2022-
We appear today to be witnessing a shift in critical perspectives of the study of race. While it had for a time been unusual to see intersectional approaches that synthesised the analysis of race with analyses of class, gender, (dis)ability, and sexuality, these combined approaches now form a new analytical baseline.
Recent scholarship has become adept at avoiding reductionisms of various kinds, and seeing racial identities and economic forces, for example, as parts of complex systems that reveal long-term patterns as well as continuous change. One of the primary conceptual nodes around which this revival has been structured is that of racial capitalism, as theorised by the Black radical tradition. Although this concept has attracted an enormous amount of excellent scholarship, does it offer a stable sense of what the critical study of racial capitalism could or should encompass?
In an effort to stimulate discussion on this and related matters, the ISRF has launched a research programme on Political Economy and Race. The intention of this programme is to bring together and further ongoing research into the ways racial imaginaries operate at the level of political economy, broadly construed.
A one-day symposium in which participants sketched existing debates in political economy and race, identifying their limits, and exploring the obstacles facing scholarship in this area. Special attention was paid to the role that the ISRF can specifically play in supporting critical research and researchers. Intended as an informal agenda-setting event, participants’ ideas are expected to have a formative influence on the eventual contours of the Political Economy and Race research programme.
A two-day workshop organised by Flexible Grants for Small Groups recipients Vincent Guermond, Ilias Alami & Ali Bhagat. The organisers aim to develop a self-reflexive and open political economy of money and finance sensitive to race and coloniality, one that grounds its understanding of the color of money at the financial frontier in capitalism’s ‘inherently racializing capacities’ (Virdee, 2019:9) on the one hand, and is adapted to tackle the racialized inequalities of our time on the other.
A two-day event celebrating the launch of Arun Kundnani’s What Is Antiracism? More details to be confirmed soon.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at lars.cornelissen@isrf.org.