The ethical and social implications of data mining, algorithmic curation and automation in the context of social media have been of heightened concern for a range of researchers with interests in digital media in recent years, with particular concerns about privacy arising in the context of mobile and locative media. Despite their wide adoption and economic importance, mobile dating apps have received little scholarly attention from this perspective – but they are intense sites of data generation, algorithmic processing, and cross-platform (...) data-sharing; bound up with competing cultures of production, exploitation and use. In this paper, we describe the ways various forms of data are incorporated into, and emerge from, hook-up apps’ business logics, socio-technical arrangements, and cultures of use to produce multiple and intersecting data cultures. We propose a multi-layered research agenda for critical and empirical inquiry into this field, and suggest appropriate conceptual and methodological frameworks for exploring the social and political challenges of data cultures. (shrink)

The close association of particular races with particular classes invites a means to exhibit disdain for a race via class. Class and race do not simply occupy a list of social problems, because generally, specific races correlate with particular classes. Racism is presently unacceptable, but not classism. We may feel sympathy for the poor, but we do not refrain from disdain. The disdain of the poor centers on Neoclassical economics’ insistence on choice in regards to class. The language (...) of choice does not circumscribe race. Michel Foucault’s work illustrates that the persistent correlation of race and class is not merely sociological but conceptual. Such close associations of particular races with particular classes serve as a means to generate essentialisms that express racism through classism. (shrink)

Racial and ethnic variables are routinely used in health services research. However, there is a growing debate within nursing and other disciplines about the usefulness of these variables in research. A qualitative study was undertaken (July 2004 – November 2004) to ascertain how researchers conceptualize and operationalize racial and ethnic data. Data were derived from interviews with 33 participants in academic health centers in differing geographic regions. Content analyses extracted manifest and latent meanings to construct categories depicting respondents' understandings of (...) race and ethnicity in research. Race and ethnicity held several meanings but the subtext was often not clear because these terms were not operationalized. Measuring race and ethnicity quantitatively necessitated uniform classifications thus it was often necessary to impose a single racialized identity. Respondents recognized the problems with racial and ethnic variables but the majority still believed these variables were necessary and useful. Several researchers understood that racial and ethnic variables were used in ways that may stigmatize the populations studied. These respondents collected data on variables other than race and ethnicity to ascertain the causes of health differentials. The policy recommendation calls for a shift in thinking about how to use racial and ethnic variables in research. (shrink)

Philosophy in Africa has come a long way. From the 18th and 19th centuries when it was totally ignored or denied altogether, to when it was given a lower status by ethnophilosophers. Today we talk proudly of an African philosophy. What is often forgotten is its history and the players behind its historical moments. This paper tells the story of how racial ideology had defined the course of philosophy in Africa. We are particularly concerned with telling the story of Henry (...) Odera Oruka, and how he contributed to raising the status of philosophy in Africa. (shrink)

Social commentators have long asked whether racial categories should be conserved or eliminated from our practices, discourse, institutions, and perhaps even private thoughts. In _A Theory of Race_, Joshua Glasgow argues that this set of choices unnecessarily presents us with too few options. Using both traditional philosophical tools and recent psychological research to investigate folk understandings of race, Glasgow argues that, as ordinarily conceived, race is an illusion. However, our pressing need to speak to and make sense of (...) social life requires that we employ something like racial discourse. These competing pressures, Glasgow maintains, ultimately require us to stop conceptualizing race as something biological, and instead understand it as an entirely social phenomenon. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists have historically conceptualized race according to two main metaphors; internal differentiation (theological, philosophical and genetic), and external differentiation (environmental). This paper examines these metaphors and theories in Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and also Darwin and the subsequent racial theories of recent history. The paper argues that the externalist metaphor has a more liberal and potentially egalitarian tradition.

