Measuring racism: Lessons learnt and possibilities for change
Schedule
Tue May 30 2023 at 04:00 pm to 06:00 pm
Location
University of Helsinki | Helsinki, ES
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Welcome to the open lecture and discussion event!Measuring racism: Lessons learnt and possibilities for change
With guest lecturers Edda Manga and Mattias Gardell
Date: Tuesday, 30 May 2023 at 16:00-18:00
Venue: Think Lounge, Think Corner/University of Helsinki, Yliopistonkatu 4, Helsinki
The Covid-19 pandemic and global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 have led to increased societal discussions on structural racial inequalities and highlighted health and economic disparities most affecting marginalised racial and ethnic minorities globally. In the European context, critical discussions have particularly highlighted the inadequacies of currently available data to identify, let alone address, such racial inequalities. Supranational human rights bodies and many civil society organisations at the European level have long advocated for racial equality data in European member states to specifically make visible structural and institutional racial inequalities. This has been further emphasised in the many resultant calls-to-action and demands in the wake of the BLM protests, including in the first-ever EU Action Plan Against Racism published in September 2020. There are differing opinions on how, or even if, this can be done at a practical level, stemming from historical concerns about the collection of data disaggregated by race.
So how can we measure racism without reproducing racism? The research anthology Att mäta rasism (Measuring Racism), published in November 2022, presents a concrete proposal to this question in the context of Sweden. The book’s editors, Edda Manga and Mattias Gardell, will shed light on the lessons learnt from efforts at measuring racism in Sweden, and discuss possibilities for change in the approach towards the understanding of and working against racism. In a shared lecture, Mattias Gardell will present a critique of the three main ways of understanding racism and explain the perspective adopted in the book, which defines racism as technology. Edda Manga will discuss the shifting governmentalities of transnational antiracism and outline the model developed in the book to measure the unequal effects of structural racism on different categories of racialised subjects in the total population on the national or regional level over time.
The speakers:
Edda Manga is scientific leader of and researcher at Mångkulturellt Centrum (Multicultural Centre) in Botkyrka, Sweden. She has a PhD in the history of ideas from Gothenburg University. Her research has focused on the intersections of colonial discourses, global power structures and postcolonial theory.
https://mkcentrum.se/om-mkc/personalen-pa-mkc/edda-manga/
Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and researcher at the Centre for the Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism at Uppsala University, Sweden. Working with ethnographic methods and text analysis, Gardell explores the intersections of religion, politics, racism and violence.
https://www.katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N96-202
Manga and Gardell have led the work of the project “Methodological Laboratories – towards tenable methods to measure discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity and religion”, funded by the Swedish Research Council, the results of which have been presented in the book Att mäta rasism.
This event is jointly organised by the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, and the Anti-Racist Forum (ARF).
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Where is it happening?
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FinlandEvent Location & Nearby Stays: