The architecture of whiteness

On 27 January 2025, I submitted my doctoral thesis titled ‘The architecture of
whiteness: How institutional whiteness shapes academic careers in the UK’,
and shared this milestone on X (formally Twitter). However, given the far-
right political landscape of the platform, the post became a representative for the very thing I was hoping to challenge—the normalcy of whiteness. In this paper, I define the architecture of whiteness as the metaphorical notion that whiteness is a structure feature of the UK university space—both physically and metaphorically—and focuses institutional investigations on ‘race’ and racism on spatial features that have been built into the walls of the academy. I argue that now more than ever, whiteness must be articulated as more than a phenotype, more than an imagination, more than a system, but as an architecture, particularly in the context of university organisations built by bricks of whiteness.