Race Critical Public Scholarship

This edited collection addresses the challenges for critically engaged research, teaching and scholarship on race and racism in a climate marked by sweeping changes in universities. Each chapter engages with debates about universities and ‘publics’, and the public orientation and reach of academic work. How do these factors play out in the work of scholars pursuing racial and social justice? What are the constraints of the marketised university or the bureaucratised political field or the celebrity-hungry arena of media culture? How can we use scholarly research and knowledge to create different and better meanings and outcomes in any of these places? With a focus on engaged and activist scholarship attuned to theory and practice, the chapters consider these issues in France, the UK, USA and Costa Rica. The chapters include discussions of teaching for social justice, collaborating and advocating for migrant and local communities and deploying scholarly knowledge in political work and the media.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Karim Murji is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University, UK. He writes on cultural and policy studies of ethnicity and racism, and criminology. With John Solomos, he is the editor of Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (2005) and Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. He is an Editor of the journal Sociology.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, UK. She has written on issues of racism and sexuality, global cultures of racism and the war on terror. Her recent work includes Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror (2008) and the edited collection Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World (2009).