Ambiguities of Racialisation: east-west inequalities and mobilities in Europe
In this talk, I propose an understanding that analytically foregrounds ambiguities of race-making – thus, the imposed instrumentality of racial categorisations, their inherent contradictions and internal inconsistencies.
Accentuating ambiguities highlights how racial classifications have – historically and today – emerged from distinctive political projects and served specific political-economic agendas. Specifically, I discuss how this approach allows us to critically engage with the role of racial imaginaries in relation to the east of Europe. A processual focus on ambiguities takes us beyond reifications of ‘Whiteness’ or erasures of the region’s implication in global histories of race-making. The categorisation as ‘Eastern European’, I argue, operates via distinctive ambiguities – it encompasses gradations, complex hierarchies of belonging and oscillates between projections of racial ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’. These ambiguities constitute a red thread of how ‘Eastern Europe’ has been imagined in the Western gaze from the 18th Century onwards. They have also been inscribed into the political management of East-West mobilities within Europe across different historical periods; they have produced distinctive – at times comparatively privileged – migration pathways yet also hidden precarities. I explore the benefits of a conceptual focus on the ambiguities of racialisation via two contemporary case study examples: the fortification of Europe’s south-eastern borders and the reception of people displaced from Ukraine to Britain and Germany.
Meet our speaker
Aleksandra Lewicki is Director of the Sussex European Institute and Reader in Sociology at the University of Sussex. Her work engages with the management of mobility and the political economy of race-making. She has written on the politics of immigration in Britain and Germany with a focus on role public institutions play in crafting categories of difference. Her publications have appeared in leading international journals such as Sociology, the Sociological Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Identities, Patterns of Prejudice, Citizenship Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
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