The Centre for Culture, Media and Society is launching the Anti-Racism Research Group
The Centre for Culture, Media and Society is launching an Anti-Racism Research Group open to all staff and postgraduate research students across the university. We hope that the group will be a forum for colleagues across disciplines to collaborate as well as share their work. We would like to invite all interested colleagues to an initial meeting so that we can share information between ourselves on the research that we are currently doing or planning and think about how the group can act as a supportive forum to promote and develop work in this area across the university.
The Anti-Racism Research Group establishes the opportunity for researchers and practitioners to discuss, study and tackle racial inequality and oppressive practices. By locating racism as an intractable and systemic issue we endeavour to both criticise and undermine the neutrality of race, which is so often grounded in the particularity of racial difference/experience.
Racism is constituted both historically and today in policies, procedures and cultures of power exercised by the state, its geo-political interests, and its institutions. Shifting over time and space we recognise racism to be part of an interconnected matrix of intersecting inequalities including, but not limited to, sexism, class and caste oppression, heteronormativity, ableism and multiple forms of xenophobia. As a research group, we are interested in fostering and supporting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work that is explicitly committed to social justice. At the heart of our critique lies an intervention in the narratives, policies, societal practices and the construction of oppressive racialised identities that continue to secure racial inequality, racist discourse, and systematic injustice.
To this end, we consider serious anti-racist work to involve an honest engagement with the critical impacts of racism within our society. We aim to provide provision and guidance on research-led policy innovations that focus on fighting racism and promoting anti-racist initiatives within society. We hope to engender a reflexive, creative and critical process that holds practices and institutions to account, whilst simultaneously building anti-colonial alternatives and possibilities.