Identities Autumn 2025 Event Series
Further details coming soon.
Past Events
2025
Global Dignity and Seeing Others – 12 May 2025
With Professor Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
Co-organised with University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre (ARC) Conversations Series
How can we equip ourselves to think across different levels of analysis (individual, societal, global) with the tools to foster pluralism and shape public discourse? In this ARC Conversation in collaboration with Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Professor Michèle Lamont invited us to discuss this question by focusing on the role of ‘recognition’, reflecting on her interdisciplinary journey, international body of research and record of public engagement (including in her new book, Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How it Can Heal a Divided World). Connecting theory, data and application, this conversation spoke to the challenges of cross-disciplinary work and some of the most pressing societal questions of our time.
The Metropolis and its Social Life: Trust Relations in the City – 7 May 2025
With Talja Blokland, Humboldt University of Berlin
Co-organised with University of Glasgow Sociological and Cultural Studies Seminar Series
The fast digitalization affects our everyday urban practices, and these influence our relations in public space. What happens when we take social theories of trust to the street of today? Can we think of urban public space as relational settings of trust, distrust and mistrust, the trilogy of Sztompka (1999), and what could we say about how urban fragmentation and seclusion affects the processes that may – or may not – bring trust and distrust about? And what is the role of digitalization in urban fragmentation? This talk presented the first chapter of a book on the thrown-togetherness of public space and how its changing character may request us to re-think the meanings of trust – and indeed whether we may also revisit the idea that the metropolis brings about the blasé mental life.
Still 'Nae Problem' Here? – 27 February 2025
Event organised by Maryhill Integration Network, in collaboration with Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER), Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE), Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Flying While Muslim and Driving While Black: Examining the Differences in Racialized Surveillance and Policing for African American Muslims – 24 February 2025
With Dr Saher Selod, Simmons University
In this talk, Dr Saher Selod examines how being Black and Muslim guides the types of racialized policing and surveillance that men and women encounter, and how race, ethnicity and gender inform the types of policing and surveillance they experience. Dr Selod explores how federal security and local policing operate under different racialized constructions of threat: the construct of the ‘terrorist’ is a racial one that drives counterterrorism policies that mark Muslims as dangerous to national security, while the War on Drugs has marked African Americans as drug offenders and violent domestic criminals, making them susceptible to hyper policing.
With Professor Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
Co-organised with University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre (ARC) Conversations Series
How can we equip ourselves to think across different levels of analysis (individual, societal, global) with the tools to foster pluralism and shape public discourse? In this ARC Conversation in collaboration with Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Professor Michèle Lamont invited us to discuss this question by focusing on the role of ‘recognition’, reflecting on her interdisciplinary journey, international body of research and record of public engagement (including in her new book, Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How it Can Heal a Divided World). Connecting theory, data and application, this conversation spoke to the challenges of cross-disciplinary work and some of the most pressing societal questions of our time.
The Metropolis and its Social Life: Trust Relations in the City – 7 May 2025
With Talja Blokland, Humboldt University of Berlin
Co-organised with University of Glasgow Sociological and Cultural Studies Seminar Series
The fast digitalization affects our everyday urban practices, and these influence our relations in public space. What happens when we take social theories of trust to the street of today? Can we think of urban public space as relational settings of trust, distrust and mistrust, the trilogy of Sztompka (1999), and what could we say about how urban fragmentation and seclusion affects the processes that may – or may not – bring trust and distrust about? And what is the role of digitalization in urban fragmentation? This talk presented the first chapter of a book on the thrown-togetherness of public space and how its changing character may request us to re-think the meanings of trust – and indeed whether we may also revisit the idea that the metropolis brings about the blasé mental life.
Still 'Nae Problem' Here? – 27 February 2025
Event organised by Maryhill Integration Network, in collaboration with Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER), Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE), Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Flying While Muslim and Driving While Black: Examining the Differences in Racialized Surveillance and Policing for African American Muslims – 24 February 2025
With Dr Saher Selod, Simmons University
In this talk, Dr Saher Selod examines how being Black and Muslim guides the types of racialized policing and surveillance that men and women encounter, and how race, ethnicity and gender inform the types of policing and surveillance they experience. Dr Selod explores how federal security and local policing operate under different racialized constructions of threat: the construct of the ‘terrorist’ is a racial one that drives counterterrorism policies that mark Muslims as dangerous to national security, while the War on Drugs has marked African Americans as drug offenders and violent domestic criminals, making them susceptible to hyper policing.
