Legacies and Disruptions
Our scales of attention move between the planetary and local site-specific issues of concern through a range of methods. We foster criticality and creativity, foregrounding contemporary issues historically, building on anti-racist legacies in research and pedagogic practices.
We run the MA in Race, Media and Social Justice with the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies department.
Social justice and how we can better recognise shared lines of oppression. Dr Brett St Louis explores. MA info: https://t.co/oZreA2frgb pic.twitter.com/3v7qsem08I
— Goldsmiths (@GoldsmithsUoL) March 3, 2017
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Department Events
Inhabiting academic whiteness?
Shona Hunter, Angela Loum, Rayhan Ayun, 24 March 2021
Whiteness: An Online Conversation
Les Back, Mackenzie Berry, Sophie Black, Agata Pacho and Brett St Louis, 25 June 2020
Listen below to the podcast for the event.
Fighting racism, Antiracist futures: An online conversation
Margarita Aragon, Renee Baure, Sabelo Ndwandwe, Sophie Niang, Nirmal Puwar (Chair), Brett St Louis, 17 June 2020
Listen below to the podcast for the event.
Research Ethics and Indigenous Peoples 101
Linda Tuhiwai Smith,The Sociological Review, February 2020
Decolonising Methodologies, 20 Years On
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, The Sociological Review fifth annual lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, 16 October 2019
Black British Feminisms: Many Voices, Many Chants
The Centre for Feminist Research cohosts the Feminist Review annual panel, December 2014
External Talks
Author readings from the book ‘Racist Tones’ (2021)
The FOUR WRITERS group (T. Patel, D. Piparia, N. Puwar, J. Samra), Resonate Festival, Coventry, 19 September 2021
Read more about the book in the Publications section further down.
Do Museums Care: Conversation with Museum De-Tox
Thanh Sinden, Nick Virk, Cina Aissa from Museum De-Tox in conversation with Nirmal Puwar, 2 July 2020
Institutions, including museums and art galleries, are releasing statements in solidarity with BLM. These accounts are also taking on artistic forms in public space. Museum De-tox are trying to make changes which take us beyond performative gestures, so that institutions start becoming accountable for their accounts. In this conversation the speakers discuss the institutional tracking, tracing and mapping work Museum De-tox are labouring over behind the scenes. Read more here.
The Outerview, Where Reason Comes First
Lez Henry and Les Back, 25 June 2020
The migrant city at the time of Covid-19
Lyndsey Stonebridge talks to Les Back on COVID, Care and the Human Condition, 5 June 2020.
Part of Conversations with Iris, a Zoomcast series on mobility and immobility.
Anti-Colonial Thought
Brian Alleyne, September 2019
Race / Racism
Brian Alleyne, September 2019
Postcolonial History Within a Mile of Where we Sit
Les Back, Marchers and Steppers, MFA Fine Art and MFA Curating Lecture Series, Goldsmiths, University of London, 7 November 2016
The Many Faces of Whiteness
Nirmal Puwar, Old Student House, Great Hall, 6 April 2014
The Narrative Representation of Progress and Vindication in CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary
Brian Alleyne, The Beyond A Boundary Conference, University Of Glasgow, 2013
The conference was part of the CLR James Documentary Project.
Publications
Racist Tones
The FOUR WRITERS group (T. Patel, D. Piparia, N. Puwar, J. Samra) et al., Goldsmiths & Herbert, 2021
Racist Tones is a limited edition book, available to buy at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry. Proceeds from the sales support creative anti-racist collaborations. The book foregrounds the everyday stories of those at the receiving end of the hostile racist environment, which formed the backdrop to the Two-Tone record label founded in 1979 in Coventry. It delves into the tones and frequencies in which racism was received and lived in this period. Racist Tones has been distinctively compiled from two modes of storytelling, altering how we imagine places across time in Coventry. During the 2021 lockdown, four of us came together online to write our flashbacks of racism from when we were growing up in Coventry, in the seventies and eighties, leading us to form the FOUR WRITERS group. This prompted us to start a dialogue with other people in our kinship networks. These conversations have only just begun… Read more about Racist Tones here.
Affecting White Woman
Katalin Halász, Feral Feminisms, 2018
This article explores the imagining of the destabilization of heteronormative power relations in the performance I Love Black Men (Halász 2011). The performance points to the potential of developing anti-racist white femininities through the white female body and its affective dimensions. This article explores how the racial category White Woman is made in a particular racializing stereotype that posits an elemental sexual attraction between white women and black men, and how this stereotype is subverted in the performance. It argues that I Love Black Men envisions a new public body for white woman, and for the potential of forming new, anti-racist relations.
Meeting Stuart Hall’s voice
Nirmal Puwar, Open Democracy, 16 February 2014
Stuart Hall’s signature image is perhaps the way in which he worked an audience with his accessible and in-depth sharp intellectual analysis, often with vital specks of humour here and there. Read the publication here.
Walks
The Reggae Map of New Cross
William ‘Lez’ Henry & Les Back, 26 May 2018
Part of the Bass Culture Event 70/50.