A consensus view appears to prevail among academics from diverse disciplines that biological races do not exist, at least in humans, and that race -concepts and race -objects are socially constructed. The consensus view has been challenged recently by Robin O. Andreasen's cladistic account of biological race. This paper argues that from a scientific viewpoint there are methodological, empirical, and conceptual problems with Andreasen's position, and that from a philosophical perspective Andreasen's adherence to rigid dichotomies between science (...) and society, facts and values, nature and culture, and the biological and the social needs to be relinquished. DNA forensics is just one field of research that reveals how race remains both idea and object for human population biologists, an indication that it is premature to accept the existence of a no- race consensus across the disciplines. DNA forensics research also demonstrates ways in which race is reified by scientists by the representation of what is cultural or social as natural or biological, and of what is dynamic, relative, and continuous as static, absolute, and discrete. The philosophical analysis of foundational concepts of human population biology such as population, race, and ethnic group is best served by foregoing traditional objectivist approaches for a critical stance that recognises the inextricability of the biological and the social. Introduction Consensus view: biological races do not exist Andreasen's defence of the biological reality of races as clades Biological permutations of race Conclusion. (shrink)

Classifying human beings according to race and ethnicity may seem straightforward to some but it, in fact, belies a difficult process. No standard procedure exists for categorizing according to race and ethnicity, calling into question the variables’ use in research. This article explores the use of race and ethnicity variables in the nursing research literature. Content analysis was conducted of a sample of 337 original research studies published in Nursing Research from the years 1952, 1955, and then (...) every 5 years through to 2000. Of the 337 research articles reviewed, 167 mentioned race, ethnicity, or their 81 code words or phrases. Out of the 167 articles, 153 used race or ethnicity to describe the study sample, and 45 of the 167 articles included race or ethnicity as an element of data analysis. Throughout the sample, there was substantial inconsistency related to race and ethnicity categorization, meanings of the terms, and use of these variables. Specificity related to conceptual assumptions, definitions, and context was missing and, as a result, data interpretation and understanding are suspect. The integrity of nursing knowledge requires that nurse researchers recognize and address the difficulties inherent in using race and ethnicity in health research. (shrink)

Despite the recent rise in articles by American philosophers willing to deal with race, the sophistication of American philosophy's conceptualizations of American racism continues to lag behind other liberal arts fields committed to similar endeavors. Whereas other fields like American studies, history, sociology, and Black studies have found the foundational works of Black scholars essential to "truly" understanding the complexities of racism, American philosophy-driven by the refusal of white philosophers to acknowledge and incorporate the foundational works of Black (...) scholars at the turn of the century, as well as the relevant insights of contemporary race theorists-remains in a very real sense underdeveloped .. (shrink)

Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race understands Black embodiment within the context of white hegemony within the context of a racist, anti-Black world. Yancy demonstrates that the Black body is a historically lived text on which whites have inscribed their projections which speak equally forcefully to whites' own self-conceptualizations.

Race and racism are matters of urgent concern for the international nursing community. Recent global events have presented the discipline with an opportunity to generate and sustain long overdue discussions. However, with this opportunity comes a need to consciously attend to what we mean by race and racism, especially in the context of the nursing literature. Indeed, the development of antiracism depends on how we conceptualise race and racism; it is these conceptualisations that actively shape the scope (...) and priorities of antiracist organising and action. The aim of this critical interpretative synthesis (CIS) is to examine conceptualisations of race and racism in the nursing literature by drawing on contemporary race scholarship. The synthesis of diverse literature is enabled through the explorative and expansive process of the CIS method. This review generates three synthesising arguments—a problem ‘of’ not ‘for’; conceptual inconsistencies and drift; and reliance on the lens of experience—that both critique and contribute to the nursing literature. In the pursuit of antiracism, this article urges us to pay close attention to our conceptualisations of race and racism by illuminating the pitfalls that occur when our conceptualisations are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply neglected. (shrink)

The phrase ‘the edge of race’ can be used both as a description and as a response to two key concerns. The first of these is that while race is increasingly on the periphery of education policy – with a growing disregard shown for racist inequities, as education systems become dominated by market-driven concerns – it is important that we map the shifting relations of race in neoliberal politics and policies. The second concern is that at this (...) time, within and outside the spaces of the academy, even to mention race equity is to risk condemnation, marginalization, and ridicule. The authors in this collection use ‘the edge of race’ as a provocation in order to examine the concepts, methodologies, policies, politics, processes, and practices associated with race and racism in education. The chapters offer empirical examples of the perpetuation and perniciousness of racism that point to the continued salience of research about race. Additionally, the chapters make contributions to conceptual and methodological understandings of race and racism. The contributors illustrate the contingency, productivity, and fragility of race as a concept, and point to how educational research continues to be a contested site in, and from which to study, race and education. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. _. (shrink)

Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life takes a spirited conceptualist look back into the history of our development. The book sets out to explore the ways in which a punditry of human equality continues to lock in unassailably assured logical postures, enabled by the historically intertwined roles played by power and the passage of time, towards the invention and sustenance of social truth. Religion, race, and multiculturalism have been written about many times, and from a variety of academic, (...) discipline-specific perspectives. Nonetheless, these social issues remain ever relevant to any sincere bid to understand the inegalitarian aspects of modern society. Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life was primarily written with serious students of philosophy, sociology, the humanities, and history in mind. The author contends that we should never be too afraid to explore contentious or difficult philosophical and social questions. (shrink)

Discussions about the biological bases (or lack thereof) of the concept of race in the human species seem to be never ending. One of the latest rounds is represented by a paper by Neven Sesardic, which attempts to build a strong scientific case for the existence of human races, based on genetic, morphometric and behavioral characteristics, as well as on a thorough critique of opposing positions. In this paper I show that Sesardic’s critique falls far short of the goal, (...) and that his positive case is exceedingly thin. I do this through a combination of analysis of the actual scientific findings invoked by Sesardic and of some philo- sophical unpacking of his conceptual analysis, drawing on a dual professional background as an evolu- tionary biologist and a philosopher of science. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of race and racism devote considerable effort to giving conceptual analyses of these notions. Much of the work is concerned to investigate a priori what we mean by the terms ‘ race ’ and ‘racism’ ; more recent work has started to employ empirical methods to determine the content of our “folk concepts,” or “folk theory” of race and racism. In contrast to both of these projects, I have argued elsewhere that in considering what we (...) mean by these terms we should treat them on the model of kind terms whose reference is fixed by ordinary uses, but whose content is discovered empirically using social theory; I have also argued that it is not only important to determine what we actually mean by these terms, but what we should mean, i.e., what type, if any, we should be tracking. My own discussion of these issues, however, has been confused and confusing. In giving an account of race or gender, is the goal to provide a conceptual analysis? Or to investigate the kinds we are referring to? To draw attention to different kinds? To stipulate new meanings? Jennifer Saul has raised a series of powerful objections to my accounts of gender and race, suggesting that they are neither semantically nor politically useful, regardless of whether we treat them as revisionary proposals, or as elucidations of our concepts. Joshua Glasgow has also offered a critique of my externalist approach to race as an effort to capture “our concept”. I agree with much of what they say, but I also believe that there is something I was trying to capture that. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse how researchers use the categories of race and ethnicity with reference to genetics and genomics. We show that there is still considerable conceptual “messiness” (despite the wide-ranging and popular debate on the subject) when it comes to the use of ethnoracial categories in genetics and genomics that among other things makes it difficult to properly compare and interpret research using ethnoracial categories, as well as draw conclusions from them. Finally, we briefly reconstruct some of (...) the biases of reductionism to which geneticists (as well as other researchers referring to genetic methods and explanations) are particularly exposed to, and we analyse the problem in the context of the biologization of ethnoracial categories. Our work constitutes a novel, in-depth contribution to the debate about reporting race and ethnicity in biomedical and health research. First, we reconstruct the theoretical background assumptions about racial ontology which researchers implicitly presume in their studies with the aid of a sample of recent papers published in medical journals about COVID-19. Secondly, we use the typology of the biases of reductionism to the problem of biologization of ethnoracial categories with reference to genetics and genomics. (shrink)

Apparently, Latinos are “taking over.” 1 With news that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the United States, the public airwaves are filled with concerned voices about the impact that a non-English dominant, Catholic, non-white, largely poor population will have on “American” identity. Aside from the hysteria, Latino identity poses some authentically new questions for the standard way in which minority identities are conceptualized. Are Latinos a race, an ethnicity, or some combination? What does it mean to (...) have hybridity as the foundation of an identity, as is the case for mestizos and most Latinos? The term “Latino” signifies people from an entire continent, sub-continent, and several large islands, with diverse racial, national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic aspects to their identity. Given all this internal diversity, is “Latino” a meaningful identity at all? Latino identity is, with few exceptions, a visible identity, for all its variability, and I will argue that unless we pay close attention to the way in which Latino identity operates as a visible identity in public, social spaces, our analyses of its social meanings and political effects will be compromised. In the following three chapters, I will address three issues that Latino identity raises, issues that have political ramifications but that also require us to think about the philosophical assumptions at work behind common ideas about race and ethnicity. First, what is the relationship between Latino identity and racial categories? Second, how do Latinos fit into, and challenge, the black/white binary thinking about race that has long dominated public discourse in the U.S.? And third, what does it mean to have a mixed identity, for Latinos or for other mixed race groups? Throughout, we will have to pay close attention to the especially significant heterogeneity of this particular population. Does such diversity threaten identity or does it reveal that identity has never presumed uniformity? Only recently has the concept of pan-Latino, or generic Hispanic, identity overtaken the older identity monikers of “Cuban,” “Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” etc. in significant national discourses across the United States.. (shrink)

