Access Under Duress

This paper examines the rapid turn to remote public meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a mix of archival materials, participant observation, and interviews within and around two mid- to large cities in the Rust Belt and Midwest regions of the United States, we consider how public officials introduced digital meeting platforms and surveys in place of traditional forms of in-person public consultation. We also examine emergent strategies of residents as they worked to have their voices heard and concerns met during a time of compounding crises (e.g., pandemic, economic recession, racial violence). Drawing from this case study, we articulate the concept of disruptive testimony, forms of public witnessing that trouble established hierarchies of power, surface conflict, and open opportunities for social change. We argue consideration for collective counter-power is increasingly important to GROUP scholarship as it attends to civic engagement beyond participation in formal, sanctioned government processes.

Recognition, Repair & the Reconstruction of “Square One”

The concept of a “square one” in societal organization is a curious thing, and challenging analytic, given the stubborn presence of the past. Even if not meant literally, the Square One Project, like much of the polity, envisions a new starting point, where social policy and practice might turn in a more equitable and inclusive direction. Yet we must grapple with what this restarting point is, in a sociological rather than political sense, and how the present can reasonably be conceived–and actively reconfigured–as an opportunity to start over. I argue that the Square One Project imagines yet another societal reconstruction, in which attending to old and more recent histories of racial violence remains critical to achieving a sustainable vision and practice of equal and legitimate justice. To that end, I encourage a wide-ranging array of efforts under the banner of monumental antiracism to prepare the ground for square one justice.

Keeping the master cool, every day, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India

This article studies how the distribution of the work of punkah-pulling in European households and barracks of colonial India involved European masters making gradually multiplying claims on their servants’ labouring time and how these claims fared in practice. The laborious task of punkah-pulling in such establishments was often resisted by native servants on counts of caste, custom or simply exhaustion. In the context of such conflicts, this article tries to understand how the colonial state and its legal and regulatory functions mediated the contested terrain of domestic and service work over the nineteenth century. Over the latter half of this century, punkah-pulling became a separate occupation, even as this occupation slid down the hierarchy of service work and became a more pronounced target of recurring racial violence. Against this background, the article also tries to grapple with the material limits encountered by the regimes of work involved in the cheap, day-and-night conduct of punkah-pulling that eventually led up to the acceptance of mechanised alternatives.

Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Decolonial Coalitions: Afro-Brazilian Feminisms and the Poetic-Politics of Quilombo

Moving beyond the legal and historical hegemonic definitions of the quilombo, this paper investigates continuities in gendered racial violence in Brazil by evoking the political and poetic of the quilombo. Inspired by the works of the historian and poet Beatriz Nascimento, the multifaceted notion of quilombo is conceptualized as an ongoing praxis of fugitivity and coalition that draws on the interconnectedness of anti-colonial, feminist, and anti-racist struggles. In exploring geopolitical breaks and epistemological ruptures, this paper fosters a necessary conversation between theory and practice by engaging with the living archives of three Afro-Brazilian writers and activists: (i) Beatriz Nascimento’s fundamental contributions on the political, material and symbolic dimensions of quilombo; (ii) the legacy and vision of Marielle Franco focusing on the necessity to ocupar the institutional politics like a growing seed; (iii) the work of Erica Malunguinho and Mandata Quilombo through the praxis of aquilombar the constitutional democracy, based on the alternation in representative power and repossession.

Transgressing to teach: Theorising race and security through struggle

Recent interventions in critical security studies have argued that the field has struggled to account for the racialised/racist foundations of security politics. This article engages with the US Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that the Party did important work to show how security politics is dependent on racial violence. The idea that we can theorise global politics through struggle (`struggle as method’) is becoming popular within disciplinary International Relations (IR), but has longer lineages in Black radical thought. The BPP were important advocates of struggle as method, with tactics and strategies intentionally designed with a pedagogical purpose; through Panther actions (including community self-defence and survival programmes), and the state’s response to these, the mechanisms of capitalist white supremacy were laid bare. The article therefore acknowledges BPP action as a series of theoretical interventions, which demonstrated how the terms of US/white security are rooted in and dependent on anti-Blackness. It also shows how Panther tactics prefigured alternative, radical, anti-statist approaches to security, these conceptualised as `survival pending revolution’. The article closes by arguing that scholarship on critical security studies - especially as related to the racialised politics of security - should do more to work with and acknowledge its indebtedness to struggle as method.

Race and Indigeneity

Looking at processes of racial boundary formation, especially in everyday practices, allows for researchers to understand how racialized distinctions are made, remade, and understood. For Native Nations, membership is heavily influenced by Indigenous kinship practices. Kinship systems reinforce laws that maintain place-based forms of social organization; however, Indigenous kinship practices are not always accounted for in discussions regarding American Indian racial boundary formation. Overlooking Indigenous kinship practices leaves room for misidentification, especially when misidentification is grounded in anti-Indian and anti-Black racism. Overlooking Indigenous kinship systems also leaves room for Native identity and trauma to be appropriated, namely by white American settlers. This chapter discusses how not accounting for Indigenous kinship systems leaves room for misclassification, appropriation, and racial violence.

Out of Place, Out of Mind: Min(d)ing Race in Mad Studies Through a Metaphor of Spatiality

This article examines the racial politics of Mad Studies in Canada through a metaphor of spatiality, underscoring the urgency of an antiracist Mad Studies paradigm. Drawing on critical race scholarship which situates “madness” as reliant on and informed by white supremacist and colonial logics of rationality and reason (Bruce 2017), I foreground claims made by critical race scholars of racialized madness as contingent on and informed by histories of slavery, genocide, and everyday realities of racism and racial violence which an anti-racist Mad Studies project must contend with. By locating the racialization of Mad Studies within a metaphor of spatiality, I heuristically problematize the “space” available for racialized subjects to re/claim madness within contemporary Mad Studies paradigms. I conclude that in failing to rigorously unpack the relations of race which undergird understandings of madness, and to challenge the presence of white supremacy in the Mad Studies discipline, scholars potentially perpetuate a colonial project of “othering” and consequentially maintain the systems of psychiatric violence they seek to undo. Centralizing race in Mad Studies exposes the workings of white supremacy in logics of violence against Mad people more broadly and is thus necessary to an anti-racist and anti- oppressive Mad Studies project.