Same Same but Different: Race and Racializations across National, Disciplinary and Temporal Contexts - I

Abstract

In human diversity research, race is a moving target. It is rarely clearly defined, and takes on different meanings and labels in different contexts, and often reveals itself as racialized connotations of other terms. From an international perspective, it is apparent that while race is used in political and scientific contexts in the USA or Brazil, for example, in continental Europe, by contrast, today it is commonly considered a taboo. This difference is partly rooted in divergent conceptual meanings in different languages, and various political as well as scientific strategies for dealing with the historical burden of the concept. However, even in countries that are largely imagined as post-racial, race remains as an “absent presence” (M’charek/Schramm/Skinner 2014) within other terms in use such as “ethnicity”, “population”, “migrant background”, “biogeographical ancestry”, “metapopulation” etc.
In this panel we welcome contributions inquiring into the national, disciplinary and/or temporal specifics of human difference categorizations – with a focus on, but not limited to, the life sciences. We are particularly interested in the shaping of processes of categorization and in the continuity and discontinuity of concepts of group classification across/in different contexts and specific situations.
Possible topics include:
* entanglements between race and “ethnicity”, “caste”, “populations” etc.
* context-specific and language-related differences and similarities between racialized concepts, wordings, meanings, and their historical dis/continuities
* travelling concepts, translations, euphemisms, modernizations, and equivocations
* processes of racialization in various scientific disciplines
* race after race, post-racial racializations, racializations in antiracism
* effects of notions like “colourblindness”, “race-consciousness”, “race realism”, “social constructivism”
* different bureaucratic-administrative regulations of race, e.g. in the law, in affirmative action, surveys, censuses etc.
* attempts to grasp diversity/variation in a non-racialized manner

Chairs

• Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Universität Bayreuth

• Tino Pluemecke, Institute for Sociology, University of Freiburg, Germany

Discussant

• Veronika Lipphardt, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg,University College Freiburg

Individual Presentations

• Old Bones in New Databases: the Case of ForDisc - Iris Clever, University of Chicago; Lisette Jong, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam

• Minjok in flux: Group classification and racialization in South Korean genomics and beyond - Jaehwan Hyun, Pusan National University

• Making race: the plantation world beyond abolition - Cristiana Bastos, University of Lisbon; Marta Macedo, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon

• Nomadic Fields: The erasure of violence in the Aché fieldwork of Pierre Clastres and Carleton Gajdusek - Sebastián Gil-Riaño, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizers

• Jenny Reardon, UC Santa Cruz

• Mihai Surdu, Research Centre on Antigypsyism/Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus

• Andrea zur Nieden, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg, Germany

• Nils Ellebrecht, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg, Germany