Contemporary Conversations in Culture, Media and Society – ‘Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism’ with Remi Joseph-Salisbury (University of Manchester) and Laura Connelly (University of Sheffield)

Update:

This seminar was recorded – you can find it online on Vimeo.

Contemporary Conversations in Culture, Media and Society

Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism

Featuring Remi Joseph-Salisbury (University of Manchester) & Laura Connelly (University of Sheffield).

This presentation focuses on our recent research exploring Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism in British universities. Based upon data from interviews with anti-racist ‘scholar-activists’, we will highlight a number of the key principles that we suggest define anti-racist scholar-activism. In so doing, we will consider the challenges and contradictions that arise from working in neoliberal-imperial-institutionally-racist universities, whilst also suggesting that there remain pockets of opportunities for us to subvert the institution and work in service to communities of resistance.

Remi Joseph-Salisbury is Presidential Fellow in Ethnicity and Inequalities at the University of Manchester. He has written widely on race, racism and anti-racism, with a particular focus on racism in education and racism in policing. He is the Race and Resistance columnist at Red Pepper Magazine, and part of the Northern Police Monitoring Project and the No Police in Schools campaign.

Laura Connelly is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Sheffield. Her work sits at the intersections of race, gender and migration, and she often explores these issues within the context of the sex industry. Laura is part of the Northern Police Monitoring Project and the No Police in Schools Campaign, and is Co-Chair of the Sex Work Research Hub.

Anti-racist scholar-activism raises urgent questions about the role of contemporary universities and the academics that work within them. As profound socio-racial crises collide with mass anti-racist mobilisations, Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism (2021, Manchester University Press) focuses on the praxes of academics working within, and against, their institutions in pursuit of anti-racist social justice. Amidst a searing critique of the university’s neoliberal and imperial character, Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly situate the university as a contested space, full of contradictions and tensions.

Drawing upon original empirical data, the book considers how anti-racist scholar-activists navigate barriers and backlash in order to leverage the opportunities and resources of the university in service to communities of resistance. Showing praxes of anti-racist scholar-activism to be complex, diverse, and multi-faceted, and paying particular attention to how scholar-activists grapple with their own complicities in the harms perpetrated and perpetuated by Higher Education institutions, this book is a call to arms for academics who are, or want to be, committed to social justice.

Contemporary Conversations in Culture, Media and Society – Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism with Remi Joseph-Salisbury & Laura Connelly

Thursday 27 January 2022, 1600-1800

Held online – if you’d like to come along please sign up on Eventbrite.

This presentation is the first in the Contemporary Conversations in Culture, Media and Society seminars hosted by the Centre for Culture, Media & Society (CCMS). Based in the Culture & Creativity Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam University, CCMS delivers critical insights and knowledge on a diversity of cultural, social and media practices. 

---

If you are interested in hosting an external visitor, giving your own seminar about your research or would like to volunteer to hold a seminar session more geared towards staff development, please let us know at ! RIS Culture & Creativity RI Enquiries. You can find out about future seminars in our CCRI Seminar Series on the CCRI Impact Blog pages for 2021-2022.

It is our aim to record each and every one of our research seminars and we will make recordings available shortly afterwards on the staff intranet, in order to create an archive of our speakers and seminars.