2024
Freedom Dreams in France: Notes on State Violence in France, Colonial Continuities, and Global Racism and Antiracism – 26 November 2024
Identities 30th Anniversary Lecture with Dr Jean Beaman
In this lecture, based on years of ethnographic research on France’s present antiracist movement and mobilization against state violence, Dr Jean Beaman discusses how visible minorities, namely Black and Arab populations, make sense of the racism they experience at the hands of the state, including through violence by the police and how they resist this racism and violence. In doing so, Dr Beaman explores the balance they draw between acknowledging and resisting racism here, as in France, as well as there, as in globally. Dr Beaman discusses what lessons they offer regarding resisting colonial continuities and imagining a world beyond state violence and subjugation.
Back to Black? Identity Politics in Treacherous Times – 22 October 2024
Identities 30th Anniversary Lecture with Professor Claire Alexander
It is now nearly forty years since Stuart Hall’s seminal 1988 ‘New Ethnicities’ article announced the ‘end of innocence’, or the end of ‘the innocent notion of an essential black subject’. The intervening decades have seen both the fragmentation and re-imagination of racial and ethnic identities, and ongoing racial and ethnic inequalities and exclusions. They have also seen the emergence of new forms of racial exclusion and the resurgence of essentialist forms of identity and resistance. This lecture traces some of these changes and explores some of the contemporary forms of identity politics, and their dangers. In particular it asks: what is the future for racial and ethnic solidarity and how do we find place for hope in treacherous times?
Wrongs Not Righted: How Might We Think about Repair? – 25 September 2024
Identities 30th Anniversary Lecture with Professor Catherine Hall
From slavery and the 1831 rebellion to the events at Morant Bay in 1865 and the Windrush scandal, multiple wrongs have been done. They have not been put right. The British state, institutions and individual Britons are all implicated. Britain’s entangled past with Jamaica is not done; it lives on in the present. There is a debt to be paid. How might we think about the question of reparation and repair? Who carries responsibility? What might that mean?
The Contested Conjuncture – Authoritarian Populism and Progressive Possibilities – 21 June 2024
This one day symposium, co-convened by The Stuart Hall Archive Project, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, assesses the present 'conjuncture': critically analysing the history and condition of the Labour party and wider labour movement in Britain; the political consequences of national and global social, economic, and ecological crises; and the nature of hegemonic, dominant and emergent political projects.
Online panel convened by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
In the spirit of Stuart Hall’s approach to scholarship, critique and engagement, this session convenes a panel of speakers from Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, to connect discussion of ‘conjunctures’ to contemporary crises and their respective terrain of struggle, in policing the crisis in the 21st century (Montel Gordon), class and everyday life (Kirsteen Paton), populism and the far right (Aaron Winter), and articulations of resistance in music (Les Back).
Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic – 18 March 2024
With Nabila Ramdani
How does France work, how did it get here, and how can it change? Join us to discuss Nabila Ramdani's newly published book, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic: "France – the romanticised, revolutionary land of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for all – is failing. Reform is urgently needed. This book is a powerful indictment of the status quo, and a highly original perspective on the challenges to which the nation must rise. Nabila Ramdani is not from the establishment elite: she is a marginalised insider, born and raised in a neglected Paris suburb. With unflinching clarity, she probes the fault lines of her struggling country, exposing the Fifth Republic as an archaic system which emerged from Algeria’s cataclysmic War of Independence. Today, a monarchical President Macron shows little interest in democracy, while a far-right party founded by Nazi collaborators threatens to replace him. Segregation, institutionalised rioting, economic injustice, the debasement of women, a monolithic education system, deep-seated racial and religious discrimination, paramilitary policing, terrorism and extremism, and a duplicitous foreign policy all fuel the growing crisis. Yet Ramdani offers real hope: the broken French Republic can, and must, be fixed."
Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe – 11 March 2024
This panel event drew on a Special Issue published by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power on Affective Control: The Emotional Life of Mobility Control in Europe
Current outcomes of immigration enforcement policies and apparatuses call for rethinking the ethics behind our understanding of community belonging, human rights and just society. The ethics at work are often presented as emotions creating a particular affective atmosphere that permits the ongoing implementation of enforcing migration. The Special Issue and panel focus on and examine emotions as processes of organizing that are mobilized in support of certain ethics. In the context of immigration enforcement, these emotions are not self-explanatory, but they can justify the potential for violence and even deem it necessary, including notably in the case of the emotions or affects of enforcers (as opposed to migrants), which have been less addressed. The contributions to the Special Issue and panel, which include the authors of four of the articles and the Guest Editors, pay particular attention to institutional racism within state structures. They reveal the ways in which emotions are instrumental to the operations of state bureaucracy within the repressive migration apparatus and point to the ethics that allow individuals to conform to state structures of oppression.
Articulating and Categorising Ethnic Identity: Reflections on Politics of Recognition and (Mis)representation in ‘Big Data’ Using the EVENS Survey – 23 February 2024
With Prof Nissa Finney, University of St Andrews
In a world awash with data how do we untangle ethnic identifications and their meanings, and how well do ‘big data’ capture ethnic identities? In this talk, Nissa considered how people articulate their ethnic identity, how this is – and isn’t - captured by statistical categorisations used as standard in Britian, and the implications of this for how we conduct research and the creation of knowledge on experiences of minoritized people. The presentation draws on a new, exciting national social survey that was led by Nissa – the Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS) – published in 2023 by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). EVENS documents the experiences of over 14,000 people and provides unrivalled data on the lives of ethnic and religious minorities in Britain. Using EVENS, Nissa drew out concepts that underpin articulations of ethnic identity and argues that new formulations of ethnic group categories are needed to reflect these, and to more fully represent the twenty percent of ethnic minorities whose identities are not well captured by current approaches. Focusing on two groups who are not routinely identified in official ethnicity data collection – Jewish and White Eastern European – Nissa discussed the power of recognition afforded (or not) through the creation (or not) of statistical categories, and the implications for whose experiences are silenced.
Identities 30th Anniversary Lecture with Dr Jean Beaman
In this lecture, based on years of ethnographic research on France’s present antiracist movement and mobilization against state violence, Dr Jean Beaman discusses how visible minorities, namely Black and Arab populations, make sense of the racism they experience at the hands of the state, including through violence by the police and how they resist this racism and violence. In doing so, Dr Beaman explores the balance they draw between acknowledging and resisting racism here, as in France, as well as there, as in globally. Dr Beaman discusses what lessons they offer regarding resisting colonial continuities and imagining a world beyond state violence and subjugation.
Back to Black? Identity Politics in Treacherous Times – 22 October 2024
Identities 30th Anniversary Lecture with Professor Claire Alexander
It is now nearly forty years since Stuart Hall’s seminal 1988 ‘New Ethnicities’ article announced the ‘end of innocence’, or the end of ‘the innocent notion of an essential black subject’. The intervening decades have seen both the fragmentation and re-imagination of racial and ethnic identities, and ongoing racial and ethnic inequalities and exclusions. They have also seen the emergence of new forms of racial exclusion and the resurgence of essentialist forms of identity and resistance. This lecture traces some of these changes and explores some of the contemporary forms of identity politics, and their dangers. In particular it asks: what is the future for racial and ethnic solidarity and how do we find place for hope in treacherous times?
Wrongs Not Righted: How Might We Think about Repair? – 25 September 2024
Identities 30th Anniversary Lecture with Professor Catherine Hall
From slavery and the 1831 rebellion to the events at Morant Bay in 1865 and the Windrush scandal, multiple wrongs have been done. They have not been put right. The British state, institutions and individual Britons are all implicated. Britain’s entangled past with Jamaica is not done; it lives on in the present. There is a debt to be paid. How might we think about the question of reparation and repair? Who carries responsibility? What might that mean?
The Contested Conjuncture – Authoritarian Populism and Progressive Possibilities – 21 June 2024
This one day symposium, co-convened by The Stuart Hall Archive Project, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, assesses the present 'conjuncture': critically analysing the history and condition of the Labour party and wider labour movement in Britain; the political consequences of national and global social, economic, and ecological crises; and the nature of hegemonic, dominant and emergent political projects.
