Periodic Reporting for period 3 - POLITICS (The politics of anti-racism in Europe and Latin America: knowledge production, decision-making and collective struggles)
Période du rapport: 2020-09-01 au 2022-02-28
European and Latin American societies and political institutions have been historically structured by racial hierarchies that have excluded peoples from the realm of being human and, thus, from civil rights. Contemporary inequalities are shaped by the legacies of this history, in particular, of colonialism and racial enslavement. However, ‘race’ and racism have been a taboo subject and antiracism a marginal issue in public policy making and the wider political debate. Silence and denial about racism have been historically challenged by grassroots organizations and social movements, in particular, black, indigenous, and Roma struggles. States have been slowly incorporating some antiracist initiatives (such as anti-discrimination legislation or affirmative action policies) but they have remained insufficient and superficial. POLITICS engages with these debates and struggles as key issues in the contemporary struggle for political dignity and equality.
POLITICS (2017-2022) analyses how power relations shape anti-racism at a global, national, and local level in European and Latin American contexts. Research identifies and examines processes of dialogue, negotiation, and conflict between different and divergent political projects and agendas within State, regional and global institutions, social organizations, and collective movements.
POLITICS aims to broaden the existing knowledge and bring innovation to the debate on anti-racism in European and Latin American contexts. The project develops fieldwork and case studies in Brazil, Peru, Portugal, and Spain in three research contexts:
(i) State-sponsored anti-discrimination and inclusion public policies within international and regional frameworks;
(ii) State universities: undergraduate courses and specific research and teaching activities;
(iii) Security policies and law enforcement agencies: police brutality in urban settings.
POLITICS (2017-2022) analyses how power relations shape anti-racism at a global, national, and local level in European and Latin American contexts. Research identifies and examines processes of dialogue, negotiation, and conflict between different and divergent political projects and agendas within State, regional and global institutions, social organizations, and collective movements.
POLITICS aims to broaden the existing knowledge and bring innovation to the debate on anti-racism in European and Latin American contexts. The project develops fieldwork and case studies in Brazil, Peru, Portugal, and Spain in three research contexts:
(i) State-sponsored anti-discrimination and inclusion public policies within international and regional frameworks;
(ii) State universities: undergraduate courses and specific research and teaching activities;
(iii) Security policies and law enforcement agencies: police brutality in urban settings.
POLITICS has carried out 4 main types of activities:
a) The development of empirically grounded theoretical/methodological frameworks
Between October 2017 and March 2020, the team organized 15 internal seminars to discuss key academic production on the perceptions of race, racism, and anti-racism in the debate in the European and Latin American contexts.
b) Discussion and regular assessment of ethics issues and protocols
The team and scholar Mónica Figueroa, ethics advisor to the POLITICS project, held several meetings in March 2019 to reflect on the series of ethical implications and decisions we face when doing research on racism.
c) Preparation of archival research and mapping stakeholders
For approximately one year, the PI and team identified institutional/organizational settings and key participants to be interviewed; they gathered key documents in order to prepare the development of cartography of case-studies, combining the regional, national, and local level.
d) Dissemination and communication activities
Between September 2017 and February 2020, POLITICS organized and co-organized 7 scientific events in the area of the production of antiracism: 1 training course; 1 international colloquium; 1 summer course; 2 seminars; 1 internal workshop, and 1 international conference. The team participated in 44 national and international events (reaching over 800 people). The team made a total of 41 presentations to a diverse audience in European and Latin American contexts and published 41 Scientific publications.
a) The development of empirically grounded theoretical/methodological frameworks
Between October 2017 and March 2020, the team organized 15 internal seminars to discuss key academic production on the perceptions of race, racism, and anti-racism in the debate in the European and Latin American contexts.
b) Discussion and regular assessment of ethics issues and protocols
The team and scholar Mónica Figueroa, ethics advisor to the POLITICS project, held several meetings in March 2019 to reflect on the series of ethical implications and decisions we face when doing research on racism.
c) Preparation of archival research and mapping stakeholders
For approximately one year, the PI and team identified institutional/organizational settings and key participants to be interviewed; they gathered key documents in order to prepare the development of cartography of case-studies, combining the regional, national, and local level.
d) Dissemination and communication activities
Between September 2017 and February 2020, POLITICS organized and co-organized 7 scientific events in the area of the production of antiracism: 1 training course; 1 international colloquium; 1 summer course; 2 seminars; 1 internal workshop, and 1 international conference. The team participated in 44 national and international events (reaching over 800 people). The team made a total of 41 presentations to a diverse audience in European and Latin American contexts and published 41 Scientific publications.
