Suspended in 2025/26
AN484      Half Unit
Anthropological Approaches to Race, Racism, and Decolonisation

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Availability

This course is a call to action - in the tradition of the movements and literatures it examines - that will provide students with a foundational understanding of race and contemporary racism, as well as approaches and theories central to their potential transformation. The course will focus on the discipline’s historical and present theoretical orientations to race, explore alternative modes and questions in the practice of anthropology raised by anthropologists and theorists of colour, and provide an understanding of the policies - institutional, economic, social, and bureaucratic - that maintain both an academic and social racial status quo. Explicitly asking students to engage with the concept of antiracist and decolonial futures for anthropology, the course centres non-white/non-Western thought and thinkers, “activist” anthropology as a norm, and racial subjectivities as central to theory and practice.

The course will ask:

• What has been the role of the anthropologists of colour in forming the basis of what is commonly thought of as anthropological theory? What can we learn from their theories and methods?
• How can we understand contemporary racisms and how, positioned in the legacy of anthropology’s contribution to its construction, can anthropology become an antiracist tool?
• Where can anthropology intervene on policy or re-orient theory to engage an antiracist epistemology in a transformative way? What is the scope of a so-called “activist” anthropology?
• What are the potential futures for anthropology as a discipline actively engaged in decolonising theory and methods?

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term.

• Allen, Jafari Sinclaire and Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2016. The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties. Current Anthropology. 57(2):129-148
• Baker, Lee.  1998. From savage to negro: anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954. University of California Press.
• Buck, Pem Davidson. 2012. “Whither whiteness? Empire, state, and the re-ordering of whiteness.”  Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 20, Number 2, pp. 105–117
• Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2019. Affective Justice: The Racialized Imaginaries of International Justice. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 42: 2. 244-267.
• Elliot-Cooper, Adam. 2018. The struggle that cannot be named: violence, space and the re-articulation of anti-racism in post-Duggan Britain, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41:14, 2445-2463,
• Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
• Harrison, Faye V. 1992. The Du Boisian legacy in anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 12(3):239–260.
• Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. 2002. The natives are gazing and talking back: reviewing the problematics of positionality, voice, and accountability among “Native” anthropologists. American Anthropologist 104(3):791–804.
• Mbembe, Achille. 2013. Introduction: The Becoming Black of the World. In Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press.
• Rosa, J. and Díaz, V. 2020, Raciontologies: Rethinking Anthropological Accounts of Institutional Racism and Enactments of White Supremacy in the United States. American Anthropologist, 122: 120-132.
• Stoler, A. L. 2002. ‘Genealogies of the Intimate: Movements in Colonial Studies’, in Carnal knowledge and imperial power: race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–21.
• Táíwò, Olúfémi O., and Beba Cibralic. 2020. “The Case for Climate Reparations. Foreign Policy.
• Takezawa, Yasuko. 2011. “Toward a New Approach to Race and Racial Representations: Perspectives from Asia.” In Racial Representations in Asia. Kyoto University Press.
• Twine, France Winddance. 1998. Chapter 3: Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Racism. in Racism in a racial democracy: the maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Essay (100%, 3500 words)

For their summative work, students will be able to choose one of the following options:

a) a policy-focused essay utilizing ethnographic evidence for an anti-racist/decolonial intervention on a particular institution explored during the course

b) a design for an anti-racist social movement or campaign

c) a traditional theoretical essay taking race as the analytical lens for examination of an institution or policy addressed in the course