Welcome to LSE Research for the World’s Race Equity edition

Racism and racial injustice continue to shape our lives in the UK and around the world. Systemic and structural barriers perpetuate inequalities and deny opportunities. While discussions around the need to combat racism have gone on for decades, impactful change has been harder to achieve. Recent years have seen growing political momentum and an urgent desire to make progress.

As a leading social science institution, one of LSE’s roles is to understand intractable social problems like racial inequality through our research, education and public engagement. Our first themed edition of Research for the World highlights some of the ways LSE academics seek to analyse and address the past and present of racial inequality, and address its future.

From examining specific government policy (including fact-checking the UK government’s Sewell Report); to exploring the wider reasons behind societal inequalities (our researchers were among the first to uncover why ethnic minorities were particularly impacted by COVID-19); and identifying areas of future concern (for example, asking what new barriers marginalised communities might be facing as a result of technological advances); our academics are at the forefront of social science research into issues of race equity.

LSE is a proudly global institution, and so our research does not end at Britain’s borders. Our researchers are exploring issues as diverse as the activists fighting for indigenous people’s rights in India, the potential impacts of a major infrastructure project in Colombia, and what Egypt’s political journey can tell us about the consequences of colonialism.

Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that huge changes are needed within the education sector itself. Read more about the research currently underway into how universities are approaching the Widening Participation agenda, as well as how social scientists can address the issue of difference and ensure their research includes a more diverse range of voices.

Features on all the above research, and more, can be found through the Race Equity category on our magazine homepage. For more on the ways LSE is working to advance race equity in education, research and at an institutional level, have a look at our Race Equity Framework.

I hope you enjoy reading about the work we are doing in this area. To stay informed about new LSE research, including on race equity, please subscribe to LSE Research for the World.

Baroness Minouche Shafik, LSE Director
November 2021