Race and Decolonisation

Decolonial approach: To use reading groups/ seminar series to develop a decolonial approach that can be activiated in our investigatiosn and esp. Bradford Convergence/Social machine enactment in Year 3. This includes approaching British industrial heritage as a record of UK capitalist and colonial expansions and extraction.
Develop racial consciousness: To enable those interested in developing personal racial consciousness in ways that enhance the decolonial approach and enable more members of the team to directly collaborate and build partnerships.
Bradford Convergence: To use the Bradford Convergence to activate the decolonial approach. This will include considering whiteness within sources. It will also include short term fellowship posts for Bradford-based people to run inquiries and for us to walk alongside in terms of social machine understandings. Specifics of this needs to be developed alongside Bradford Convergence conversations.

What questions do we need to ask to treat the materials we are working with as a record of UK colonial and capitalist expansion and extraction?

Who produced the data? Where? For what purposes?
How can we mitigate the colonial structures intrinsic in the data?
How do we always understand any UK data to have a constitutive outside of international networks of trade and extraction?
How do we read for the normative, for whiteness and other normative concepts of gender, sexuality and ability?
How do we attend to the politics of datafication (as not all knowledge can be turned into data and not all people want to be turned into data)?
How do we make ourselves accountable for the biases not only in the data but in the technology?

What questions do we need to ask to create an anti-racist and anti-oppressive national collection as social machine?

How can we design for decentralisation, autonomy and self-organisation and minimise the spaces that might become embattled? (Designing out the conditions which intensify the worse of online spaces?)
How can we – when it arises – carefully structure space that might facilitate disagreement without personal attacks or racist/oppressive attacks? (i.e. rather than a free for all forum, would this be a mediation process that would arise at certain times?)
What types of decision making (and how can this work to the principle of subsidiarity) might be necessary – and how can we minimise decision making?
Is there a need for a constitutional process that is open to revision? How can a loose but effective anti-racist and anti-oppressive norms be collaboratively developed and open to revision (based on cycles of learning and reflection)?
Where might facilitation and holding spaces necessary – how do we minimise this?

The readings and the notes from the Race and Decolonisation reading group are documented on the Research Discussion Group page.