Ethnic and Racial Studies podcast on the ‘Race
critical public scholarship’ special issue
The following recordings you are about to hear were conducted at a one day
symposium entitled Race Critical Public Scholarship - pursuing justice in
austere times. This event took place at the University of East London on July
17th 2013.
My name is Gargi Bhattacharyya and I work at the University of East London
and I have co-edited the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies with Karim
Murji of the Open University.
Really me and Karim were thinking about how debates about public
scholarship and engaged scholarship translated into the broader field of
ethnic and racial studies. Partly because I think, in different ways we both felt
slightly sceptical about the claims that being an engaged scholar is such a
great thing and so easy to do, and you just kind of get your politics and you go
out with your article and your banner and there you are, you have saved the
nation. I thought well, that, is, maybe, yes, the field of Ethnic and Racial
Studies is almost by definition engaged because it is the field that is highly
engaged in some very urgent social issues, that is almost always related to
either issues of conflict or current policy, or areas which are very much about
the lived every-day pains and meanings of people’s lives, but there is quite a
big leap between doing that work and then how you speak to other people
and what impact it has, or what you even think you are doing politically.
So the special issue tries to make a kind of opening to speak about that
honestly to each other. Almost a way of slightly deflating that kind of nudging
into pomposity of the public intellectual to think a little bit more about oh well,
okay, this is a particular kind of tactical intervention learning and scholarship,
what might it be in some different places and how have some really quite
established people thought about that.. I think the pieces in the special issue
are really great at that, but they are very personal and tell you a lot about
practicalities of trying to be a decent person while you are being an academic
and how working with different people might work and what you might need to
know about what you bring to that table and why that is important, and I think
all those things now more than ever it is really crucial that we are able to say
to each other, because the other theme in the special issue is yes, we are all
scholars but the places of scholarship are under extreme attack.
There is almost no space to think and work and do and speak to each other
and that means that our ability to reflect and say to each other, well there is
something of not earth shattering, but still of central importance for the wider
society that we do and this is how we try and do it, and what do you do, can I
learn from you. That feels, you know I feel very pleased that I have been
involved in a special issue that at least gives that conversation a kind of kick
start in my sub discipline.
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Steve Garner, the contribution to the Ethnic and Racial Studies special issue
that has my name is a conversation with a French intellectual called Eric
Fassin and our conversation turned around the specifics of working on race
and doing public scholarship around this topic and others and how it was
different from the other models of American and UK work. We have
particularly talked around the difficulties of addressing racism when you work
in an environment which is officially colour blind and doesn’t use the terms
race and ethnicity in any official discourse whatsoever. So you have all the
patterns of racist discrimination, and verbal insults and all the kind of imagery
and ways of thinking about race that are common to most other places, that
had empires, but without the public language being available to you, to be
able to address these either through academic interventions or through public
ones and even in the French context where public intellectuals are taken
much, much more seriously than they are in the English speaking world in
general. Eric was talking about how particular changes open up the
possibilities and how you have to choose your wording very carefully to
address different forms of public.
So I think what we can draw from this in terms of our work in Britain is that
you’re constrained to a certain extent, or helped depending on the case by the
terms of the debate as they exist and you have to take into consideration how
people already frame these big topics and by frame I mean what are the
assumptions, what are the parameters about talking about them and the ideas
that you can use to express things, that people are comfortable with, what the
sociologists would call normative. And so for the UK we have to think about
how people understand the terms racist, racism, integration, diversity - all of
these terms which are used around policy. And then as we are trying to think
about a public scholarship that engages different publics we have to think
about how to make these terms make sense, in the ways that we want them,
as activists who want to change things and make society less unequal, less
racist, less discriminatory, how we want these things to happen because
currently people’s understandings through the research that I have been
doing for the last eight years or so on the racialization of white UK identities,
demonstrates to me that a large proportion of people understand these terms
quite differently from activists and academics who work in this area.. And so
terms such as equality for example would be read by many people as being
not in their interests at all, and an agenda cooked up to benefit minorities over
them. So if this is a kind of perverse effect that using that word in the title
which is seemingly something which is mainstream - equality, who is going to
argue against equality if that kind of term is taken to mean that it’s a coded
way to shift resources to minorities and away from white UK people, then we
might also think about how the term racist is constructed by lots of people as
well and racism and how this makes people think about terms that in their
understanding are unfair to them or refer to political correctness.
