Event: Evolving understandings of racism and resistance – local and global conceptions and struggles

We are delighted to invite you to the following one-day conference at the Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London in conjunction with the BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group:

‘Evolving understandings of racism and resistance – local and global conceptions and struggles’

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: JOHN SOLOMOS, STEPHEN SMALL

Date: Friday 1st May 2015

Launching the ESRC-funded seminar series, ‘Racism and Political Mobilisation: learning from history and thinking internationally’, organised by Gargi Bhattacharyya (UEL), Satnam Virdee (Glasgow) and Aaron Winter (UEL).

This conference responds to the urgent need to understand how and why people have mobilised around ethnicity – to challenge racism or to fight for social justice – despite other exclusionary forms of ethnic politics, including campaigns of racism. Whereas we have learned to argue against social policy that divides the population by ethnicity (Commission for Integration and Cohesion, 2007), there is little contemporary debate about the socially beneficial potential of calls to ethnic identity in enabling political mobilisation. At a time when there is widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics and unexpected and relatively unknown political groupings can emerge to prominence with little warning, it is essential that we understand the range of forms of ethnic mobilisation and the implications of these diverse forms of political engagement.

These questions become urgent in a context of the resurgence of racist movements across Europe and the continuation and intensification of communal divisions in many regions. In many urban spaces, the impacts of economic crises and war have remade the terrain of racism and inequality, hardening some divisions and giving rise to new kinds of ethnic mobilisation that reference religious, national, regional and ethnic identity in ways that reflect the transnational connectedness of these mobile populations.

Papers and discussions will address the following questions and debates, and more:

– contemporary and historical examples of movements against racism and the role of ethnic mobilisation within such movements
– the role played by ethnic mobilisations in wider movements for social justice
– changing terrains of racism and new articulations of anti-racist resistance

Programme Forthcoming.

Please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/evolving-understandings-of-racism-and-resistance-tickets-16258660090

 

Reminder: Eastside Community Heritage Lecture Series 2015 to include Talk on Refugee Council Archive

Events:

Eastside Community Heritage Lecture Series 2015

We are pleased to be able to circulate details of the forthcoming Eastside Community Heritage Lecture Series for 2015.  The lecture series will begin on Thursday 26 February with a talk given by Jan Pimblett from the London Metropolitan Archives and wil continue with talks from Sara Griffiths from The National Archives, on Thursday 28 April, and Arthur Torrington CBE on the 24 September.  The events are free but booking is recommended.  Full details of each of the speakers and the subject of their presention are available to download from the Eastside flyer for futher information: Eastside Community Heritage Lecture Series 2015 flyer (PDF File).

Without wisinhing to overly flag up our participation in this project, Paul Dudman the Archivist at UEL will be giving one of the talks which is scheduled to take place on Thursday 18th June and details of which are as follows:

Thursday, 18th June, 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Eastside Community Heritage Lecture Series 2015
Paul Dudman, Archivist, Refugee Archives at UEL

As part of the Eastside Community Heritage Annual Lecture Series for 2015, I will be giving a talk and the focus of this presentation will be to investigate the role of Archives in preserving the history of the refugee experience through a
case study of the Refugee Archives at the University of East London.

As part of our Archival holdings here at UEL, we do currently hold Eastside’s East London People’s Archive oral history collection.  This oral history collection preserves the oral history recordings of the various projects “conducted by Eastside Community Heritage document the lives of ‘ordinary’ people in East London. Topics include World War Two, women’s history, markets, boxing, ethnic groups in East London, food and parks.”

Also available are DVDs on East London local history produced by Eastside Community Heritage comprising Eastside voices: from Canning Town to Custom House, 2003; My Roots, Our Heritage, 2006 and Our Brick Lane, 2007. Published books and booklets on East London local history, chiefly published by Eastside Community Heritage including A Working Class War and Hidden Lives: stories from the East End and an index to photographs collected as part of projects by Eastside Community Heritage comprising of black and white thumbnail reproductions.
(Reference: Eastside Community Heritage).

Please contact the UEL Archives on library-archives@uel.ac.uk for further information on how to access these materials.

Seminar: Gender, Sexuality, Fundamentalism and the Law

The University of East London’s CMRB (Centre for research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging) and SOAS’ Centre for Gender Studies are pleased to announce the following seminar:

GENDER, SEXUALITY, FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE LAW

This seminar will take place in B102, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Campus map here

Saturday 25^th April 2015, 2–5pm

Gita Saghal
(Centre for Secular Space)

 Pragna Patel
(Southall Black Sisters)

Peter Tatchell
(Peter Tatchell Foundation)

 Karon Monaghan QC
(Matrix Chambers)

Chair: Nira Yuval-Davis
(CMRB)

The event is free but space is limited so please reserve a place at

http://gsfl.eventbrite.co.uk

For more info on CMRB: uel.ac.uk/cmrb and facebook.com/CMRBuel

For more info on Centre for Gender Studies: http://www.soas.ac.uk/genderstudies/

Speaker’s bios:

Gita Saghal is a founder of the Centre for Secular Space, which opposes fundamentalism, amplifies secular voices and promotes universality in human rights. She was formerly Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. She is a filmmaker and writer. For many years she served on the board of Southall Black Sisters and she was a founder of Women Against Fundamentalism and Awaaz: South Asia Watch.

Pragna Patel is a founding member of the Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism. She worked as a co-ordinator and senior case-worker for SBS from 1982 to 1993 when she left to train and practice as a solicitor. In 2009 she returned to SBS as its Director. She has been centrally involved in some of SBS’ most important cases and campaigns around domestic violence, immigration and religious fundamentalism. She has also written extensively on race, gender and religion.

Karon Monaghan QC is a barrister specialising in equality and discrimination law. Much of her work concerns the rights of women and gender based violence. Her publications include ‘Monaghan on Equality Law’ (2013, OUP) and ed. Hunter, McGlynn and Rackley, ‘Feminist Judgments: From theory to Practice’ (2010, Hart) (contributor).

Peter Tatchell has been campaigning since 1967 on issues of human rights, democracy, civil liberties, LGBT equality and global justice. He coordinated the Equal Love campaign from 2010, in a bid to challenge the UK’s twin legal bans on same-sex civil marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships. The following year, he organised four gay couples and four heterosexual couples to file a case in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that sexual orientation discrimination in civil marriage and civil partnership law is unlawful under Articles 8, 12 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. He has proposed an internationally-binding UN Human Rights Convention enforceable through both national courts and the International Criminal Court; a permanent rapid-reaction UN peace-keeping force with the authority to intervene to stop genocide and war crimes; and a global agreement to cut military spending by 10 percent to fund the eradication of hunger, disease, illiteracy, unemployment and homelessness in the developing world.