Race relations : a theoretical displacement (original) (raw)
Related papers
Another step in the study of race relations
Sociological Quarterly, 2000
Recent qualitative researchers have argued the need for a more sensitizing approach to race research that elevates in importance the concerns and interests of those under study. This article illustrates how Herbert Blumer's work on race relations, critical race theory, and participatory action research may help this objective. These projects' similar epistemologies advance a type of social imagery that has powerful emancipatory implications in regard to racial oppression. Simply put, dominant renditions of social reality-including structural imperatives and racial identities-are illustrated to be socially constructed and hence open to negotiation. As a result of this shift, sensitizing methodologies (e.g., storytelling and collaboration) are employed that allow minorities an opportunity for self-representation. The liberating potential of all these projects can be further enhanced by relating their conceptual links to recent developments in contemporary social theory. Specifically, the typical concerns with process, interaction, and experiential meanings are intersubjectively mediated and not reducible to an objectivesubjective theoretical framework. Rather than simply personal or external, all knowledge is recognized to be fluid and coproduced. By grounding research on this intersubjective region, equitable exchanges are possible.
Syllabus: Sociology of Race and Racism (MA)
Sociology has been looking at race and racism since the second half of the 19th century. This module aims at the critical understanding of race as one of the most deep-rooted principles organizing both the material and the symbolic structures of society in hierarchies of moral worth. Racism, as coterminous and direct extension of race, will be scrutinized in its most evident manifestations, from everyday circumstances to urban inequalities, textured by global capitalism. Race and racism will be presented and discussed from a historical and comparative sociological perspective, detecting both a comprehensive genealogy of racism in the various imperial colonial projects, and the key and intersectional forms of racist exclusion in the dominant manifestations of contemporary neoliberalism (e.g. recent global wars; financialization of the economy, and the pluralization and privatization of detention). and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2019
are to be commended for coordinating and conceptually framing this special section, a most timely contribution to recent trends in the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Conversations on this important concern are being held in many parts of the world, not uncommonly within volatile climates and under embattled circumstances. I was introduced to the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity (ARE) Network when I attended the European Association of Social Anthropologists' (EASA) 2016 biennial meeting in Milan, Italy. I appreciated the significance and indeed the urgency of establishing a supportive, publicly engaged space for anthropologists in Europe and their kindred thinking colleagues elsewhere who share with them interests in race and ethnicity, racialisation and racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and many related matters reflecting how race and ethnicity intermesh with each other and with other mutually constitutive axes of difference and inequality salient in various situations and contexts. The dynamic ebbs and flows along with the ambiguities and shifting terms of race-making-an assemblage of social relations, encounters and practices situated in and across time and space-make the tools, lenses and ethics of sociocultural anthropology's ethnographic inquiry particularly useful. About a year after Milan, I participated in a fairly prestigious interdisciplinary conference where I observed very different circumstances and commitments. I encountered a number of social scientists who insisted that the language of race was not appropriate for our work group's drafting of the conference's statement on the social and political challenges faced in many parts of the world today. An anthropologist from France was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the use of the race concept. The perspective he espoused in that discussion seemed to follow the colour-blind, race-evasive and post-racial line of thought that exists in parts of Europe as well as in the United States and Latin America. Contributors to this publication attest to this social fact as it is manifested in different national contexts. However, in all those settings, there are also countervailing forces, such as the socio-political confluences that have given rise to inclusive projects promoting 'Europeanisation from below', as Marleen de Witte points out in her contribution here.
Comparative Migration Studies
In this rejoinder we argue, based on the papers of this commentary series, that ‘race’ is such a tricky notion because it can be used in (at least) two very different and contradictory ways—as a concept to disentangle racism and racialisation (what M’charek calls the ‘work race actually does’) and as a way of categorization and social classification, in which case it might create the very essentialised hierarchies ‘race’ as a critical concept tries to disentangle. We wonder if it is indeed possible to use ‘race’ as a concept without evoking ‘race’ as a social classification. At first, we give a short summary of the four discussion papers and then delve into two aspects the papers share, namely the need for spatial and temporal contextualization and comparison, as well as their choice not to take up our invitation to compare race as a category with gender. In a second step we will discuss two points arising from the papers, (1) ‘race’ as category, not as lens, often resulting in esse...
Key Questions in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Race and Ethnicity in the 21st Century, 2010
We have edited Race and Ethnicity in the 21st Century with two core objectives in mind. First, we see it as a resource for students and scholars of race and ethnicity. It is for this reason that we have sought to cover what are seen as the substantive core issues in the making of race and ethnic relations in contemporary societies. Second, we wanted to bring together authors who could write with a sense of depth and authority about the specific issues covered by their chapters. All the authors included in this volume have carried out extensive empirical and conceptual research in their main areas of scholarship and this is reflected in the individual chapters. More generally, however, we see this volume as helping readers to think about key facets of contemporary race and ethnic relations on the basis of current research and utilising a range of theoretical and conceptual perspectives. Another way to make this point would be to say that we wanted to raise questions for our readers and help them to think about them from a range of angles rather than provide them with a uniform perspective. In the current climate there is both intense public debate and mobilisation around the issues we cover in this book. This is evident in the heavily politicised debates we see about such questions as immigration, asylum, policing, education, public housing and related issues. It is also evident in the social constructions of migrant and minority communities as 'social problems' or 'enemies within' as well as in the seemingly common-sense acceptance of the argument that many Western societies have become 'too diverse' for their own good (Hansen 2007; Hartmann and Gerteis 2005). In this climate of fear and uncertainty it has also been evident that there has been a loss of historical perspective about both the background to current preoccupations and the reasons why multiculturalism as a set of policies and initiatives emerged in the first place. The various chapters in this book seek to address this loss of perspective by situating the present situation within a broader historical context. In doing so they give voice to the need to see debates about racial and ethnic inequality
SYLLABUS - "Theorizing Race" - Spring 2017
Modern racial ideologies are inseparable from the production of hierarchical differences giving shape to what Frantz Fanon characterized as a "division of the species". The process has historically accompanied European imperial and colonial expansion and the conceptualization of whiteness as a self-conscious project of global supremacy along political, economic, and epistemic lines. Drawing on long-standing images casting blackness or darkness as the opposite of morality, progress, and civilization, the globalization of White supremacy sought legitimacy in definitions of humanity that defined the Black as its inhuman other. Violent Black enslavement and the Middle Passage turned the division of the species into a principle of organization, unity, and value for White/Human civil society.
Race and Racism(s): Current Debates in Global and UK Theorisation and Empiricism
Sociology, 2021
Invited Joint Book Review: Alana Lentin Why Race Still Matters Cambridge: Polity, 2020, £14.99 pbk (ISBN: 9781509535705), 184 pp. Bridget Byrne, Claire Alexander, Omar Khan, James Nazroo and William Shankley Ethnicity, Race and Inequality in the UK: State of the Nation Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020, £19.99 pbk (ISBN: 9781447351252), 320 pp.