This is a space for the Understanding Race Masters of Research Unit I run at Western Sydney University. The space will include my reflections on the texts we are reading as well as student blog posts.
I was kindly invited by the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University to give a talk on postcolonial and decolonial thought for its Key Thinkers & Concepts series. I have posted in the slides and notes here. 1. I wish to acknowledgement the Darug people,…
Continuing our focus on racial capitalism, Understanding Race discussed the relationship between race and class with a focus on Race and the Undeserving Poor by Robbie Shilliam. Using the book Futures of Black Radicalism, and in particular the chapter by Nikhil Pal Singh, we explored the…
This is the text from this week’s lecture on Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson. The presentation focuses on Chapter I of the book and some sections of Part II dealing with the invention of ‘The Negro’. This is the merge…
This week in Understanding Race, we are continuing our conversation of race, coloniality and property which began last week with a primary focus on the work of Cheryl Harris, in her seminal essay Whiteness as Property, and Patrick Wolfe’s discussion of the formation of race in…
W.E.B Du Bois’ famous question, ‘How Does it Feel to be a Problem?’ has long underpinned explorations of race as a lived experience. A similar question drives Frantz Fanon querying in Black Skin, White Masks. The answer given by Du Bois sheds light on the fact that…
You can You can download the syllabus for Understanding Race 2019 here.. Readings are contained in the folder and check back here for blogposts
Last year, the course I run at Western Sydney University as part of the Masters of Research degree, ‘Understanding Race’, was well received among a wide range of people because I posted the readings and the blogposts I wrote weekly online. This year, I am running it again…
The final session of this year’s Understanding Race course focuses on the ever-deepening intersections between race, digital technology and social media. Our main reading is Safiya U. Noble‘s Algorithms of Oppression which has made an important contribution to our understanding of the racialised nature of Internet search through her cogent…
Over the last few weeks, we have been focusing on issues arising from the book published by Sara Farris in 2017, In the Name of Women’s Rights. What is generative about this book is that it allows us to explore several topics that each have a bearing on the…
‘Race, it cannot be stressed strongly enough, is a process, not an ontology, its varying modalities so many dialectical symptoms of the ever-shifting hegemonic balance between those with a will to colonize and those with a will to be free, severally racialised in relation to each…