical research has emerged in areas like hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), whiteness (Fine et al. 2004), the ruling class (Domhoff 2002), private schools (Howard and Gaztambide-Fernandez 2010), and hetero-normativity (Kimmel 2001). New to this encouraging wave of scholarship has been the use of participatory action research (PAR) 1 to directly study privilege with those individuals and inside those institutions that are most structurally advantaged (see Kuriloff et al. 2009; Stoudt et al. 2010).
