Towards Anti-racist Legal pedagogy: A resource

This Social and Legal Studies Association (SLSA) funded project is aimed at assisting teachers to develop anti-racist pedagogy in their teaching in five of the six foundation subjects currently required for a qualifying law degree (QLD)

Decolonizing the Academy - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I draw on my own experience facilitating a student-led ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ project within an English university critical law school. I reflect upon how such initiatives - predicated on collaboration between staff and students in particular - can constitute ‘liberatory’ spaces from which to resist different structural forms of coloniality and racism or racialization within the western academy. I draw on the work of scholars of colour who expose the coloniality and racialization underpinning the current trend within higher education institutions (HEIs) equalities initiatives that ‘gaze’ upon bodies of colour through the phenomenon of the ‘BME attainment gap’. This same scholarship also facilitates scholars and students of colour to theorize the possibilities for (re-)existing within the academy by calling for a re-focusing of attention and ‘gaze’ back onto institutional racism within HEIs. The process is rife with pitfalls, navigating continued racialization or erasure on the one hand, to co-optation - in the current increasingly marketized UK HE environment - on the other. Finding oneself in this situation - between a rock and a hard place - is also particularly fraught for academics of colour who are effectively rendered complicit through their wage relation with universities reproducing knowledge systems, that emerged from and continue to be marked by coloniality and racialization. What then is the allure for us to engage in university decolonizing movements? I argue that doing the work of confronting these tensions is an urgent task that must be done alongside finding spaces - albeit cracks and fissures - from which to do crucial anti-racist work of ‘decolonizing the western academy’. This is not an end-goal in and of itself - not least perhaps because of its impossibility - but rather as part of a self-liberatory process facilitating the re-existence of people of colour within the academy

Decolonial Sexualities: Paola Bacchetta in Conversation with Suhraiya Jivraj and Sandeep Bakshi

In this roundtable forum, decolonial dyke-queer theorist Paola Bacchetta begins with a discussion of the span of decolonial queer theorization as it gained momentum in several fields of critical inquiry. Connecting it to contemporary mobilizations – anti-imperial, decolonial, anti-racism, feminist, queer – appears in this scenario as one of its key constituent features. Understanding, critiquing and transforming relations of power emerges as a necessary dimension of decolonizing queer/sexualities. For Bacchetta, decolonial queer/sexualities emanates from and brings into focus disparate geopolitical sites, analytics, expressions and activisms. Bacchetta proposes the concept-term “situated planetarities” to think about how power operates, and about subjects, in any specific context in relation to the planet. She elaborates the notions “co-formations” and “co-productions” to consider different kinds of relations of power (coloniality, racism, capitalism, class, misogynarchies, including sexism, queerphobia, transphobia) that are co-constitutive of each other and that structure all of life. She provides transnational examples. It is, in this regard, a compelling observation for both academic scholarship of activism and grassroots political mobilization

Queer anti-racist activism and strategies of critique: a roundtable discussion

status: publishe

The Dutch Homo-Emancipation Policy and its Silencing Effects on Queer Muslims

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities

Interrogating law's religion : non-Christianness, belonging and nationhood

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo