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.
As well as adding to Understanding Race, this post responds and adds to two recent conversations I had, one with Khadijah Diskin and Josh Briond on the Return to the Source podcast and the other with Momodou Taal on The Malcolm Effect podcast. In my book…
Welcome back to Understanding Race. This year I have not made many changes to the syllabus so if you did not get a chance to participate last year, this is an opportunity to access similar content. However, there are some updates including tow new weeks: one…
Lecture given to the ICS Key Thinkers and Concepts Series. I have included both the recording of the lecture on Zoom (which is in two parts) and the text and slides below that. The text and accompanying slides of the lecture follow: Universities are built on…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
In the age of Black Lives Matter, we have become accustomed to hearing concepts like ‘institutional’ and ‘systemic racism’ openly discussed. On one side, there are calls to recognise the extent to which race shapes experience, access and opportunity even in so-called ‘successful multicultural’ societies like…