Seeking Support in Teacher Education for Racial Knowledge: The Role of Professional Networks and Social Identities

Drawing from the narrated experiences of teacher educators (TEs) at different institutions, this paper analyzes TEs’ perceptions of support related to their work in teaching about race and racism. TEs varied in the extent to which they viewed their institution as supportive, and they identified factors that signaled that their institution supported teacher learning about race and racism. TEs also described how their racial identities and positional privilege related to tenure status informed engagement with peers both for providing and seeking support. Implications for teacher education programs in providing support for TEs who teach about race and racism are discussed.

The „Niemands“ – Heimatlose Ausländer in Mannheim

Heimatloser Ausländer (homeless foreigner) was a status granted to Displaced Persons, who were mostly slave or foreign workers during the Third Reich. How did local authorities and the population in Mannheim – an industrial ‘migration-city’– deal with these first ‘Ausländer’ of the Federal Republic of Germany? This article outlines how local authorities managed housing for dp s and later homeless foreigners and how their concerns were treated with at the Ausländerbehörde (foreigners office). It also looks into the reactions and attitudes of the population mirrored in local/regional administrative files and press coverage. The self-denomination as Niemands (nobodies), originating from sociologist and Mannheim based son of dp s, Stanislaus Stepień, expresses the history of a group of migrants who have been mostly forgotten after serving as projection surfaces and transmission objects for racial knowledge about the ‘migrant Other’ and ‘the German’.

Sleepwalking into the ‘Post-Racial’: Social Policy and Research-Led Teaching

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21st century university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline’s habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towards a re-envisioning of Social Policy, within a framework in which postcolonial and intersectional theory and praxis are championed. Only then might a decolonised curriculum be possible in which race is not peripheral to core teaching and learning.

Qualitative Description and Black Males: On Race, the Body, and Researching the Unimaginable

In this article, I explore how race and the body are central to social and education research on Black males. The guiding question of this essay is, How has the Black male body been conceptualized over time through qualitative description? I argue that, as Black males entered into new systems of reasoning, the Black male body was examined in different ways. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s concept of subjective understanding and David Theo Goldberg’s concept of racial knowledge, I explore the temporal and spatial meaning of qualitative description in the context of African American males. I conclude this essay by arguing for a different approach to qualitative description of Black males that moves beyond recycled stories of deficits or counter-narratives and on to explore the unimaginable.

The Power of the Gaze: Suspicion, Race and Migration Policing

This chapter delves deeper into the ubiquity of race in migration policing, its camouflage, and disavowal, and its legitimation and power for making sense of a complex and fluid social geography. It explores how racial knowledge and taxonomies are deployed and redefined through migration policing. As the ‘fine-grained cognitive maps’ with which the police operate are rendered insufficient and inefficient, immigration enforcement has been increasingly brought on board. Immigration enforcement works with and through race as a sorting technique in insidious, oblique, and paradoxical ways, giving meaning to and redefining the contours of police suspicion. Its presence is ubiquitous and legally sanctioned, yet selective, continuously disavowed, and often left unarticulated and nebulous. In immigration enforcement, the chapter argues, race makes state power operate in particularly mysterious, hazy, and magic-like ways, hinging on some bodies and not others, building on irretrievable vocabulary, associations, visual registers, smells and other sensory clues, and lingering colonial imageries and knowledge. In this context, racial sorting and profiling is not a deviation or aberration, but a constitutive part without which its exercise is futile. As a racial technology, immigration control practices illustrate the power and resilience of race, as well as its fragility. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, race is a shaky and fragile basis for policing which lays bare its contradictions, paradoxes, and limits.

Race in post-war science: The Swiss case in a global context

The historiography on the concept of race in the post-war sciences has focused predominantly on the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism and on the Anglo-American research community. By way of contrast, this article highlights the history of the concept of race from a thus far unexplored angle: from Swiss research centres and their global interconnections with racial researchers around the world. The article investigates how the acceptance, resonance, and prestige of racial research changed during the post-war years. It analyses what resources could be mobilised that enabled researchers to carry out and continue scientific studies in the field of racial research or even to expand them and link them to new contexts. From this perspective, the article looks at the dynamics, openness, and contingency of the European post-war period, which was less stable, anti-racist, and spiritually renewed than retrospective success stories often suggest. The pronounced internationality of Swiss racial science and its close entanglement with the booming field of human genetics in the early 1950s point to the ambiguities of the period’s political and scientific development. I argue that the impact of post-war anti-racism on science was more limited than is frequently assumed: it did not drain the market for racial knowledge on a continent that clung to imperialism and was still shaped by racist violence. Only from the mid 1950s onwards did a series of unforeseen events and contingent shifts curtail the importance of the race concept in various sectors of the human sciences.

