Race & Ethnicity Study Group Archive

18 June 2012
BSA Race & Ethnicity Study Group Conference - Living with Social Categories: Ethnicity, Mental Health, and Learning Disability in an Age of Austerity
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

13 May 2009
Challenging the ‘Parallel Lives’ Myth: Race, Sociology, Statistics and Politics
London School of Economics, UK

30-31 March 2005
Race and State
Trinity College, Dublin
MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Dublin, Trinity College; in association with the BSA Race & Ethnicity Study Group, and the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI)

Speakers included:

• Howard Winant, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Les Back, Goldsmiths College, London
• Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dept of Cultural Studies & Sociology, University of Birmingham
• Robbie McVeigh, Independent Researcher, Derry, Ireland
• Piaras Mac Einri, Dept of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland

18 November 2004
The learning, teaching and assessment of 'race' in the HE curriculum
Birmingham University

The Study Group welcomes collaborations with other like-minded organisations, and to that end Max Farrar worked with Malcolm Todd (Sheffield Hallam University) who co-ordinates the Higher Education Academy´s C-SAP activity. C-SAP specialises in improving Learning, Teaching and Assessment in sociology, anthropology and politics and they organised a special conference at Birmingham University on the learning, teaching and assessment of ´race´ in the HE curriculum. Visit the C-SAP website.

12 June 2004
Doing Diversity: ´Other´ Histories and Memories
Jointly organised by the BSA Race & Ethnicity Study Group, Coventry University and The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

Nirmal Puwar organised a seminar titled ‘Doing Diversity’ on cinema and the Arts in Asian and Africanian communities on 12th June 2004 in Coventry. It was co-organised with Val Hill at Coventry University. Lunch was provided and taken in the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum which displayed and exhibition co-produced by Nirmal Puwar, with the gallery. Titled ´Khabie Ritz Khabie Palladium: the making of South Asian cinema in Coventry 1940-1980´ this film based exhibition used memory work to look back at the existence of a heady cinema scene that was created in post-war Britain. It sought to represent migratory histories outside of predictable and static genres. The speakers at the seminar were Glenn Jordan, Roshini Kempadoo, Alia Syed, Ashwani Sharma and Nirmal Puwar. Berg Publishers kindly …….took the opportunity of hosting a launch party for the book South Asian Women in the Diaspora edited by Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram –hospitality enjoyed by all.

March 2004
City University

In March 2004 Shamser Sinha organised a seminar in conjunction with Gina Higginbottom of the Transcultural Research Group in Health and Diversity. This was held at City University and speakers included Hannah Bradby and Ann Phoenix.

28 June 2003
Other study group seminars have included one in Leeds which focussed on the implications for higher education of the Race Relations Amendment Act. The speakers at this event were Sharon Grant (Salford), Alison Jones (Leeds Metropolitan University) Ian Law (Leeds) and Kath Woodward (Open University).

11-13 April 2003
BSA Annual Conference - Race Session: "Writing Race"
University of York

At the 2003 conference our session was titled "Writing ´Race´" and featured contributions from Claire Alexander (South Bank University), Les Back (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Max Farrar (Leeds Metropolitan University) and Shamser Sinha (University of East London). The session addressed the thorny problems raised when sociologists attempt to translate theory, empirical reserach and political values into scripts. Issues such as the ´voice´ adopted by the writer and whether the text must be immediately comprehensible were under discussion.

November 2002
In November 2002 we also organised a seminar in collaboration with the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College. This featured Ghassan Hage from the University of Sydney presenting work from his forthcoming book on ‘Paranoid nationalism’.

October 2002
The second study group day in October 2002 was on the government’s citizenship white paper published in February. Speakers for the well-attended seminar day, ‘The new racism: asylum, immigration and citizenship’, discussed a range of issues surrounding the new immigration paper ‘Secure Borders: Safe Haven´. Gail Lewis focussed on the return of assimilationist discourses and New Labour’s simultaneous avowals and disavowals of cultural diversity. Rosemary Sales considered the contradictions at the heart of the white paper and Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias examined the proposed legislation in relation to gender and citizenship. Don Flynn, from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, problematised the notion of ‘managed migration’ in relation to the white paper and current economic needs. In 2001 one session focussed on the urban unrest in the Pennine towns of Northern England. In October 2002 the Study Group seminar the panel, made of four expert academics and practitioners examined the debates around citizenship, asylum, multiculture and the government´s immigration and asylum policies.

18 May 2002
Parallel lives and Polarisation
City University, LONDON

The seminar investigated the racialized discourses of the 'Community Cohesion' Cantle Report following the civil unrest in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham.

• Organiser: Karim Murji (Open University)

The first study group day in 2002 was entitled ‘Parallel lives and polarisation?’ and looked at the aftermath of the riots or disturbances in parts of northern England in the summer of 2001. The speakers – Claire Alexander, Shamser Sinha, Alan Carling, Max Farrar and Sanjay Sharma - considered the media coverage of Asian youth, ideas of cultural difference in the Cantle report, the local politics of race in Bradford and Leeds and the ways in which ‘Asians’ have been seen in sociology.