Are we Post-Race yet? Encountering the 'Other' in Everyday Academia

by Dr Amrita Ghosh (Lund University)

Wednesday 17 Nov 2021, 10:15 → 12:15 Europe/Stockholm

80127 (Ångströmlaboratoriet)

This talk intends to demystify myths about "color blindness" and "meritocracy." Charting the premises of postcolonial studies and critical race theory, I will discuss specific examples from popular culture and the lived classroom experiences. Furthermore, I will discuss how to identify and create awareness about structural racism around us. I will trace historical concepts of race, intertwined with science and popular culture, and unravel concepts like "orientalism" and "color blindness" that affect us daily. This talk aims to emphasize how we can aim to create ethical and just spaces within the classroom and in our everyday. We would be discussing concepts like "safe spaces;" how to ask questions that initiate critical thinking that shift hegemonic knowledge and create change around us. The main aim of this talk is to forge solidarities and create intersectional spaces towards an impulse to futurity and ethicality.

 

Dr. Amrita Ghosh is a research fellow at Lund University, SASNET (South Asia Research center) and an Associate Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She has a doctorate in postcolonial studies from Drew University, USA and has worked as a lecturer at Seton Hall University in USA ,before moving to Sweden in 2017. She has been teaching courses on multiculturalism, race and integration at Linnaeus University where she also finished a postdoc on literary and visual cultural productions emerging from the conflict zone of Kashmir. Ghosh is a postcolonial scholar who writes, teaches and strives to create spaces of praxis framed within the fields of decolonial and postcolonial studies. Her two books on Kashmir and Nobel Prize winning writers-- Yeats and Tagore, are coming soon. She is the co-founder and editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual transcultural, online journal.