Acknowledging the Racial State: An Agenda for Environmental Justice Research

Abstract:  This paper argues that environmental justice scholars have tended to overlook the significance of the state's role in shaping understandings of race and racism, and argues for the use of critical race theory to deepen insight into the role of the state in both fostering and responding to conditions of racialized environmental injustice. Critical race theory offers insights into both why and how the state manages racial categories in such a way as to produce environmental injustice, and how the state responds to the claims of the environmental justice movement. Closer attention to the interplay between the racial state and the environmental justice movement as a racial social movement will yield important insights into the conditions, processes, institutions and state apparatuses that foster environmental injustice and that delimit the possibilities for achieving environmental justice in some form or another.     

Mapping race and gender in the academy: the experiences of women of colour faculty and graduate students in Britain,the US and Canada

This paper examines the experiences of women of colour in geography. An analysis of qualitative, open‐ended questionnaires with women of colour geography faculty and graduate students in North America and Britain suggests that policies and practices within geography departments continue to reflect a pervasive persistence of racialized and gendered inequities in the workplace. There has been relatively little application of theoretical work on race and gender to the minority experience within geography. Some strategies suggested to challenge racialized and gendered barriers that limit women of colour's full participation in geography include a proactive recruitment programme, diversification of the curriculum and development of mentoring.     

“They hate pigs,Chinese farmers … everything!” Beastly Racialization in Multiethnic Malaysia

Abstract: This paper details the construction of the pig and the pig industry in Malaysia. It argues that a pattern of “animal‐linked racialization” continually polices the boundary between the dominant, elite Malay‐Muslim hegemony and the comparatively less powerful Chinese pig farmers. Often subtle and implicit, such beastly racialization, drawing frequently from religious and nationalist tropes, renders visible the taboo subjects of race and racism in Malaysia. While a simplistic form of beastly racialization in relation to the pig industry is held by the political elites and non‐Chinese community, one cannot say that such a racialization has produced or sustained distinct racisms. Nonetheless, it is through the process of beastly racialization that we unravel the seemingly random acts of coercive policies that, taken in their entirety, threaten to stymie the future viability of the industry and continue to accentuate the visible social‐cultural disjuncture between the two biggest ethnic groups in Malaysia.     

Making space,making race: reconstituting white privilege in Buckhead,Atlanta

The comfortable relationship between the overwhelmingly white, southern Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead and a major hub of nightlife in the region unraveled in the early 2000s as the entire nightclub cluster was delegitimized, discursively constructed as dangerous and out of control, and ultimately razed to make space for luxury shopping. This paper sets out to query what social and cultural relations account for this massive and unpredicted reconfiguration of urban space in the epicenter of wealth, whiteness, and power in Atlanta. By mobilizing the concept of the socio-spatial dialectic (Soja 1980, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70: 207–225), we draw on Pulido's (2000, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90: 12–40) work on the construction and perpetuation of white privilege to argue that the racialized production of space is a relevant framework for understanding the processes at work in Buckhead. We argue that race was an unstated but deeply important social relation shaping the process by which this particular space was remade. In so doing, we seek to advance the literature on whiteness by demonstrating the ways in which it articulates with the political economy of cities in the present conjuncture.     

“This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism,Racialization, and Urban Policy

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place‐making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's “notorious” Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood.     

Race,Space, and Nature: An Introduction and Critique

In this essay we put forth nested arguments about the way that racialization remains a powerful force in contemporary society, contending that intersections with space and nature offer important lessons about the (de)construction of race. We argue that the pernicious character traits of racial constructs develop through spatial practices and intersect with ideas about “nature” and belonging. We trace these concepts through recent conversations in geography and environmental studies, and we call for a persistent, critical, and prominent engagement with racialization in the spatial social sciences. Finally, we introduce the papers that constitute this symposium, which engages these questions from a range of perspectives and across a variety of landscapes. We hope to spur the conversation about “race and geography”, broadly conceived, beyond studies conceptualized around race alone. We are hopeful that this work, and the larger body of work it contributes to, travels beyond academic conversations to engage broader social justice debates about the “nature” of racial inequality—to ultimately participate in its dismantlement.     

Positionality,subjectivity, and race in transnational and transcultural geographical research

This article investigates the complexities of negotiating subject positions in transnational and transcultural research by focusing on the gendering of race and racialization. As more people claim to be of mixed ‘racial’ descent and Western researchers grow more diverse, it is increasingly important that this diversity is reflected within geographical research; however, much of the existing research on subjectivity and its role in the research process has focused either on ‘white’ researchers in Global South contexts or on researchers working in their ‘home’ country or community. Less visible are accounts from those who challenge conceptions of ‘white’ Western researcher or whose racial identity can be conceived as hybrid. Moreover, there is a tendency to conceptualize race/racialization and their effects on subjectivity and positionality in relatively narrow terms. This article draws attention to the changing subjectivities of a racialized gendered body as it moves into different contexts. I examine how conceptualizations of race and discourses of racialization constitute researcher subjectivity, and how different understandings of ‘race’ mediate relationships between researcher and research participants (and others). To understand the spatial (re)configurations of (race) subjectivities and how this affects researcher positionality, I offer an autoethnography of a bi/multiracial Western woman of New Zealand Māori/Pākehā descent interpellated as ‘insufficient Other’ in her home context of Aotearoa New Zealand, then reconstituted as white and ‘sufficient Self’ in the Philippines by her research participants and Filipino ‘family’ and friends.     

The LGBT specter in Russia: refusing queerness,claiming ‘Whiteness’

Abstract

 

In Europe ‘homoemancipation’ has played a significant role in legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia. Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant role in (re)defining the contested meaning of the nation after the demise of the Soviet empire. While acknowledging the repressive and violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT legislation and public discourse on LGBT people, this essay analyzes how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative sexuality is constitutive of an ethno-national project in post-Soviet Russia. This analysis goes beyond the Cold War binary of east/west that oversimplifies Russian political homophobia as in opposition to Europe. By doing so, it is argued that Russia is not just an illiberal state, but entangled in Eurocentric projects that define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual politics. Consequently, challenging political homophobia in Russia requires attending to intersectional strategies and approaches to sexual politics. An intersectional approach to solidarity will situate sexual rights within national and global ethno-national, racialized, and colonial projects.     

White environmental subjectivity and the politics of belonging

In a society dominated by a colorblind approach to racial difference, racial categories are often viewed as unchanging and constructed in a time past. This article examines the making of racial categories and subjectivities in everyday perceptions and portrayals of place and belonging related to environmentalism. It examines the ways in which middle-class white people, who engage regularly with Latino immigrants, simultaneously construct the racial category of ‘white’ and affirm their own belonging in Boulder, Colorado through an exclusionary discourse of environmentalism. In Boulder, immigrants and non-immigrant Latinos are often portrayed as unaware of environmentalism, not interested in environmentalism, and/or too busy or poor to participate in environmentalism. In interviews, white residents of the city reproduce discourses of privilege and exclusion through environmental discourses and reinforce their own white environmental subjectivity as the norm. The insider/outsider division established through environmental discourse in Boulder is a specific example of how exclusion is enforced through the racialization of ‘natural’ spaces and environmental activities and how environmentalism itself is an important articulation of difference.     

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina women's interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young people's lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.