The RACELAND project started in the middle of the pandemic, in February 2021. Travel restrictions and COVID measures were still in place, which made it impossible to go to the US. Until the summer of 2021 I worked remotely, with researchers from the University of Mississippi. Together we studied and discussed scholarly publications from a wide variety of disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, geography, and history. The reading and discussion sessions formed an important basis for the development of the theoretical and methodological framework of RACELAND. A work-in-progress presentation (with a focus on the concept of toxic masculinity) for the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Groningen was also useful in that respect. I did another (online) talk at Tilburg University for students of the Global Law program, about the history of police violence in the US. With regard to public outreach, I built a website with Square Space about my research (www.racelandproject.com) and created an Instagram account (
https://www.instagram.com/racelandproject/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)). In the summer of 2021 I submitted a first draft of an article for a special issue of The Global South journal on the Plantationocene and participated in a symposium on Hinterlands organized by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (the Netherlands) and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg (South Africa). This symposium formed the basis for a peer-reviewed chapter in an open-access edited volume on Planetary Hinterlands, which will come out in August 2023 with Palgrave Macmillan. With colleagues at the University of Groningen I set up an anti-racism workgroup that led to the organization of the Decolonize Hub, an initiative to address racialized prejudice in education and the university (
https://www.rug.nl/let/decolonize-hub/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)).
In the fall of 2021, I still could not travel to the States, because of COVID-related delays in visa processing at the US Consulate in Amsterdam. I therefore did my three-month secondment at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) first and then worked with my host institution, the University of Groningen, until I could finally move to the USA in late February 2022. During my secondment I did research in the RIAS archives, gave feedback on PhD projects, organized a two-day workshop with the Rural Imaginations research group of the University of Amsterdam, did a presentation on Cowboy Myths, participated in an online panel organized by the Netherlands Atlantic Youth about polarization in the US, and did a podcast on the Frontier in American History. I contributed to two online classes at the University of Groningen, continued my work with the Decolonize Hub, and joined the organizing committee for the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA) conference themed "A Superpower by Nature: The Environment and American Studies." This conference was originally planned for December 2021, but because of a lockdown we had to postpone it until May the next year.
While in the US, I finished the article for the special issue of the Global South and the chapter for the Planetary Hinterlands book. These peer-reviewed publications will come out in the next months. So far, I conducted research in archives across the US Deep South and did fieldwork and interviewed people in Natchez, Holly Springs, Winona, Clarksdale, Mound Bayou, Mileston, and Shannon (all located in Mississippi). I delivered academic papers at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations conference, the Rural Imaginations conference, the UM Race & Ethnicity Forum, and the Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Historical Association. In addition, I followed trainings in grassroots and heritage tourism and investigative journalism, worked on my management skills as member of the Center Advisory Committee and the Editorial Advisory Board of Study the South journal, and delivered talks for the general public in Oxford, MS and Jackson, MS.