“The Way of Progress and Civilization”: Racial Hierarchy and US State Building in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (1915–1922)

Racial stratification remains critically undertheorized in hierarchy studies. Postcolonial analyses demonstrate how diffuse systems of racial knowledge produce unequal subjectivities in world politics, but they are often criticized for making overdetermined explanations that do not account for agency or contingency. To rectify this theoretical lacuna, I develop a postcolonial-practice theory approach to explain variation in the intensity and duration of governance hierarchies. I argue that racialized discourses constitute the habitualized dispositions of dominant and subordinate actors and make possible specific governance practices. This approach can account for puzzling cases of successful resistance by some subordinates while others languish under intense domination. Two such cases are US state building interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the early twentieth century. By using a variety of primary archival and public sources, I demonstrate how ideas about racial differences among Anglo-Americans, Dominicans, and Haitians led US policymakers to enact a more long-term and domineering occupation of Haiti compared to the Dominican Republic. Once Dominican elites articulated a European–Spanish identity in opposition to Blackness, they mobilized support from other Latin American states and made US withdrawal practical. A postcolonial-practice explanation is useful because it addresses the limitations of both narrow and broad approaches to the study of hierarchy. Its focus on the contestation of US hierarchies further contributes to hegemonic-order theory while illustrating how the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion shape imperial rule and strategies of anti-imperial resistance.

Anti-gypsyism, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia

This intervention brings together insights from race critical theories and historical sociology to provide a framework for understanding the longstanding racism against Romani people across Europe. It directly draws on Picker's 2017 monograph Racial Cities , and argues that in order to understand the racial segregation of Romani people in Europe, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia should be squarely placed at the core of analytical scrutiny and political intervention. The reason for this is that when looking at several cases of urban authorities' actions on Romani people in 21st-century Europe, key similarities can be detected with colonial authories's actions on "natives" in the cities of European empires. This intervention brings together insights from race critical theories and historical sociology to provide a framework for understanding the longstanding racism against Romani people across Europe. It directly draws on Picker's 2017 monograph Racial Cities , and argues that in order to understand the racial segregation of Romani people in Europe, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia should be squarely placed at the core of analytical scrutiny and political intervention. The reason for this is that when looking at several cases of urban authorities' actions on Romani people in 21st-century Europe, key similarities can be detected with colonial authories's actions on "natives" in the cities of European empires.

What Is It Like to Be a Nazi? Racial Vision and Scientific Selves in German Portrait Photographic Practice

Default ways of reading others come with a host of problems, often caused by a lack of adequate tools for obtaining analytical and interpretive access to the phenomenon of interest; in the case of Nazis, this has led to a flattening of National Socialist racial thinking into a blunt racial essentialism that, as Ann Stoler put it, ignores nuance and conflicts in historical debates about race that are then juxtaposed to later, presumably more sophisticated, racial epistemologies (Stoler 2016). Horror at historical atrocities has led to a glossing over of significant variation in scientific and cultural practices that are consequential for our understanding of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes substantively, and for our ability as cultural and comparative historical sociologists to make claims about the past, methodologically and causally.What Is It Like to Be a Nazi employs Nagel’s paper as metaphorical point of departure to study not consciousness, but to more attentively interrogate the scientific practices of those whose ways of thinking and existing in the world seem so alien to us, as well as the practices of contemporary social science purporting to understanding National Socialist science. My contribution to this project consists in homing in on one historical form of racial knowledge production and visualization, that of portrait photographic practice. By choosing portrait photographers, the larger category of “Nazi” is narrowed down to a professional group who generated visual propaganda for the National Socialist regime and sustained the dictatorship by way of artistic production.How did National Socialist photographers generate “race” in images? Through an analysis of photographic instruction manuals, reflections of the image makers on their craft and the photographs themselves, I theorize three processes by which National Socialist-period photographers created race in images: contemplation, freezing, and sculpting. Photography, far from being a transcriptional art, brimmed with agency and was in constant disagreement about the nature of perception, and the best way of capturing phenomena occurring in the world through novel technologies. While local circumstances of photographic production under National Socialist rule at first glance appear excessively specific and perhaps exceptional, they raise more universal questions about perception, vision and interpretation that remain at issue today (Browne 2010; Morning 2011; Morning 2014; Nelson 2008).