How To Tell People They Sound Racist

In case you missed this, the presenter (Jay Smooth) offers some useful practical knowledge…

Filed under: anti-racism, racism , anti-racism, racism

Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies – Review

Book review of: Ellis Cashmore (ed), Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, London: Routledge, 2004

What are encyclopaedias good for?

In an age of information over-load, the implosion of meanings and forever sliding signifiers, has the imperious authority of such texts been undermined? Or conversely, precisely because of our amnesiac contemporary culture caught in a perpetual presentism – particularly in relation to failing to grasp the contortions of ‘race’ – is the role of such an encyclopaedia needed more than ever?

Cashmore’s legitimacy and scope of his expanded text is made explicitly clear in the introduction: the 4th Edition has now matured from a dictionary to a full-blown encyclopaedic status. The sheer size of the volume is impressive, and with a list over eighty international contributors, he has laudably edited an array of substantial entries which extend the boundaries of ‘race’ work towards an interdisciplinary agenda. Entries such as ‘Mike Tyson’, ‘Central Park Jogger’ and ‘Consumption’ are unlikely to appear in conventionally narrow sociological dictionaries of ‘race’ and ethnicity.

Filed under: politics , anti-racism, Islam, race, racism

Anti-racist/non-Eurocentric Critical Pedagogy – some provocations

Below are some notes (a handout) for the talk I gave at the Migrating University event at Goldsmiths, 14 June 2007:

• Critical pedagogies attempt to distinguish the method (how we teach) from the content (what we teach)…”we teach students how to critically think, not what to think”. But can we really hold on to such a distinction?

Filed under: thought , anti-racism, education, pedagogy, teaching