So what I am suggesting is that we take these things into consideration, not
that we stop using the terms racist, racism etcetera, but we might need to
explain it a bit better than we are explaining and to engage a bit better with
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publics outside academia in lots of different ways, using different formats and
really focus on making the terminology that we use explicit, making it more
available to a broader group of people, so that they can use it and the framing
behind it becomes closer to what we are doing at the moment than what it is.
So that is a long term project.
My name is Max Farrar, I am an Emeritus Professor at Leeds Metropolitan
University, which means I have retired. I did teach sociology there for a long
time, but I ended up as a professor for community engagement and that was
to do with the voluntary work that we were encouraging staff and students to
do both in Leeds and internationally. So I have always been a sociologist who
has is interested in kind of public engagement, and therefore when Gargi and
Karim asked me to contribute to this special issue of Ethnic and Racial
Studies on the issue broadly of kind of public sociology, or the engaged public
facing kind of sociology of what used to be called race relations, I was
flattered and willing to have a go at this field.
I have for some time been interested in extending Michael Burawoy’s idea of
public sociology, by sort of adding on Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of an
interpretive sociology. And so in this article I was trying to build upon
something that I had written before to try and integrate interpretive and public
sociology to add a further dimension for what I think is really increasingly
necessary in sociology in general but specifically on these issues, these really
difficult issues to do with race and ethnicity and that was to try and insert into
the debate an explicitly emotional content and to make that sound a bit more
sociological, you have to use this kind of peculiar word affective, which is
peculiar because people get it mixed up with effective, but I am suggesting in
this article that if we want to make any real difference in the public world of
racism and racialization and the complex issues that arise when people of
different skin colours and different cultures come into contact with each other,
we need to pay a lot of attention to the emotional dimensions of those
interactions and the article makes that point in several different ways partly
through my own, as a white person, working alongside and with people in the
political movements around race over the last, well nearly probably 40 years
now, I have realised initially just in the kind of trauma of some of the painful
interactions that had to happen between white people and black people
particularly in the 70s and the 80s, I begin to realise that it’s not just a
personal issue, it is something that is inherent in the public arena of race, it’s
much more emotionally charged than most sociologists recognise, and one of
the reasons why our analysis and our public interventions are not always as
good as they should be, I think, is because we rather bracket off the emotional
dimensions of these interactions. In the article I use some examples from my
own biography because this isn’t something which is very easily accessed
through most of the writing in sociology about race. In fact, sociological writing
about race is conspicuous by the absence of an emotional dimension. In
parenthesis I do advocate the reading of novels, particularly novels by blacker
nation, who are basically the whole range of non-white authors, but
sometimes also by white authors who are addressing the issues of race and
racialization and racism.
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My name is Michael Keith from the University of Oxford. At our symposium
this morning addressing the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies it was
suggested that a public sociology breaks down the distinction between the
analytical and the normative. I think this is true, and in my article I try to
suggest that this might also be problematic in ways that are unexpected as
well as ways that are productive in a manner that can be challenging. I think
the claims of public sociology to break down the distinction between what is
normative and what is analytical challenges us to make the normative
elements of our scholarship visible. In the piece of work that contributes to my
article, what I try to do is suggest that this might0020make us reflect on both
the ethnographic tradition and its anthropological roots, but also the border
lands between the humanities and social sciences when we are constructing
knowledges of race, racism and the power of race to make a difference to
people on the ground in contemporary cities. What I try to suggest is that an
ethnographic reflexivity nuanced by a historical sensibility might be important
in making sense of some of the more complex forms of intolerances as well
as some of the more aspirational forms of intercultural dialogue in the
contemporary moment.
This is Miri Song and I am a professor of Sociology at the University of Kent.
One of the issues that I think is coming through a lot of the speakers’
presentations, but which isn’t explicitly addressed is, I think, the whole issue
of a really fundamental need to critically assess what we mean when we talk
about racism and I think that going back to Robert Miles’ intervention many
years ago amongst others, that there is a kind of conceptual inflation around
the term racism that we often don’t know exactly what we mean when we use
the term, when we say someone is being racist, or someone is being racist
toward us and I do think that this is hugely problematic and I think that we
need to get back to being really clear and precise in our scholarship when we
talk about the term racism because its now used in all sorts of ways. I just
wrote this paper about this issue in which I contest the way in which all sorts
of people refer to a whole variety of very different racialised phenomena or
racialised actions as ‘racist’ and I think that this is something really hugely
important issue for us politically and as scholars.
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