Discussions about the biological bases of the concept of race in the human species seem to be never ending. One of the latest rounds is represented by a paper by Neven Sesardic, which attempts to build a strong scientific case for the existence of human races, based on genetic, morphometric and behavioral characteristics, as well as on a thorough critique of opposing positions. In this paper I show that Sesardic’s critique falls far short of the goal, and that his (...) positive case is exceedingly thin. I do this through a combination of analysis of the actual scientific findings invoked by Sesardic and of some philosophical unpacking of his conceptual analysis, drawing on a dual professional background as an evolutionary biologist and a philosopher of science. (shrink)

The use of the category of race in science remains controversial. During the last few years there has been a lively debate on this topic in the field of a relatively young neuroscience discipline called cultural neuroscience. The main focus of cultural neuroscience is on biocultural conditions of the development of different dimensions of human perceptive activity, both cognitive or emotional. These dimensions are analysed through the comparison of representatives of different social and ethnic groups. In my article, I (...) present arguments supporting these two hypotheses: the other-race effect understood as an individual, distinct effect does not exist. It is rather an exemplification of a much broader phenomenon which I call theunfamiliarity homogeneity effect. It includes not only problems with differentiation and recognition of faces of representatives of other ethnic groups, but also covers similar recognitional difficulties ; The race-based terminology and categories are used in cultural neuroscience research in a vague and inconsistent manner. Such an approach distorts the science both in empirically and conceptually significant respects. The unfamiliarity homogeneity effect is an example of such a situation: narrowing it to the other-race effect makes it difficult to analyse in a wider context crucial for its understanding. (shrink)

The research and publication practices by which scientists produce biomedical knowledge about race and ethnicity remain largely unexamined despite increasing interest in biological explanations for health disparities by race, as well as prominent critiques by social scientists highlighting the implications of conceptualizing race as a biological category. Although a growing number of studies on lab and research practices are helping to map meanings of race and ethnicity on notions of difference and health, we still have very (...) little understanding of the earlier funding application stage or of the resulting publications. We know that knowledge production can involve a range of different processes, including consensus building, strategic and instrumental decision making, as well as conscious and subconscious cognitive filtering, through which we direct analytic attention only to those aspects of a problem or topic that are defined as “relevant” and “important.” These processes also involve the “translation” of ideas such as race and ethnicity for different audiences, which occurs in broader contexts of cultural norms and institutional rules and practices. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss epistemological limitations relating to the use of ethnoracial categories in biomedical research as devised by the Office of Management and Budget’s institutional guidelines. We argue that the obligation to use ethnoracial categories in genomics research should be abandoned. First, we outline how conceptual imprecision in the definition of ethnoracial categories can generate epistemic uncertainty in medical research and practice. Second, we focus on the use of ethnoracial categories in medical genetics, particularly genomics-based precision medicine, where (...) ethnoracial identity is understood as a proxy for medically relevant differences among individuals. Notably, extensive criticisms have been made already against the genetic interpretation of races, but, nonetheless, the concept of race remains a key element of contemporary genomics. This motivates us to explore possible reasons why such criticisms may have been ineffective in redirecting attention to other (non-race-based) ways of controlling for human variability. We contend that popular arguments against the idea that human races have a genetic basis, though convincing in many respects, are not sufficient to exclude the pragmatic use of race and ethnicity as proxies for genetic variability related to complex phenotypes. Finally, we provide two further arguments to support the idea that ethnoracial categories are unlikely to provide meaningful insights into medical genetics, which implies that even the interpretation of race as a useful tool to stratify disease risk is unwarranted. (shrink)

Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how (...) class='Hi'>race exploits bodily and enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human. (shrink)

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the (...) social construction, structural correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize and the communities where these are more prevalent. (shrink)

The predominant conception of the status of race is that race is a social construction. But what does it mean to say that a group, racially defined, is a social construct? How we understand the process of constitution and related identities is important beyond the conceptual reality or non-reality that defines the group. To this end, this dissertation explores two models of group constitution employed by Jean-Paul Sartre, the first from Anti-Semite and Jew, which bases group constitution and (...) identity on the gaze of the dominant Other, and the second from his later work, Critique of Dialectic Reason, Vol.1, which places the group as a prominent facilitator of history that produces itself in the domain of the Other. Both models show that the existence of group and group identity are constructed and as a result both reject claims of essentialism that may be ascribed to the group. However, I argue that the more nuanced conception of the social construction of the group, found in the Critique, envisages a more complex and dynamic account of group formation and identification, an account that acknowledges the need for group identities particularly among those who are historically oppressed as members of a group. ;My dissertation attempts to reconcile two fundamental and distinct approaches to race---ontology and experience---through what I hope the reader will appreciate as a series of dialogues between Sartre and various interlocuters. These interlocuters include contemporary authors such as Ian Hacking, K. Anthony Appiah, and Naomi Zack whose works refer to some aspect of Sartrean thought. Additionally, I explore textual dialogues between Sartre and both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, existentialists authors themselves, whose works provide insights into the possibilities and problems that Sartre faced in his attempts to attend to colonialism, racism, race and class consciousness, individual and group freedom. Thus, a secondary goal of this dissertation is to show Sartre's continued relevance to our contemporary discourse of race in particular and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events? In the context of proposals around biomedical prevention, there is a growing awareness of the need to find ways of responding to complexity, as everywhere new combinations of treatment, behavior, drugs, norms, meanings and devices are coming into encounter with one another, or are set to come into encounter with one another, with a range of unpredictable effects. In (...) this paper I consider the operation of various framing devices that attribute responsibility and causation with regard to HIV events. I propose that we need to sharpen our analytic focus on what these devices do, their performativity—that is, their full range of worldly implications and effects. My primary examples are the criminal law and the randomized control trial. I argue that these institutions operate as framing devices: They attribute responsibility for HIV events and externalize other elements and effects in the process. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies as well as queer theory, I set out an analytic frame that marks out a new role for HIV social research. Attentiveness to the performative effects of these devices is crucial, I suggest, if we want better to address the global HIV epidemic. (shrink)

My fundamental argument is that a collective concept of race that presumes that there are, or were at some point in the past, discreet genetic groups that have tracked along continental lines and that those differences are the fundamental basis for our folk and political groupings of white, black, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander is a fallacy that will always lead to social inequality. Such an understanding of race currently reverberates through genetic science, but for social and (...) political reasons, and with good intentions. But if we want to move toward a social order that promotes social justice, all of us across the sciences, throughout health policy, and in the wider public will need to reconceptualize race in terms of legacies of discrimination. We will need to shift our focus from molecular differences to social and political differences, especially when we conduct gene‐environment analyses. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider Sally Haslanger’s social constructivist account of race and propose a modification to the nature of hierarchy specified. According to Haslanger, race will cease to exist post-hierarchy, given that she builds in a requirement of synchronic hierarchy for the existence of race. While Haslanger maintains that racial identity would linger beyond hierarchical treatment in the form of ethnicity, I will suggest this fails to provide adequate conceptual justice for the cultures and aesthetics which (...) emerged out of past oppression. In response, I propose a modification which would allow us to recognize the possibility of post-hierarchical races. (shrink)

Beginning with the assumption that race is a conceptual blur, this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” argues that race conflates what is plain to see with something that is invisible. Race roots today's policy decisions in a remote and often imagined past. It blurs agency and overwhelming structural inequality. It is a set of categories that people define for themselves and that, at the same time, others — strangers, neighbors, government officials — relentlessly impose (...) upon them. For four hundred years, the meaning of racial categories in North America has remained unstable. A central question underlying the history of race in the United States is how people could acknowledge the incoherence of racial categories while still structuring their lives, communities, politics, and culture around the idea of race. At a fundamental level, race has functioned as a set of rules and rights—and legal entitlements and disabilities are a primary source of meaning for racial categories. The law provides a starting point for understanding how there could be so much consensus regarding such a blur. Legal decision making is itself a process that blurs what is objective and subjective, scientific and social, precise and penumbral. Taken together, the pervasive fuzziness of race and law ensured the resilience of clear and definable regimes of discrimination and hierarchy. (shrink)

Analyzing racial concepts has become an important task in the philosophy of race. Aside from any inherent interest that might be found in the meanings of racial terms, these meanings also can spell the doom or deliverance of competing ontological and normative theories about race. One of the most pressing questions about race at present is the normative question of whether race should be eliminated from, or conserved in, public discourse and practice. This normative question is (...) often answered in part by appealing to the ontological status of race: if race is an illusion, then it should be eliminated, and if it is real, then it can be conserved. 1 Thus, for.. (shrink)