Online panel convened by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
In the spirit of Stuart Hall’s approach to scholarship, critique and engagement, this session convenes a panel of speakers from Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, to connect discussion of ‘conjunctures’ to contemporary crises and their respective terrain of struggle, in policing the crisis in the 21st century (Montel Gordon), class and everyday life (Kirsteen Paton), populism and the far right (Aaron Winter), and articulations of resistance in music (Les Back).
Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic – 18 March 2024
With Nabila Ramdani
How does France work, how did it get here, and how can it change? Join us to discuss Nabila Ramdani's newly published book, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic: "France – the romanticised, revolutionary land of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for all – is failing. Reform is urgently needed. This book is a powerful indictment of the status quo, and a highly original perspective on the challenges to which the nation must rise. Nabila Ramdani is not from the establishment elite: she is a marginalised insider, born and raised in a neglected Paris suburb. With unflinching clarity, she probes the fault lines of her struggling country, exposing the Fifth Republic as an archaic system which emerged from Algeria’s cataclysmic War of Independence. Today, a monarchical President Macron shows little interest in democracy, while a far-right party founded by Nazi collaborators threatens to replace him. Segregation, institutionalised rioting, economic injustice, the debasement of women, a monolithic education system, deep-seated racial and religious discrimination, paramilitary policing, terrorism and extremism, and a duplicitous foreign policy all fuel the growing crisis. Yet Ramdani offers real hope: the broken French Republic can, and must, be fixed."
Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe – 11 March 2024
This panel event drew on a Special Issue published by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power on Affective Control: The Emotional Life of Mobility Control in Europe
Current outcomes of immigration enforcement policies and apparatuses call for rethinking the ethics behind our understanding of community belonging, human rights and just society. The ethics at work are often presented as emotions creating a particular affective atmosphere that permits the ongoing implementation of enforcing migration. The Special Issue and panel focus on and examine emotions as processes of organizing that are mobilized in support of certain ethics. In the context of immigration enforcement, these emotions are not self-explanatory, but they can justify the potential for violence and even deem it necessary, including notably in the case of the emotions or affects of enforcers (as opposed to migrants), which have been less addressed. The contributions to the Special Issue and panel, which include the authors of four of the articles and the Guest Editors, pay particular attention to institutional racism within state structures. They reveal the ways in which emotions are instrumental to the operations of state bureaucracy within the repressive migration apparatus and point to the ethics that allow individuals to conform to state structures of oppression.
Articulating and Categorising Ethnic Identity: Reflections on Politics of Recognition and (Mis)representation in ‘Big Data’ Using the EVENS Survey – 23 February 2024
With Prof Nissa Finney, University of St Andrews
In a world awash with data how do we untangle ethnic identifications and their meanings, and how well do ‘big data’ capture ethnic identities? In this talk, Nissa considered how people articulate their ethnic identity, how this is – and isn’t - captured by statistical categorisations used as standard in Britian, and the implications of this for how we conduct research and the creation of knowledge on experiences of minoritized people. The presentation draws on a new, exciting national social survey that was led by Nissa – the Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS) – published in 2023 by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). EVENS documents the experiences of over 14,000 people and provides unrivalled data on the lives of ethnic and religious minorities in Britain. Using EVENS, Nissa drew out concepts that underpin articulations of ethnic identity and argues that new formulations of ethnic group categories are needed to reflect these, and to more fully represent the twenty percent of ethnic minorities whose identities are not well captured by current approaches. Focusing on two groups who are not routinely identified in official ethnicity data collection – Jewish and White Eastern European – Nissa discussed the power of recognition afforded (or not) through the creation (or not) of statistical categories, and the implications for whose experiences are silenced.
2023
Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World – 13 December 2023
With Prof Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
In this seminar, Professor Michèle Lamont discussed her new book which explores the power of recognition – in rendering others as visible and valued – by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition – from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay – showing how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity. Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World details how decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups. The solution, Professor Lamont advances, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: by reducing stigma, we put change within reach.
