Planned Activities and Events 2020 - 2025
Over the coming years it is our intention that CRREN will increasingly become an inter-disciplinary research centre with members across different schools and colleges including Gregoris Ioannou (Law), Kristyn Carter (Immunology), Dave Featherstone (Geography) and Sourit Bhattacharya (English Literature). This will further consolidate co-writing and collaboration on individual research projects and PhD supervision. Short outlines of some of our future plans are given below:
Sourit Bhattacharya: I'm about to begin a new project on the literary and cultural works of the 1943 Bengal famine. Funded by a Carnegie Research Intensive grant, this one-year project will gather data from research libraries in the UK and India and build an online annotated bibliography. I'm also planning to apply for an RSE Research Network grant in Sep 2020 to build an international research team working in the areas of health and culture during the 1940s. This project looks to organise a couple of public events in association with the NLS. My plan is to lead these projects to two long-term research projects (preferably funded by AHRC/Leverhulme/Wellcome): on medical and cultural debates on food and famine prevention in colonial British Asia and Africa; & farmer's suicide and community oriented cultural responses in contemporary rural India.
I recently published a monograph on food crisis, catastrophe and novel writing in postcolonial India (Palgrave, June 2020). I'm currently working on a related monograph on postcolonial writings in the twenty first century (Orient BlackSwan). My forthcoming publications include a co-edited volume on the radical Bengali writer, Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury, 2020) and essays in Cambridge Critical Concepts: Magic Realism, The Cambridge Handbook on Literature and Plants, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Environment, and South Asian Review. I currently co-edit a biannual, peer reviewed, open access journal, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry which has recently begun a virtual seminar series on education related issues in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. I also run a reading group in postcolonial studies at Glasgow which I plan to facilitate in the next years.
Dave Featherstone is a human geographer with core interests in the relations between resistance, space and politics and has a particular interest in forms of anti-racist and multi-ethnic solidarities. He is currently working on a monograph provisionally titled Politicising Race and Labour: Seafarers’ Struggles for Equality and the Anti-Colonial Left, 1919-1953. The book traces the diverse political alliances, imaginaries and organising practices through which seafarers from racialized minorities contested the unequal racialized construction of maritime labour. It develops a detailed engagement with the writings of, and material about, seafarers who were active in struggles against racism and colonialism through transnational networks linked to British ports such as Cardiff, Glasgow, London and Liverpool, in the early to mid-twentieth century. It will use this material to foreground the political trajectories and agency of key seafarers’ organisers from the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia reconstructing their impact on, and relationship with, various organisations associated with the anti-colonial left.
Robert Gibb: Over the next few years, I plan to prepare further publications based on my AHRC-funded anthropological research on refugee status determination procedures in Bulgaria and France, with a particular focus on questions of translation, transcription and interpretation.
Gregoris Ioannou: In May 2020 I am co-organising with Vera Pavlou at the Law School the workshop “Legal statuses and labour market prospects: the UK experience of ‘settled’ migrants in a comparative setting”. This is a part of small research funding I won from the College of Social Sciences Strategic Research Fund as a preparatory step for a major Grant application on the broad topic of Discrimination, labour fragmentation and life chances. The application is expected to be submitted by October 2020 to the ESRC Research Grant.
Maureen McBride: I am currently writing up the findings from a small study on the impact of covid-19 and lockdown on refugee and migrant families in Glasgow, based on research with frontline workers. Outputs will include a report and a blog, and we are in the early stages of planning a seminar to take place towards the end of 2020, bringing together academics who have conducted research in this area. I am also currently working on an article entitled Nationalism and sectarianism in contemporary Scotland, based on my doctoral research.
Gareth Mulvey: I will be continuing work around Syrian settlement in the UK, with a focus on varieties in experiences across national and regional jurisdictions. In addition, a new project looking at the experiences of the Covid pandemic among asylum seekers and others made destitute by immigration rules will involve the writing of reports, blog and articles and will also include public events and other forms of public engagement. Longer term I plan a grant proposal looking at how politics is done by migrant communities in the different parts of the UK, examining how state and sub-state authorities facilitate and/or prevent newer populations from engaging in political actions.
Teresa Piacentini: I am currently co-leading the Refugee and Asylum Stream in the CSO-funded Covid-19 study Health and social impacts of Covid-19 in Scotland https://scotlandinlockdown.co.uk/. Outputs will include journal articles and policy guidance. Also, third sector organisations will be actively supported through a collaboratively-constructed evidence base which will help inform social justice work and anti-racist practice. I am currently drafting a book proposal on The Uncomfortable classroom: developing a critical pedagogy of migration, ethics, politics and practice.
Giovanni Picker: I am working on a number on two major writing projects at present. Provincializing European Cities (2019-2021) – an edited volume with Dr Noa Ha (Manchester University Press) Building on a homonymous ISA-RC21 conference session, and inspired by Chakrabarty's 2000 seminal work, Provincializing European Cities aims to open up new, critical and global perspectives on urbanism in Europe, and to enrich debates on geographies of knowledge production. Planning White Europe (2017-2022). This new monograph builds on Racial Cities to analyze, from a global and historical perspective, the relations between urban planning and urban social heterogeneity, a.k.a. "urban diversity", in Europe. The aim of the book is to contribute to (re)theorizing Europe as a racial project from a global and comparative perspective, by documenting the ways in which race, gender, class and sexuality function in shaping urban horizons, desires, longings and aspirations in a continent which is largely considered void of racial hierarchies and thinking, especially after 1945.
Francesca Scrizni: I will be completing a monograph on Gender and the Populist Radical Right (under contract with Routledge) which will be the main output of my on-going British Academy Mid-career fellowship. As part of this fellowship, I am also organising a documentary film screening of ‘Rocking the nation' focusing on the Hungarian far right, by Bori Kriza. Alongside this, I will also be giving talks at the ‘Populism, Gender and Feminist Politics’ conference in Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy in 2021 and writing an article on migrant care labour and religion with Ester Gallo (Senior Lecturer, University of Trento).
Andrew Smith: over the coming period I will continue recent work on racism and everyday life, and on the way in which mundane forms of aesthetic judgement - claims about beauty and ugliness - play a role in the racialising of place and social relations. A first discussion of these questions, based on qualtiative data from research undertaken with colleagues in the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethncity, is forthcoming in the journal Cultural Sociology. An introductory chapter on 'Racism' is also forthcoming in the new The Routledge Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by John Solomos.
Satnam Virdee: My plans include the completion of two book projects. The first, entitled Nationalism, Racism and the Left will be published by Brill in their Historical Materialism series and focuses on the convoluted relationship between the Left and racialized minorities from 'the age of empire' to the present. The second book project provisionally entitled Racism and Capitalist Modernity takes a world history approach to identify and track the principal mechanisms (economic, political and cultural) through which racism emerged and was consolidated thereby becoming an intrinsic feature of modern capitalism.
In 2020, I will deliver the Westergaard Annual Lecture at the University of Sheffield and the inaugural Millins Lecture at the International Centre on Racism, Edge Hill University. Along with colleagues at the University and elsewhere, I am preparing a submission to the Sociological Review seminar series on Theory, history and thinking racism and antisemitism together.