Content

The organisation of human life according to a set of hierarchies and distinctions, a principle otherwise known as race, is one of today’s most controversial and visible continuations of colonial power. Human characteristics as diverse as skin colour, language, cultural/religious difference or geography are thereby constructed as central signifiers around which the idea of an incommensurability becomes constructed and which become the basis for a distinct politics of exclusion. As a direct heir of European and Christian colonial endeavours, race – in its modern articulation – continuous to figure as an important marker through which access to wealth, health, mobility and other forms of social, material and symbolic capital is organised and regulated. An influential body of work has consistently sought to unfold how race, understood as a social formation (Omi & Winant 1986) and a global structure (Hall 1997, Goldberg 1993), comes to condition and regulate various kinds of social relationships, ranging from everyday micro-interactions to one’s (self-)identification (Pierre 2012), to broader macro-sociological patterns such as migration, the flow of capital and knowledge, the regulation health, and war waging. Race is thereby not only seen as an important biopolitical technology of life, but it also entails a necropolitical dimension (Mbembe 2004). 

This course has a double aim: to unfold the scholarly and anthropological deployment of this vocabulary of race and to investigate the operations of 'race' in a cross-cultural context. The course is largely structured around a set of theoretical schools of thought (racial capitalism, biopolitics, articulation theory, phenomenology) and case studies. 

Course material

Toledo will be used for this learning activity, and all assigned readings will be put online.

Language of instruction: more information

The course is taught in English. 

Format: more information

Flipped classroom - Traditional lecture

This course is designed as a combination of lectures and assignments in smaller groups during break-out sessions. In person presence is therefore required.