I invited Gunditjmara woman and abolition activist Tabitha Lean to speak to my class The Racial State. I am happy to share the video of her talk with you. The text of my introduction to Tabitha’s talk: It is an honour for me to welcome our…
Author: Alana Lentin
Revisiting the Racial Contract and white ignorance. Charles W. Mills in memoriam
I was waiting for a sandwich on Tuesday afternoon and idling on Twitter when I read Falguni Sheth‘s tweet announcing that Distinguished Professor Charles Wade Mills had died. I expleted loudly in shock and had to apologise to the person working behind the counter! Charles W.…
Engendering Race/Race-ing gender
This week we looked at how race and gender are co-constitutive constructs, specifically focusing on the centrality of reproduction in racialisation under conditions of slavery, the different relationships to work of Black, Indigenous and migrant women as opposed to bourgeois white women, and the colonial context…
Critical Race Theory: Transforming Knowledge in the Australian Social Sciences and Humanities
You are welcome to join is for an event as part of Social Sciences Week on September 10 at 10 am organised by the Institute for Culture and Society Borders and Diversity Research Group Registration link A 2021 Social Sciences Week event from the Borders and…
Race, the floating signifier
Today we had a good discussion about Stuart Hall’s 1997 lecture, ‘Race, the Floating Signifier’ and the accompanying text reproduced in The Fateful Triangle, ‘Race, the Sliding Signifier’. We built on work done over the previous two weeks on W.E.B. Du Bois’ essay ‘The Concept of…
A word on sociogeny and ‘lived experience’
The work on this course, Understanding Race, is a work in progress. When I began teaching it in 2018 I had the ambition of providing different content each year, or developing a new theme. The first year was a collection of recent books and articles that…
Is White Privilege a Useful Term?
In class I’ve been asked why people say white people have privilege. So, let’s talk about it. Here’s my TikTok video and the script below: @racialliteracysolidarity ♬ original sound – RacialLiteracySolidarity The concept seems to have come from Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible…
Introducing Decolonization and Social Worlds
I am proud to announce a new book series just launched last Bristol University Press co-edited by Ali Meghji (Cambridge), Syed Farid Alatas (NUS Singapore) and me, Decolonization and Social Worlds. Read more about the series and get in touch to discuss a proposal with one…
Challenging Migration Studies
This provocative series challenges the established field of migration studies to think beyond its policy-oriented frameworks and to engage with the complex and myriad forms in which the global migration regime is changing in the twenty-first century. It proposes to draw together studies that engage with…
Understanding Race Week 1: Working with and against race. Some words on Du Bois and Chun
In preparing for this new year of Understanding Race, the Masters of Research class I teach at Western Sydney University, I have been thinking about the call to speak more about race in settler colonial ‘Australia’. As I have written, there is an elision of race…