9 October 2023
A Conversation on The Souls of White Jokes
This online panel event will discuss 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 forthcoming symposium in Identities: Global Studies in Culture in Power, panellists will explore
The Souls of White Jokes to think through the book's themes and issues more expansively.
Speakers:
Chaired by: Nasar Meer, University of Glasgow
Online event
Time: 16.00-17.30pm BST (10.00-11.30am CDT / 8.00-9.30am PT)
To attend this event: This event will take place on Zoom. Please register in advance, and a link to join the event will be sent to all registered attendees on the day of the event.
The Souls of White Jokes to think through the book's themes and issues more expansively.
Speakers:
- Raúl Pérez, University of La Verne
- Simon Weaver, Brunel University London
- Hajar Yazdiha, University of Southern California
- Victor Ray, University of Iowa
Chaired by: Nasar Meer, University of Glasgow
Online event
Time: 16.00-17.30pm BST (10.00-11.30am CDT / 8.00-9.30am PT)
To attend this event: This event will take place on Zoom. Please register in advance, and a link to join the event will be sent to all registered attendees on the day of the event.
27 November 2023
What Sociologists Learn from Music: Identity, Music-making and the Sociological Imagination
With Les Back, University of Glasgow
Co-organised by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, RACE.ED, Sociology at the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science, and Sociology at the University of Glasgow School of Social and Political Sciences
Co-organised by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, RACE.ED, Sociology at the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science, and Sociology at the University of Glasgow School of Social and Political Sciences
Sociologists very often have extra-curricular lives as musicians. This talk explores 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 concludes 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.
Venue: St Cecilia's Music Museum and Concert Hall, 50 Niddry Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LG
Time: 11.00am-12.30pm GMT, with lunch to follow 12.30-13.30pm
Places are limited. Please register in advance if you wish to attend.
Venue: St Cecilia's Music Museum and Concert Hall, 50 Niddry Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LG
Time: 11.00am-12.30pm GMT, with lunch to follow 12.30-13.30pm
Places are limited. Please register in advance if you wish to attend.
13 December 2023
Seeing Others: How Recognition Works – and How It Can Heal a Divided World
With Michèle Lamont, Harvard University
Joint seminar with Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and Sociology at the University of Glasgow
Joint seminar with Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and Sociology at the University of Glasgow
In this seminar, Professor Michèle Lamont will discuss 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.
Online seminar
Time: 14.00-15.00pm GMT
Details for registering to attend this event to be released shortly.
Online seminar
Time: 14.00-15.00pm GMT
Details for registering to attend this event to be released shortly.
Past Events
2023
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.
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
Explore Identities at tandfonline.com/GIDE |
|
|
|
|