What Sociologists Learn from Music: Identity, Music-making and the Sociological Imagination – 27 November 2023
With Prof Les Back, University of Glasgow
Sociologists very often have extra-curricular lives as musicians. This talk explored the relationship between musical life and sociological identities. Through a range of examples from Howard Becker’s grounding in field research as a pianist in the Chicago jazz clubs and his theories of deviance to the connection between Emma Jackson’s life as a bass player in Brit pop band Kenickie and her feminist punk sociology an argument is developed about the things sociologists learn from music. Based on twenty-seven life history interviews with contemporary sociologists this talk show how sociologists learn – both directly and tacitly – to understand society through their engagement with music. Music offers them an interpretive device to read cultural history, a training in the unspoken and yet structured aspects of culture and an attentiveness to improvised and interactive aspects of social interaction. For sociologists, involvement in music making is also an incitement to get off campus and encounter an alternative world of value and values. Music has enabled sociologists to sustain their research imaginations and inspire them to make sociology differently. However, the talk concluded that in the contemporary neoliberal university it is harder for sociologists to sustain a creative hinterland in music. The tacit knowledges that often nourish sociological identities may run the risk of being depleted as a result.
A Conversation on The Souls of White Jokes – 9 October 2023
This online panel event discussed Raúl Pérez's book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (2022), which offers a rigorous study of the social meaning and consequences of racist humour. Drawing on a published symposium in Identities, panellists explored The Souls of White Jokes to think through the book's themes and issues more expansively.
Racism and the Republic: Understanding the Uprisings in France – 12 July 2023
The Police killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, joins a long established pattern of racialized police violence in France. The uprisings it sparked, too, are connected with continued mobilizations against state sanctioned racial discrimination, and cannot be understood apart from these encounters. Meanwhile, in speeches, newsrooms and social media posts, the language of ‘riots’ and ‘integration’ obscure these racialized social dynamics, in ways that portray the Republic as a victim of France’s hospitality. How has this come to pass and in what ways can be better understand current and unfolding developments? This specially convened panel of speakers can help us to do just this.
Fireside Chat with Professor Nicola Rollock – 24 March 2023
Professor Nicola Rollock talks with Professor Nasar Meer about her new book, The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival, which uses narrative to explore and document the realities of everyday racism. In this transformative book, Nicola Rollock, one of our pre-eminent experts on racial justice, offers a vital exploration of the lived experience of racism.
With Prof Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
In this seminar, Professor Michèle Lamont discussed her new book which explores the power of recognition – in rendering others as visible and valued – by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition – from Nikole Hannah Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay – showing how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity. Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World details how decades of neoliberalism have negatively impacted our sense of self-worth, up and down the income ladder, just as the American dream has become out of reach for most people. By prioritizing material and professional success, we have judged ourselves and others in terms of self-reliance, competition, and diplomas. The foregrounding of these attributes of the upper-middle class in our values system feeds into the marginalization of workers, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and minority groups. The solution, Professor Lamont advances, is to shift our focus towards what we have in common while actively working to recognize the diverse ways one can live a life. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: by reducing stigma, we put change within reach.
What Sociologists Learn from Music: Identity, Music-making and the Sociological Imagination – 27 November 2023
With Prof Les Back, University of Glasgow
Sociologists very often have extra-curricular lives as musicians. This talk explored the relationship between musical life and sociological identities. Through a range of examples from Howard Becker’s grounding in field research as a pianist in the Chicago jazz clubs and his theories of deviance to the connection between Emma Jackson’s life as a bass player in Brit pop band Kenickie and her feminist punk sociology an argument is developed about the things sociologists learn from music. Based on twenty-seven life history interviews with contemporary sociologists this talk show how sociologists learn – both directly and tacitly – to understand society through their engagement with music. Music offers them an interpretive device to read cultural history, a training in the unspoken and yet structured aspects of culture and an attentiveness to improvised and interactive aspects of social interaction. For sociologists, involvement in music making is also an incitement to get off campus and encounter an alternative world of value and values. Music has enabled sociologists to sustain their research imaginations and inspire them to make sociology differently. However, the talk concluded that in the contemporary neoliberal university it is harder for sociologists to sustain a creative hinterland in music. The tacit knowledges that often nourish sociological identities may run the risk of being depleted as a result.
A Conversation on The Souls of White Jokes – 9 October 2023
This online panel event discussed Raúl Pérez's book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (2022), which offers a rigorous study of the social meaning and consequences of racist humour. Drawing on a published symposium in Identities, panellists explored The Souls of White Jokes to think through the book's themes and issues more expansively.
