Gala Rexer welcomes Xine Yao, Associate Professor at UCL and author of Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2021). Reflecting on how Disaffected has travelled as a book, a theory, and a method over the past two years, Xine speaks about what thinking though and with the fields of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian diasporic studies, and queer of colour critique does to our understanding of race, gender, and affect, and how we approach literary and cultural text as theory. They discuss how their citational practices shape tea ..read more

Gala Rexer welcomes Akwugo Emejulu, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, 2022). Discussing the figure of the fugitive from a Black feminist perspective, Akwugo addresses questions about solidarity and coalitional work, strategies of counter-storytelling and playing with new forms of writing, and discusses the difficulties of staying in the liminal space of fugitivity as a mode of experimentation, ambivalence, and disidentification from the figure of the Human. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/con ..read more

Luke de Noronha welcomes Musab Younis, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (University of California Press, 2022). Musab traces the themes and arguments of his important new book, which examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. Musab gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements f ..read more

Maya Mikdashi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a lecturer in the program in Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. In conversation we discuss Maya's first book, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/conversation-maya-mikdashi www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation ..read more

Luke de Noronha welcomes Maurice Stierl, researcher at Osnabrück University in Germany and author of Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2019). Maurice describes the varied patterns of movement and militarisation at the sea borders of Europe: the Atlantic, Central Mediterranean, Aegean and Channel crossings. In both his intellectual and activist work, Maurice joins those demanding free movement for all and an end to Europe’s border violence. This conversation charts those urgent political struggles by and for people on the move.  Transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racia ..read more

When Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero was a child, the government imprisoned and executed his parents, who were members of Shining Path. In The Surrendered—originally published in Spanish in 2015 and appearing here in English for the first time—Agüero reflects on his parents' militancy and the violence and aftermath of Peru's internal armed conflict. He examines his parents' radicalization, their lives as guerrillas, and his tumultuous childhood, which was spent in fear of being captured or killed, while grappling with the complexities of public memory, ethics and responsibility ..read more

The questions will focus on the social and normative consequences of the Chilean social outbreak and the operation of the election and the Convention, focusing on gender parity, the representation of indigenous populations and the role of independent members and members elected on party lists. Our guest experts are Professors Verónica Undurraga (Constitutional Lawyer, Faculty of Law Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez) and Daniel Chernilo (Professor of Sociology, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez) Verónica Undurraga holds a LL.M. from Columbia Law School, New York, and a PhD in Law from the Universidad de Chile ..read more

Fanm Rebèl: Excavating the Histories of Haiti's Women Revolutionaries We were delighted to have hosted Nicole Willson (UCLAN-IBAR) as our distinguished guest speaker at the very well attended virtual event part of our Caribbean Studies seminar series last night. ‘The history of Haiti has been entirely written by men and for men, and one hardly finds any trace of women, of their moral, social and economic influence.’ With this quote by Madeleine Sylvain Boucherou, Dr Willson ended her presentation on the fascinating yet sobering histories of Haiti’s revolutionary women. In this seminar, Dr Will ..read more

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, writer, independent scholar and poet, joins us to reflect on engaging with the works of Black feminist scholars, ancestral listening and her connectedness to seals. Author of 'Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals', Alexis discusses how colonialism, enslavement and the plantation economy resulted in the extinction of the Caribbean monk seal. Alexis also talks about her forthcoming biography of Audre Lorde and deep diving into Lorde’s life and love of geology. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-alexis-pauline-gumbs This c ..read more

UCL Institute of the Americas was delighted to host our distinguished guest speaker, Professor Nadia Brown (Georgetown University), who spoke about her new book Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (Oxford University Press, 2021), which she co-authored with Danielle Casarez Lemi. The talk centered on Black women’s bodies, specifically their hair texture and skin tone, to argue that phenotypic differences among Black women politicians directly impact how they experience political office and how Black voters evaluate them. It will provide an overview of the b ..read more