'The Coloniality of Meritocracy' Simone Varriale
| Dates: | 18 January 2024 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:15 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| How much: | Free |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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This presentation will discuss some key ideas from Simone Varriale's recent book, Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations (BUP, 2023), and some emerging ideas from ongoing fieldwork with Black and minority ethnic Italian migrants living in the UK.
Drawing on interviews with working and middle class, white and Black Italians who moved to Britain after the 2008 economic crisis, the presentation will explore the narratives of Northern 'meritocracy' and Southern 'backwardness' that inform migrants' motivations for moving abroad, and how these narratives are experienced within classed, racialised and gendered migrations.
Simone Varriale proposes to rethink meritocratic ideology as a form of 'coloniality', namely, a social imaginary that reproduces narratives of ethnic and racial difference between European centres and peripheries, and between Europe and its others.
However, he will also address the epistemic limits of this imaginary - how it resonates (or not) within unequal social biographies - and the risks of using decolonial perspectives in ways that reproduce both white and Black victimhood, as well as overly homogeneous social representations of 'Italians', 'Southern Europeans' and 'EU migrants'.
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