Winter School on Inequality, 8-14 January 2018 University of Göttingen, Germany

Shared techniques of domination across various world regions are only growing in importance, as movements of refugees and migrants render more and more people vulnerable to racialized subordination (UN Report of Special Rapporteur on Race, Racism and Xenophobia, 2015). To understand both racialized pasts and possible futures, we will focus on three themes, drawing on studies from a number of world regions, including the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, to illustrate:
(1) Racial Capitalism: how are subpopulations relegated to forms of unfree and/or unwaged labour? What institutional, spatial, and political-economic processes reproduce these forms of social organization, and how and when do these techniques travel? How, in various regions, have these labour regimes been thrown into crisis? How are the privileges of dominant groups, including inherited wealth and preferential access to labour markets, maintained?
(2) Race and Political Representation. How does political action take place in distinct racial regimes? How is access to political power racially regulated, and articulated with common modern state forms, such as democracy? Who can represent "permanent minorities" (Guinier 1994, Ambedkar 1947), and what determines the limits of their participation? How is politics itself reconfigured by anti-racist movements as well as rightwing populisms?
(3) Race as Knowledge Production. Both in contemporary times and historically, the dissemination of authoritative knowledge about raced groups has been essential to their subordination, producing the broad systems of meaning within which racialized social organization "makes sense". How and where is this knowledge produced, and how does it circulate? How does it achieve its effects? What media are available for the circulation of dissent? What is or ought to be the role of scholars in the production of knowledge about race?

Prof. Thomas Abowd, Tufts University
Prof. Demetrius Eudell, Wesleyan University
Prof. Keith Feldman, University of California, Berkeley
Prof. Peter James Hudson, University of California, Los Angeles
Prof. Jemima Pierre, University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Nathaniel Roberts, University of Göttingen
Prof. Rupa Viswanath, University of Göttingen