Anti-racism

Projects funded in 2022

• Political Discourses Against Racism and Caste

  Researchers: Clayton Chin (SSPS, Arts), Farrah Ahmed (Law), Hamza Bin Jehangir (SPSS, Arts)

  External partners: ACU, Jindal Global Law School, Jawaharlal Nehru Uni, Delhi

  This pilot project aims to initiate comparative and global approaches to studying anti-racism. To do this, it aims to comparatively investigate and evaluate anti-racist and anti-casteist state action across three countries. The three chosen case studies are (a) the Canadian government’s national anti-racism strategy (2019-2022); (b) the Australian Human Rights Commission‘s national anti-racism strategy (2013-2022); and (c) the Indian state’s constitutional and legal anti-caste aspirations and actions (1950-2022). To facilitate such a comparison, this project draws on theories from legal, political and sociological approaches. It proceeds by exploring the relations, synergies and tensions between anti-racism and anti-casteism to frame the analysis and provide the conceptual and normative resources needed.

  These case studies have been chosen for their potential to (a) enhance understanding of the range of anti-casteist and anti-racism initiatives that states could deploy; (b) illuminate the extent to which anti-casteist and anti-racism initiatives have overlapping aims, strategies and outcomes; and (c) explore how anti-racist and anti-casteist discourses might relate to state action on race and caste.

  Expected outcomes include increased understanding of state approaches to tackling racism and casteism as systemic issues and fostering inclusive citizenship, which should ultimately contribute to the creation of more effective state anti-racism and anti-casteism strategies.

• Exacerbation and attenuation of racism during and after the 2019-2020 bushfires

  Researchers: Iain Walker (Psychology, MDHS), Cameo Dalley (SCC, Arts)

  External partners: Indigenous orgs, ANU

  Natural disasters place enormous stresses on individuals, families, and communities. They often bring people together, enhancing cohesion and belongingness; but they also can increase tension and hostility. Our earlier work after the Australian 2019-2020 bushfires produced anecdotal evidence that, during the fires, Indigenous people in some communities experienced greater incidents of racism. These personal reports raise many concerns, including about the role of racism as a barrier to emergency response services, which are known to support resilience and mental health recovery following bushfire disaster.

  On the other hand, we also found anecdotal evidence of Aboriginal agencies leading community support efforts during and after the bushfires, for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous locals, thus reducing racism.

  This project will develop from that earlier work to explore the experiences of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people during and after the bushfires, in two country townships in Victoria and New South Wales. The project seeks to investigate direct and indirect experiences of racism and of communities coming together. Personal experiences need to be understood at individual, community, and institutional levels. For this, the project’s interdisciplinary approach will draw from psychological frameworks of racism, community cohesion, and identity, and from anthropological frameworks on Indigeneity. We will work with Aboriginal community leaders to scope the questions of most relevance for them, to enhance adoption and uptake of the project’s results. We anticipate being able to suggest community-level actions to enhance cohesion and reduce racism, particularly in crises such as during and after natural disasters.

• Conspiracy Cultures: Racism and the Crisis of Freedom in Pandemic Times

  In recent decades, a range of prominent conspiracy theories rooted in racism have proliferated throughout what is sometimes called the ‘liberal multicultural west’. While some of these individual theories have been the subject of existing research, an analysis of what connects them—both in terms of overlap in their content, and associated personnel—is yet to be conducted.

  This project will address this gap by first utilising digital data-collection methods to conduct an empirical analysis of the extent to which prominent conspiracy theories overlap in terms of online content and personnel. By doing this, the project aims to trace the emergence and evolution of a range of prominent racially charged conspiracy theories that seem to distort established forms of racism and anti-racism and conceptualisations of racism to strategically advance a racist agenda.

  The project aims to understand the underlying dynamics that have allowed conspiracy cultures to flourish and to continually emerge and evolve. Examples of these conspiracies are the QAnon theory; the Trojan Horse Affair; the Great Replacement Theory; calls to ban Critical Race Theory in schools; and the idea COVID-19 was a ‘plandemic’ created by the Chinese state. In each of these conspiracies, a malevolent racial and racialized force is depicted as acting covertly upon the liberal multicultural west and encroaching on its freedom. This project examines the presumed links between (lost) freedom and race as articulated in these theories and explores how cultures of conspiracy advance racism by constructing those they racialise as simultaneously advancing upon them.

  This project will contribute to anti-racism scholarship by first establishing and mapping the extent to which racist online conspiracy groups overlap, as well as by expanding knowledge of how the diffuse phenomenon of conspiricisation, fuelled by paranoia of invasion and contamination, is integral to contemporary racism, providing a deeper understanding of how ‘conspiricisation’ and racism not only overlap but are genealogically linked. By understanding the conspircisation of race, or race as conspiricisation, the project will provide a strong platform from which continued research into this constantly evolving phenomenon, and contemporary racism more broadly, can occur.

  Additionally, the project will investigate the extent to which the work of anti-racism itself is constructed by racial conspiracy theorists under the label “woke politics”, as an organising force that is conspiring to disrupt existing social, economic and political arrangements. These project outcomes may assist fellow researchers, policymakers, and community and advocacy groups who are working on anti-racism to do so more effectively.