CoDE Seminar: Mixed-race, white (rural) space: Black (and white) mixed-race family’s experiences of managing and negotiating racialisation and racism in a predominantly white English town
| Dates: | 28 May 2020 |
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| Times: | 12:00 - 13:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni |
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| Speaker: | Chantelle Lewis |
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In this ethnographic thesis Chantelle Lewis explores the retrospective accounts of racialisation and racism experienced, negotiated and managed by six Black mixed-race families who live (and have lived) in the predominantly white town, Bromsgrove (West Midlands). Whilst conducting a two-year ethnography - supported by in-depth conversations with family members through both solo and group ethnographic interviews - Chantelle aims to contribute to the emerging contemporary scholarship on place and space, mixedness and Black mixed-race people in Britain (Joseph- Salisbury, 2018 and Campion, 2019). Much of the previous literature on mixedness has focused on (mixed) racialised identities and how race and race thinking has affected lived experiences (Tizard and Phoenix,1993; Ali, 2003, Caballero, Edwards and Puthussery 2008, Bauer, 2010, Parker and Song, 2001, Olumide, 2002 and Ifekwunigwe, 1999). In this research, Chantelle strives to move beyond conceptualising mixedness by attending to experiences of racialisation and racism in relation to place, space and family formations.This is a further contribution to the scholarship on mixedness that has sought to challenges frequently binarized portrayals of mixed-race families within public life (Caballero, 2012). Through ethnographic observations and conversation between family members, Chantelle stresses that the emphasis on place, space and the family unit help to confront the doxa around ‘progressive’ and ‘problematic’ representations of mixed- race populations. By attending to the social intricacies outside of constructions of identity, Chantelle explores the existence and persistence of whiteness that is narrated through participants experiences within Bromsgrove and how this is entangled within their own Black (and white) mixed-race families. Further, she draw on participants negotiations of racialisation and racism in relation to proximities to whiteness, but also stresses the importance of very intimate forms of racism they navigate due to their predominantly white environments within their hometown, but also within their families (Lewis, 2009).
Chantelle Lewis is a part-time PhD student in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths, UK. She is co-host of the sociological/political podcast Surviving Society, a research assistant on the ESRC funded project (UK in a Changing Europe), BrExpats and Programme Director of the Leading Routes campaign, #BlackinAcademia.
Speaker
Chantelle Lewis
Organisation: Goldsmiths
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
G.035/36
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
