The concept of speaking from experience in order to prevent universalized claims and maintain awareness of positionality has figured prominently in educational practices oriented toward social justice. History has taught us, however, that any resistive practice can come to serve the very interests it was developed to oppose. This paper examines one such situation: In interracial discussions of racism, White participants in our study used the discourse of personal experience to inoculate their racial claims against interrogation or critique. Our goals in analyzing the use of this discourse are to explicate how it functioned to hold white privilege in place, and to unsettle the discursive authority that this discourse offers. We conclude with suggestions for buffering the impact of experience discourse as a move of whiteness.

We describe two projects involving the construction of Floer homology

theories for knots in lens spaces. In the first project, we propose

definitions of complex manifolds P_M(X,m,n) that could potentially be

used to construct the symplectic Khovanov homology of n-stranded knots

in lens spaces. The manifolds P_M(X,m,n) are defined as moduli spaces

of Hecke modifications of rank 2 parabolic bundles over an elliptic

curve X. To characterize these spaces, we describe all possible Hecke

modifications of all possible rank 2 vector bundles over X, and we

use these results to define a canonical open embedding of P_M(X,m,n)

into M^s(X,m+n), the moduli space of stable rank 2 parabolic bundles

over X with trivial determinant bundle and m+n marked points. We

explicitly compute P_M(X,1,n) for n=0,1,2. For comparison, we present

analogous results for the case of rational curves, for which a

corresponding complex manifold P_M(CP^1,3,n) is isomorphic for n even

to a space Y(S^2,n) defined by Seidel and Smith that can be used to

compute the symplectic Khovanov homology of n-stranded knots in S^3.

In the second project, we describe a scheme for constructing

generating sets for Kronheimer and Mrowka's singular instanton knot

homology for the case of knots in lens spaces. The scheme involves

Heegaard-splitting a lens space containing a knot into two solid tori.

One solid torus contains a portion of the knot consisting of an

unknotted arc, as well as holonomy perturbations of the Chern-Simons

functional used to define the homology theory. The other solid torus

contains the remainder of the knot. The Heegaard splitting yields a

pair of Lagrangians in the traceless SU(2)-character variety of the

twice-punctured torus, and the intersection points of these

Lagrangians comprise the generating set that we seek. We illustrate

the scheme by constructing generating sets for several example knots.

Our scheme is a direct generalization of a scheme introduced by

Hedden, Herald, and Kirk for describing generating sets for knots in

S^3 in terms of Lagrangian intersections in the traceless

SU(2)-character variety for the 2-sphere with four punctures.