Keeping the Red Record: The Racial Violence Archive
| Dates: | 17 May 2017 |
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| Times: | 12:30 - 14:00 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Law |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Geoff Ward |
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Geoff Ward, University of California, Irvine.
This talk foregrounds over a century of effort to document racial violence, and its contributions to critical analysis, oppositional movements, targeting social services, and other remedial effort. Represented most notably by Ida B. Wells’s 1895 pamphlet A Red Record, which proved key to the crusade against lynching, these data gathering, analysis, and leveraging efforts have sought to clarify and counter threats to African Americans' and others' life chances.
The Red Record is at base a recognition of black human and civil rights, a moral and political assertion that “black lives matter,” which was directed at the national conscience but targeted specific environments of normative disregard, challenging political leaders to ensure equal protection. This Record and documentation efforts since continue to inform critical analyses of race as a socially constitutive force, and reveal legacies of racial violence in contemporary social relations. These contributions notwithstanding, there are great challenges to measuring racialized violence, interpreting impacts, and translating insights into pragmatic remedial effort. The Red Record is a contested empirical account, inevitably incomplete, and fraught with tensions related to criteria, accuracy, and meaning.
The talk explores some of these challenges and strategies for overcoming them in the context of my ongoing work with many collaborators to build a Racial Violence Archive, and realize its research, educational, and remedial potential.
All welcome.
Speaker
Geoff Ward
Organisation: University of California, Irvine
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
4.08
Williamson Building
Manchester
