Experiences of Othering in the Modern Mindfulness Movement: A Critical Race Theory Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study, grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT), investigates the phenomenon of the discovery of Othering in modern mindfulness spaces. We describe Othering as the perception of individuals or groups labelled or treated as fundamentally different from one’s own identity or social group. Amidst the rising popularity of mindfulness practices in Western culture, this research explores how equality, diversity, and inclusion are experienced by individuals in the mindfulness practice community. Through qualitative interviews with a diverse group of 31 mindfulness practitioners and leaders, this study examines the intersectionality of race, identity, and mindfulness. Our findings suggest that People of Color (POC) experience Othering at the systemic, group, and individual level. At the systemic level, issues include commodification and implicit White supremacy, alongside group-level challenges like White-centric leadership, spiritual bypassing, and universalist approaches. Individually, participants express alienation and safety concerns in predominantly White mindfulness settings. Through our findings, we contribute valuable insights towards the theory and practice of mindfulness, placing particular emphasis on addressing systemic racism, understanding the consequences of performative diversity, and fostering a genuine sense of belonging. In doing so, we offer mindfulness scholarship and practice considerations toward the development, delivery and evaluation of equity and justice-informed mindfulness training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".