Crisis Ordinariness and Racial Justice
When:
—
Venue:
Online
This talk explores how societies adapt to a form of ‘crisis ordinariness’ (Berlant 2011) in which the regularity of racial injustice prevails without the need for pre-meditated racist intentions. Underwritten by a ‘racial contract’ (Mills 1997), and propelled by racial mechanics in seemingly disparate and ancillary social spheres (Meer 2022), the argument advanced here is that social systems bear the imprints of older racial injustices that are not merely restated but re-articulated in ways that may be novel, and yet share common properties with how other racial projects have been curated and sustained. Seeing racial injustice as systemic, therefore, better allows us to grasp the nature of the challenge we face.
Speaker Biography:
Nasar Meer is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences and Director of RACE.ED at the University of Edinburgh.
He is Co-Investigator of The Impacts of the Pandemic on Ethnic and Racialized Groups in the UK (UKRI, 2021-2023) and Principal Investigator of the Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europe's Refugees (GLIMER) (JPI ERA Net / Horizon-2020). Between 2020-2021, he was a Commissioner on the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Post-COVID-19 Futures Inquiry, and a Member of the Scottish Government COVID-19 and Ethnicity Expert Reference Group, and the British Council's Outreach Program. Nasar is an elected Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), a former elected co-Chair of Young Academy of Scotland (YAS), a Trustee of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and the Social Policy Association (SPA). He is currently co-Editor in Chief of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power; co-Editor of 21st Century Standpoints (BSA and Policy Press) and co-Editor of Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series (PPICS).
Professor Meer’s recent book The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022, Bristol University Press) can be found here.
Race and Justice Series
This event is part of the Department of Criminology’s Race and Justice Series and is supported by the by the British Society of Criminology's Race Matters Network. For further information, please contact the event organiser and Race Matters Network coordinator Dr Monish Bhatia (m.bhatia@bbk.ac.uk).
This event is open to the public and free to attend however booking is required via this page. The event will be hosted on MS Teams, a free to access website. You will be sent a link to access the event on the day.
Contact name:
Hannah Geddes