Description
Who tends to think of everything in two or more ways simultaneously? Who is a postmodernist virtually as a condition of his or her being?
– Richard Delgado, Racial Realism – after we are gone
Recent publications such as Zvobgo et al.’s ‘ (2023) Race and Racial Exclusion in Security Studies’ and Doharty et al.’s (2021) ‘The University went to ‘decolonise’ and all they brought back was lousy diversity double-speak!’ bring back the importance of the issue that is the structural violence towards scholars of colour who choose to uphold the legitimacy of alternative knowledge as part of the decolonising movement. This roundtable is on this topic of racialised epistemology and its value in showing IR a perspective advantage. Quoting pedagogical theorist Ladson-Billings (2000:262): this advantage speaks to the ways that not being positioned in the white centre allows scholars of colour a “wide-angle vision” that enables them to see better and transcend the normative thought boundaries that come with existing on the inside. In recent years, attention to debates over racialised knowledge and in particular the role of a solidarity in anti-racist consciousness has intensified amidst discussions of what decolonising International Relations (IR) means for the academy. While the focus of decolonising IR for many has popularised an academia focused on the topic of contextualising political knowledge within the colonial and imperial backdrops that form their foundation, there is an important continued concern within re-aligning the decolonising effort back to addressing the structural issues of the racist circumstances of POC academics persisting within the colonial and imperial environment of the professoriate. Participants in this roundtable will engage in this critical discussion of the importance of upholding racialised discourses in challenging an IR that continues to dehumanise and depersonalise its interlocutors.
