SOC40610 Race, Space and Place

Academic Year 2016/2017

Caroline Knowles writes that it is in the spaces and places of our everyday lives that we both create and resist the racialised social orders that underpin the societies in which we live. This course explores the ways in which ‘race’ is constructed, experienced and transformed through our engagement with the social formations, power relationships and practices that shape our lives. It does so, however, within an intersectional framework whereby the dynamics and operations of race, gender, class, sexuality and so on are mutually constitutive.

We will begin by exploring the legacies of colonialism and the rise of the nation-state in the evolution of the concepts and structures of ‘race’ and racisms. We will then explore their implications in the structures of othering and the politics of knowledge production across the contexts of academic scholarship, governance and everyday life. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives we will explore how ‘race’/difference operates across (1) an array of different landscapes (eg., the territories of law, policy regimes, the civic sector, public arenas); (2) in different circumstances and contexts (eg., migration, segregation, regeneration, mobilisation); and (3) according to different constructs (eg, diaspora, transnationalism, ethnic relations, identity politics), within and across internal/external, individual/collective, ‘host’/‘migrant, national/trans-national borders and binaries.

In addition to gaining an understanding of the theoretical foundations of the substantive topics of race, space and place, the course is designed to help students develop their skills of scholarship, from conceptualising and contextualising their phenomena of interest, to articulating research questions and constructing research frames for their own work.