POLITICS has engaged with specific theoretical perspectives, categories and policy/legal debates that foreground the overlapping and even conflation of three notions that, as David T. Goldberg stated, need to be distinguished: nonracialism (‘to sidestep historical legacies of racial injustice’), anti-racialism (‘a commitment to ending racial reference’) and anti-racism (‘to critically address and redress those legacies’). Building on Alana Lentin’s sociology of anti-racism in Europe in the late 1990s, the project has advanced innovative knowledge on how anti-racism is being conceived in relation to European and Latin-American mythical foundations of their political communities (i.e. universal gracelessness; anti-racialist mestizaje) and the challenging or complicities with the public culture of the nation-state (i.e. cultures of racism in denial).
Research has identified tensions, stark conflicts or complicities between the politics of incorporation and the politics of liberation, engaging with the specific vocabularies and political contexts of each research stream and case-studies:
(Research-Stream A) Fieldwork and policy analysis has revealed the tensions between State-sponsored anti-discrimination measures and radical anti-racist struggles. We have identified the following issues:
- prevailing approaches in public policymaking, legislation, and hegemonic social organizations are predicated on the notions of discrimination, cultural diversity/interculturality, and vulnerability. These notions focus on individual moral reform (racism is about racist individuals) rather than institutionalized practices;
- there has been a significant investment in legal initiatives to combat racism since the 2000s. The criminalization of racism has been a historical demand of anti-racist movements, however, legislation is grounded on formalistic understandings of discrimination that presume that the combat against racism is mainly about the regulation of social relations, evading institutional and State responsibility;
- Public policies focusing on ‘integration’ and ‘interculturality’ displace the debate about and measures to combat racism.
(Research-Stream B) The fieldwork carried out at the four universities has foregrounded three central lines of analysis:
- the crucial work outside and on the margins of Academia: the centrality of social movements (black, indigenous and Roma) in the processes and debates on “Decolonising methodologies”, and, in particular, the critical review of the Eurocentric curriculum;
- the pitfalls of the need for a “translation” process of the demands of social movements by the State and the academic community;
- the limits of incidental changes in the social sciences and humanities curricula in face of the historical-structural legacies of epistemological colonialism in the 4 universities.
(Research-Stream C) Fieldwork has questioned the narrative of “the problem of (in)security” and police violence as a question of “human rights and police reform”. We highlight key issues the project is questioning:
-the racial/racist contours of policies and discourses about the “problem of urban (in)security” are being invisibilized through the construction of questions of security/police intervention and social inclusion/development, as synonymous;
-policies of repression-brutality-genocide are being implemented jointly with programs of prevention-policing and police reform-human rights that place black and Roma women and youth at the center of a politics of social control that renew what Paul Amar has named as “racial missions”;
-Models of police intervention, programs of crime prevention, and techniques of crime mapping circulate globally since the 1980s, allowing to examine common trends in the effects of these policies in producing the black and Roma “abject subject”: incarceration, police brutality and state control.
Research has identified tensions, stark conflicts or complicities between the politics of incorporation and the politics of liberation, engaging with the specific vocabularies and political contexts of each research stream and case-studies:
(Research-Stream A) Fieldwork and policy analysis has revealed the tensions between State-sponsored anti-discrimination measures and radical anti-racist struggles. We have identified the following issues:
- prevailing approaches in public policymaking, legislation, and hegemonic social organizations are predicated on the notions of discrimination, cultural diversity/interculturality, and vulnerability. These notions focus on individual moral reform (racism is about racist individuals) rather than institutionalized practices;
- there has been a significant investment in legal initiatives to combat racism since the 2000s. The criminalization of racism has been a historical demand of anti-racist movements, however, legislation is grounded on formalistic understandings of discrimination that presume that the combat against racism is mainly about the regulation of social relations, evading institutional and State responsibility;
- Public policies focusing on ‘integration’ and ‘interculturality’ displace the debate about and measures to combat racism.
(Research-Stream B) The fieldwork carried out at the four universities has foregrounded three central lines of analysis:
- the crucial work outside and on the margins of Academia: the centrality of social movements (black, indigenous and Roma) in the processes and debates on “Decolonising methodologies”, and, in particular, the critical review of the Eurocentric curriculum;
- the pitfalls of the need for a “translation” process of the demands of social movements by the State and the academic community;
- the limits of incidental changes in the social sciences and humanities curricula in face of the historical-structural legacies of epistemological colonialism in the 4 universities.
(Research-Stream C) Fieldwork has questioned the narrative of “the problem of (in)security” and police violence as a question of “human rights and police reform”. We highlight key issues the project is questioning:
-the racial/racist contours of policies and discourses about the “problem of urban (in)security” are being invisibilized through the construction of questions of security/police intervention and social inclusion/development, as synonymous;
-policies of repression-brutality-genocide are being implemented jointly with programs of prevention-policing and police reform-human rights that place black and Roma women and youth at the center of a politics of social control that renew what Paul Amar has named as “racial missions”;
-Models of police intervention, programs of crime prevention, and techniques of crime mapping circulate globally since the 1980s, allowing to examine common trends in the effects of these policies in producing the black and Roma “abject subject”: incarceration, police brutality and state control.