Racism and the Republic: Understanding the Uprisings in France – 12 July 2023
The Police killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, joins a long established pattern of racialized police violence in France. The uprisings it sparked, too, are connected with continued mobilizations against state sanctioned racial discrimination, and cannot be understood apart from these encounters. Meanwhile, in speeches, newsrooms and social media posts, the language of ‘riots’ and ‘integration’ obscure these racialized social dynamics, in ways that portray the Republic as a victim of France’s hospitality. How has this come to pass and in what ways can be better understand current and unfolding developments? This specially convened panel of speakers can help us to do just this.
Fireside Chat with Professor Nicola Rollock – 24 March 2023
Professor Nicola Rollock talks with Professor Nasar Meer about her new book, The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival, which uses narrative to explore and document the realities of everyday racism. In this transformative book, Nicola Rollock, one of our pre-eminent experts on racial justice, offers a vital exploration of the lived experience of racism.
2022
Race and Class: Understanding Their Relationship in Society – 14 November 2022
Joint event with The British Library and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
W. E. B. Du Bois and his Strange Synthesis of Spirituality and Sociology – 26 October 2022
Seminar with Matthew Hughey, co-sponsored by Identities and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh
Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois now flourishes. Despite the newfound attention, few critically engage the complicated and contradictory uses of divinity, prayers, transcendental virtues, and otherworldly dimensions that circulate within Du Boisian social theory. This absence looms large within sociology, wherein only a fraction of Du Bois’s vast oeuvre endures. As a remedy, I plumb lesser-engaged works like “A Vacation Unique” (1995 [1889]), “The Princess Steel” (1995 [1909c]), "Prayers for Dark People" (1980 [1910c]) and “The Comet” in Darkwater (1920) to illumine a “Du Boisian Sociological Spirituality”: (1) a ritualized blend of materialist instrumentalism and pedagogical idealism; (2) a pragmatist-underpinned social interactionism that sanctifies the Black self, and; (3) a sociology of knowledge predicated on otherworldly dimensions and metaphysical standpoints. I argue that Du Bois’s poiesis animates his analysis of the colour-line and his understandings of both Whiteness and White Supremacy.
Decolonizing Politics Symposium – 23 May 2022
This online roundtable event discussed Professor Robbie Shilliam's book, Decolonizing Politics, which offers a lens through which to decolonize the main themes and issues of political science - from human nature, rights, and citizenship, to development and global justice. Drawing on a published symposium in Identities: Global Studies in Culture in Power, speakers explored the approaches within Decolonizing Politics to introduce a range of intellectual resources from the (post)colonial world to think through the same themes and issues more expansively.
Joint event with The British Library and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
W. E. B. Du Bois and his Strange Synthesis of Spirituality and Sociology – 26 October 2022
Seminar with Matthew Hughey, co-sponsored by Identities and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh
Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois now flourishes. Despite the newfound attention, few critically engage the complicated and contradictory uses of divinity, prayers, transcendental virtues, and otherworldly dimensions that circulate within Du Boisian social theory. This absence looms large within sociology, wherein only a fraction of Du Bois’s vast oeuvre endures. As a remedy, I plumb lesser-engaged works like “A Vacation Unique” (1995 [1889]), “The Princess Steel” (1995 [1909c]), "Prayers for Dark People" (1980 [1910c]) and “The Comet” in Darkwater (1920) to illumine a “Du Boisian Sociological Spirituality”: (1) a ritualized blend of materialist instrumentalism and pedagogical idealism; (2) a pragmatist-underpinned social interactionism that sanctifies the Black self, and; (3) a sociology of knowledge predicated on otherworldly dimensions and metaphysical standpoints. I argue that Du Bois’s poiesis animates his analysis of the colour-line and his understandings of both Whiteness and White Supremacy.
Decolonizing Politics Symposium – 23 May 2022
This online roundtable event discussed Professor Robbie Shilliam's book, Decolonizing Politics, which offers a lens through which to decolonize the main themes and issues of political science - from human nature, rights, and citizenship, to development and global justice. Drawing on a published symposium in Identities: Global Studies in Culture in Power, speakers explored the approaches within Decolonizing Politics to introduce a range of intellectual resources from the (post)colonial world to think through the same themes and issues more expansively.
2019
The Subject of Decolonisation: Literary Critical Insights – 18 November 2019
Identities Annual Lecture 2019 by Dr Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge, UK
Identities Annual Lecture 2019 by Dr Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge, UK
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