Audio
Podcast on ‘Migrants’
Les Back interview by David Edmonds, Social Science Bites, 2019
Sociologists Les Back and Shamser Sinha spent a decade following 30 migrants in London, a study that forms the narrative in their new book, Migrant City. The book offers an insight into life in contemporary London from the perspective of 30 adult migrants. “In the end,” Back tells interviewer David Edmonds, “Shamser Sinha and I learned so much about not only the experience of migration, but about London as a space and a place that is made through migration. So this is not really just a migrants’ story; it’s the story of London but told through and eyes, ears, and attentiveness of 30 adult migrants from all corners of the world.”
This collaborative longitudinal ethnography in, and of, London was accompanied by a conscious effort not just to “mine” the 30 migrants of their personal experiences and data; the sociologists were “doing research alongside people, instead of just in front of them and on them.”
Listen to the podcast here.
Migrant City
Les Back, Surviving Society podcast, 30 October 2018
Les talks to the Surviving Society team about the book, Migrant City (2018) he co-authored with Shamser Sinha.
Exhibitions
New Cross Fire (1981) – 13 Dead, Nothing Said
Kingsway Corridor, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, 9 March – 8 April 2017
This exhibition presents a body of photographs taken by Vron Ware documenting the Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March 1981. The images bear witness to a historic moment of community organising and resistance in post-war Britain following a fire that broke out at 439 New Cross Road, killing 13 young black Londoners.
Migrating Dreams + Nightmares: movement + materials
Kingsway corridor, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, 12 November 2015 – 12 December 2015
An exhibition and series of events responding to ‘A Seventh Man’ by John Berger and Jean Mohr.
White sand
Katalin Halász, The Chamber of White, Performance Sense Laboratory, Art Zone, Roskilde Festival, Denmark, 29 Jun – 06 Jul 2014
White sand is composed of images of ‘white woman’ and icons of white femininities including cultural figures like Cinderella, the cartoon Betty Boop, and Marilyn Monroe. These archetypes of ‘white woman’ are cross-referenced with the violent histories of whiteness and words from Aimé Césaire and Audre Lorde.
Space and Gaze: Conversations with Jean Mohr and Edward Said in Palestine
Kingsway corridor, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, November 2013 – June 2014
An exhibition bringing together the images of Jean Mohr and the text by Edward Said.
Noise of the Past
Nirmal Puwar & Sanjay Sharma with Kuldip Powar, 10 November 2013
The project brought together researchers and artist practitioners to unsettle social containers of war, memory and affect in an inventive tactile play of the past in the present.
Visualising Affect
Sutapa Biswas, Sandra De Berduccy, Nirmal Puwar, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Julio González Sánchez, Karin Michalski, Laura Cuch and Yvonne Füeg, Lewisham Arthouse, 8 – 10 July, 2013
Visualising Affect investigates art-practices and visual research strategies that consider and challenge the affective and emotional dimensions of race, sexuality and gender-constructs in art and society. It provides a compelling argument for an aesthetic engagement with affect and offers an insight into the ways in which social research remains concerned with the role and possibilities of feeling.
Untitled
Katalin Halász, Engaging Tactics: Sociology and the Public conference, The Old Police Station, 30 April 2012
Untitled explores visual perception and racialized seeing.
Archival footage from the civil rights movement was edited with the narration of five participants. The footage shows Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and a peaceful demonstration that turns violent with police officers arresting people and using water cannons to dissolve the crowd. Participants took on the role of observer and narrator at the same time: they reflected on the rhythm of the events as they were shown, and thus offered insight into their perceptions, feelings, and ways of thinking about how race is made in our societies.
In the video, we see the archival footage while listening to the different voices narrating it.
Collaborators
OPEN ROOMS #8: PHOTOGRAPHY AND RACIALISATION
Yasmin Gunaratnam, The Open Eye Gallery, July 2020
A conversation between Yasmin Gunaratnam, Ali Eisa and Daniel C. Blight on the role photography plays in the ongoing racialisation of people in the UK and worldwide.
Decolonising Culture: In Conversations With…
Nirmal Puwar, 2017
Migration Dreams and Nightmares
Library exhibition, Stuart Hall Library, Iniva, 17 March – 31 May 2016
A recording of the opening panel discussion with the artists Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta, Nirmal Puwar and Ashwani Sharma.
Crossing
Daljit Nagra and Yasmin Gunaratnam, 2014
Part of Medicine Unboxed, 2014 Frontiers.
Films
Two Sighs – Transnational Dying and Care
Yasmin Gunaratnam, 2014
A film about transnational dying and end of life care in the UK.
Khabie Ritz Kabhie Palladium
Herbert Art Gallery, 31 January – 13 June 2004
An exhibition on the South Asian cinema scene in Coventry.
Coventry Ritz
Nirmal Puwar, 2007
A film on architecture, unused spaces and the social scenes produced in Coventry in the British post-war period by South Asian workers who bought and programmed cinemas.
