The International Inequalities Institute (III) established its Racial Justice Working Group last summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The III’s Racial Justice Working Group (RJWG) is comprised of both academic and Professional Services staff. It was established in July 2020 and has a central role in proposing and developing initiatives around equity and racial justice for the consideration and enactment by the Institute’s leadership. Working in concert with the wider III and the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) community, the RJWG seeks to build on the LSE’s Race Equity Framework by supporting scholarship focused on race and by promoting equity, inclusion and minority representation in processes of recruitment, hiring, mentoring and programme development.
Since July 2020, the III’s RJWG has focused on creating programming and scholarly conversations around two interrelated themes: exploring movements for race justice from Global South perspectives and studying the intersections of race and the economy. This programming will build on the III’s and AFSEE’s existing strengths while creating new platforms in the Institute and across the School for broader discussions of racial justice in different global locations.
The RJWG has developed a set of short, medium and long-range goals and proposals, aimed at increasing scholarship, representation, public engagement and teaching around race, equity and inclusion. We are also interested in examining processes of hiring, recruitment, mentorship and financial assistance, in order to create and sustain a supportive community for minority students, scholars and staff.
The Racial Justice Working Group includes:
- Asmaa Akhtar, Programme Manager (Global Engagement and Impact), AFSEE, a.akhtar2@lse.ac.uk
- Sara Camacho Felix, Assistant Professorial Lecturer and Programme Lead for AFSEE, s.m.camacho-felix@lse.ac.uk
- Michelle Coates, Programme Assistant, AFSEE, m.coates@lse.ac.uk
- Shalini Grover, LSE Research Fellow in the III, s.grover4@lse.ac.uk
- George Kunnath, LSE Assistant Professorial Research Fellow in the III, g.kunnath@lse.ac.uk
- Poornima Paidipaty, LSE Fellow in Inequalities, Department of Sociology, p.paidipaty@lse.ac.uk
If you are interested in working together with the III’s RJWG or finding out more information, please don’t hesitate to directly contact any one of the members identified above via email.
Racial Inequalities research at the III:
See below for Racial Inequalities research conducted by the III/AFSEE community.
Mike Savage, Convenor of the ‘Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice’ research theme, will be conducting research on the UK racial wealth gap. This project will also foster collaborative relationships between the III and the Runnymede Trust.
Read the Runnymede report 'The Colour of Money' here
This event tackled the topic of technology, injustice, and inequity with a focus on bottom-up practices of resistance, rejection, and refusal of digital and automated systems that increasingly govern people’s lives.
From informational capitalism to biased code, technological systems increasingly form part of larger structures of oppression and domination. Given these challenges, what can affected communities learn from other practices of technological refusal? (11 May 2021).
Speakers: Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan (Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)
Chair: Professor Ellen Helsper (Research Theme Convenor (Politics of Inequality); Professor in Digital Inequalities, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)
Watch the video here
Listen to the podcast here
Black Film British Cinema II, co-edited by III Visiting Fellow Dr Clive Nwonka, considers the politics of Blackness in contemporary British cinema and visual practice. It focuses on the practices, values and networks of collaborations that have shaped the development of Black film culture and representation.
Through a diverse range of perspectives and theoretical interventions that offer a combination of traditional chapters, long-form essays, shorter think pieces, and critical dialogues, Black Film British Cinema II is a comprehensive, sustained, wide-ranging collection that offers a new framework for understanding contemporary Black film practices and the cultural and creative dimensions that shape the making of Blackness and race (1 February 2021).
Read more here
'Tracing the Relationship between Inequality, Crime and Punishment: Space, Time and Politics'; edited by Nicola Lacey, David Soskice, Leonidas Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis; traces key questions of inequality in the contemporary intellectual agenda. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial.
In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities (28 January 2021).
Read more here
Melanie R. Brown (Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, III) provides explanation of commentary on some the key questions about race in America: its history, how it affects society today, and what needs to change (9 November 2020).
Watch on LSE Player here
Watch on YouTube here
In this event, a panel of speakers discuss the separation of racism - often viewed through the prism of social policy and discrimination law - from mainstream economics and economic inequality. This separation means we overlook the mechanisms by which our current models of capitalism can profit or indeed thrive because of racism and racist hierarchies. They ask: is the economy racist? If so, how? What can be done about it? (15 October 2020).
Speakers: Faiza Shaheen (Director, CLASS), Wilf Sullivan (Equalities Officer, TUC), Nonhlanhla Makuyana (Decolonising Economics) and Felicia Odamtten (Director, The Black Economists Network)
Chair: Dr Poornima Paidipaty (Dept of Sociology, LSE)
Watch the video here
Listen to the podcast here
As the twin crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd have highlighted in an unprecedented way, racial inequalities and injustices persist in spite of decades of legislation aiming to promote equality and end discrimination. This working paper by Suki Ali considers two main areas of ‘racial equalities’ work, namely anti-racist initiatives and decolonial initiatives. From a feminist postcolonial perspective, the paper suggests that recentralising racism and reengaging difference as a way to negotiate more just educational futures (July 2020).
Read the paper here