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…
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…
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…
The scholars, scholarship and scholarly histories denied
This is the fourth blog post in my Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology series for my course at The New School Department of Sociology in Spring 2017. This week we are beginning to discuss books, mainly new works, in race critical studies. The rest of the…