Racist disciplines? Critically exploring approaches to race in the Social Sciences and Humanities Professor Heaven Crawley, Coventry University
Event details
IGDC Roundtable - US Black History Month 2021
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 and the protests that followed, academics across the social sciences have been forced to scrutinise their own biases and racism with their own disciplines and institutions. In the context of Black History Month in the United States, the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre is seeking to explore how race is dealt with across three distinct disciplines.
Both fields in social sciences and humanities have long suffered from being largely founded on Eurocentric understandings of the world that often paper over colonial legacies, legacies of the slave trade and racism, and that neglect insights and contributions from the non-Western world. This has led to campaigns to decolonize the university and decolonize the curriculum. In this panel, we have experts from Political Science, Economics and English that will address how these problems manifest themselves in their own field and the movements in the fields that aim to address the disciplines’ shortcomings.
Image: Black Lives Matter Protest - Washington, DC by Yash Mori, (CC BY 2.0).
Introduction:
- Professor Kiran Trehan, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Partnerships and Engagement
Speakers:
- Professor Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and a University Professor and the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at The New School. Considered one of the nation’s foremost scholars, economists and public intellectuals, Hamilton’s accomplishments include recently being profiled in the New York Times, Mother Jones magazine and the Wall Street Journal and being featured in Politico Magazine’s 2017 50 Ideas Shaping American Politics and the People Behind Them issue. Also, he is a member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation in partnership with the Group Health Foundation’s inaugural class of Freedom Scholars.
- Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge UK. Gopal’s expertise includes colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. She recently published Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2020).
- Dr Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, Founder and President of Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race (WISER), US. Sharpe’s expertise includes gender and racial inequality, representation and diversity in economics and STEM, and the demography of higher education. She is also the co-editor of the Review of Black Political Economy.
- Professor Robbie Shilliam, Professor in the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, US. Shilliam’s expertise includes the political and intellectual complicities of colonialism and race in the global order. More specifically, he is working on a re-reading of classical political economy through its intimate relationship to Atlantic slavery, a retrieval of Ethiopianism as a critical orientation towards global order, and South-South anti-colonial connections. His book Decolonizing Politics will be out in 2021.
Chairs:
- Professor Henrice Altink, Department of History, University of York
- Dr Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Department of Politics, University of York