Blog

15 May 2023

A personal reflection on Nakba Day

Nakba is an Arabic word, roughly translating to ‘catastrophe’ and is the word Palestinians use to talk about the appropriation of land and expulsion and exile of over 800,000 people during the partition of Palestine to make way for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

21 April 2023

On Gary Lineker's tweet, the politics of comparison and denial of racism

On 7 March 2023, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, escalating the rhetoric on and punitive approach to migration, asylum and refugees, announced the ‘Illegal Migration Bill’ and strategy to stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats by arresting, detaining, deporting and banning those caught.

A masked person in medical scrubs answers the phone

24 March 2023

Extinguishing migrant Muslim communities

Gender, as expressed on namely the bodies of Muslim women, is positioned at the centre of the radical right’s linkage between migration and religion. This link is visible in the persistent debates on the ban of Muslim body-covering, which in Austria has been promoted by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) since the turn of the century.

03 March 2023

Poetic insubmission of the orality of Black women word-crafters in slams

The poem of the slammer Rool Cerqueira is an example of spoken textuality which is born from literary activities erupting in Brazil, especially in the favelas and periferias (marginalized and often criminalized urban areas), with the construction of other narratives and poetic forms that are the unfolding of the effervescent creativity and reading of the society by people who at times are not represented in literature.

Sir Stamford Raffles statue in Singapore

17 February 2023

Reflections on decoloniality, time, history and remembering

Amidst a wider decolonisation debate, racialised communities across metropoles have contested, and protested, questions of the ‘past’, of history and of memory.

27 January 2023

Black presence and dreamwork

This blog captures some of the thoughts that struck me when I read Nasar Meer’s latest book – The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice. The book is a tour de force of concepts relating to the historical and its impact on the contemporary.

An orange book: Nasar Meer: The cruel optimism of Racial Justice

13 January 2023

Is there a tipping point before we pivot collectively and decisively for racial justice?

14 December 2022

RACE.ED Newsletter – December 2022

Looking back on the work of the network over the past year, we are grateful to everyone for their support and contributions. This year, we have stretched our threads to different networks in the university, out to the surrounding community and transnational lengths. Together, we weaved new opportunities to build dialogues and exchange ideas.

09 December 2022

Building transnational solidarity: radical pedagogies from the South

Every time I think of the transnational solidarity workshop RACE.ED hosted this past summer, I have to recollect and reaffirm that it was not a fever dream.

09 December 2022

Damn, you’ve been (t)here: a dialogue between Black lives in Scotland to another

After reading Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland by Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill, I struggled to situate myself. I am new to Scotland. I think it is apt to say that I embody the assumption many try to put on to Black Lives in Scotland; not native born, child of an immigrant, and not really from here.

An orange book. Nasar Meer: The cure optimism of Racial Justice

02 December 2022

Reorienting from ‘crisis ordinariness’: a meditation on The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice

The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice guides us through a series of pertinent questions, not at all easy to answer but as Nasar Meer encourages us to think about, foundational to the legacy of anti-racist praxis past, present and future.

28 October 2022

Haitian, Bahamian, both or neither?

On 24 September 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the contributions and experiences of people of African descent to the United States. Engraved on one of the walls of the museum reads, ‘I, too, sing America’.

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