It is nowadays a dominant opinion in a number of disciplines (anthropology, genetics, psychology, philosophy of science) that the taxonomy of human races does not make much biological sense. My aim is to challenge the arguments that are usually thought to invalidate the biological concept of race. I will try to show that the way “race” was defined by biologists several decades ago (by Dobzhansky and others) is in no way discredited by conceptual criticisms that are now fashionable (...) and widely regarded as cogent. These criticisms often arbitrarily burden the biological category of race with some implausible connotations, which then opens the path for a quick eliminative move. However, when properly understood, the biological notion of race proves remarkably resistant to these deconstructive attempts. Moreover, by analyzing statements of some leading contemporary scholars who support social constructivism about race, I hope to demonstrate that their eliminativist views are actually in conflict with what the best contemporary science tells us about human genetic variation. (shrink)

How do students learn about racism in the absence of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept for current social divisions? This article traces conceptual and affective negotiations of ‘race’ and racism in a Norwegian middle school classroom. Conceptual confusion about ‘race’, racism and lines of inclusion and exclusion in the nation is rife in this educational setting, where the curricular focus is on questions of immigration and integration. Treating ‘race’ as a ‘chameleon-like’ concept that adapts to the (...) cultural context and political situation, the analysis highlights the emotional investments and injuries that discussing race brings forward in the situation through a Kleinian psychoanalytic lens. Working through the affective as well as the conceptual aspects of the classroom’s struggles with ‘race’ and racism, the article argues that racism is enacted in the classroom partly as an effect of the denial of ‘race’ as a current effect of racism. Furthermore, it suggests that the denial of ‘race’ as an explanatory concept veils racial binaries that are enacted through Norwegian ethnonationalism, and facilitates enactment of racist dynamics in education that is intended to prevent racism. (shrink)

This article examines how the formation of markets in bottled water has relied on assembling a particular subject: the subject of hydration. The discourse of hydration is a conspicuous feature of efforts to market bottled water, allowing companies to appeal to scientifically framed principles and ideas of health in order to position the product as an essential component in self-health and healthy lifestyles. Alongside related principles, such as the ‘8 × 8 rule’, hydration has done much to establish new practices (...) of water drinking and consumption in which the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration and must engage in practices of ‘frequent sipping’. This article traces the emergence of the concept of hydration from its origins in exercise science and explores its circulation, contemporary uses and purchase. I argue that the appeal to biomedical languages and concepts found in the discourse of hydration connects with much broader ways of conceiving and acting upon the self that have become prevalent in contemporary society – what Rose and Novas call ‘biological citizenship’ – indicating how the ensemble of hydration participates in wider-ranging transformations in forms of rule. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical techniques of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’ by offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. In order to grasp these developments, I position the health sciences, and health and fitness in particular, as a potent site of popular culture in which bodies learn to be affected by the procedures of scientific experiment. A critical grasp of this context is best enabled, I argue, by situating the producers and consumers of scientific principles and commercial products as embodied and looking at their interconnection in processes of emergence. Through these means, we can begin to develop a fully materialized account of the question: how have we become so thirsty? (shrink)

This article examines changes and continuities in the epistemic and methodological presence of “race” in British imperial demography from 1920 to 1960. It does so in relation to population-level interventions aimed at improving reproduction in the New Hebrides. Through an examination of the sex ratio in relation to debates about demographic decline, the article describes aspects of how sexual selection was connected to race thinking. Taking a balanced sex ratio as a marker of well-adapted, healthy populations—biologically and culturally—the (...) British authorities in the New Hebrides attempted to regulate the bride price in an attempt to level the imbalanced sex ratio. They believed that this intervention would reduce the marriage age of men while also appeasing missionary agendas of changing marriage and kinship practices. I use the metaphor of a “watermark” to think through the conceptual and methodological absent/presence of race in colonial demography and colonial administrators’ attitudes toward and interventions in local reproductive practices. (shrink)

This was a book I wanted to read, being alumni of the Institute of Education and the History of Education MA Course, which was a programme led by Richard Aldrich in the 1990s. Richard Aldrich was t...

1. This is a book not only about school exclusions. It examines the scale of the problem which has wider implications for educational inequality both in England and internationally (Demie, 2019, 20...