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…
This week is a ramble through some basic idea about capitalism, how it works and what it means for us. I found a lot of cool things online that help students understand profit and surplus value, etc. A good tool someone has by David Murphy is…
For the first week of my undergraduate course, Politics, Power and resistance, we are going to looking at the Black Panther Party’s understanding of politics as war. We are also going to be thinking about the epistemic questions arising from whose knowledge we foreground. The ethos…
Politics, Power & Resistance is a course I have been teaching since I began at Sussex University in 2006, when it used to called Political Sociology. Since I joined Western Sydney University in 2012 it has gone through a few iterations. And this year I am…
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…
For the final week of The Racial State, we are going to engage in the relationship between race, digital technology and social media. We shall focus our classroom activity around Joy Buolamwini’s research project Coded Bias which has also been made into a Netflix documentary. We…
In Week 12, we will have a guest lecture from author of Radical Skin, Moderate Masks, Dr Yassir Morsi. Watch Yassir discuss his book together with author of The Muslims Are Coming!, Arun Kundnani here:
Week 11 of The Racial State all involve a discussion of police, prison and detention abolition. I have adapted some tests produced by abolitionist activists and intellectuals Mariame Kaba, Debbie Kilroy (from Sisters Inside) and Tabitha Lean. In preparation for this week’s theme, we will be…
Mariame Kaba has some amazing resources on her blog, Prison Culture including the #FergusonSyllabus: Talking and Teaching about police violence. I have adapted one of her techniques, the ‘6 word story’ exercise for us on Week 10 of The Racial State during which we will be…
I first developed this exercise when I was invited by Professor Lilon Bandler to speak to er medical students at Sydney University! Here I have re-adapted it for use in our The Racial State Week 8 on institutional and systemic racism, as a ‘menu’.