Waging the war on race: the necessity of an intellectual insurgency

This webinar outlined the history and intellectual project of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research. Originally formed in Magandjin as a refuge for scholars facing the hostility of the Australian academy to scholarship on race and racism, it soon began to put its intellectual resources to work with those on the frontlines of struggle against racial violence in the Australian colony.

In courts, inquests, inquiries, protests and testimonies, it draws inspiration from the staunch tradition of Brisbane Blacks, foregrounding Black sovereign theorising as it confronts the reality of state murder, disappearance and incarceration. The ICRR project has moved from refuge to fortress, joining with others challenging the failure and complicity of liberal visions of anti-racism and state multiculturalism in an era of open genocide and white supremacy.

This work has pushed us to reconceptualise our role as academics. The power of ideas and their ability to shape the world is inherent in the idea of race scholarship - but plainly, in and of themselves, monographs and articles have little bearing upon Black life worlds. We reflect on what we have learned from working with those on the frontline of antiracist struggle: we must mobilise all our resources to contribute to antiracist intellectual insurgency inside and outside the academy.

Monday 20 August 2024

Speakers

Professor Chelsea Watego is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher, and is currently Executive Director of the Carumba Institute at QUT. Her scholarship seeks to build Indigenist Health Humanities - a research field that is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, and foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, a founding board member of Inala Wangarra (an Indigenous community development association within her community) and a co-director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research.

Dr David Singh is a settler originally from the UK, where he was a community organiser against racial violence and saturation policing and director of several municipal policy units. He is now the Academic Director of the ARC Indigenist Health Humanities project at QUT. He has taught refugee and social policy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and as a researcher specialises in race critical theory and its application in a range of policy areas including Indigenous health, education and policing. He is the co-host, with Professor Chelsea Watego, of 'Let's Talk - Blacking Knowing' on Triple A Radio, and co-director of the Institute of Collaborative Race Research.

Dr Elizabeth Strakosch is a white settler scholar whose work examines the dynamics of race and settler colonialism in public policy, and is senior lecturer at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is currently an ARC DECRA fellow, researching the connections between Indigenous policy and sovereign conflict across the liberal settler colonies. Liz is a co-director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, a board member of the Institute for Postcolonial Studies, and an Executive Officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, which seeks to provide an alternative Jewish perspective advocating for justice and Palestinian freedom.