Single Review on past events

Abstract:
Why is race an issue worth to discuss in academic circles? The most obvious answer is that it poses severe social injustice. In order to understand why this is the case and more importantly how we can change it we have to understand how the concept “race” works in our language. What is its explanatory and epistemic role? Does “race” pick out a real entity and if so, what kind? In my talk, I will give a brief overview of the current debate, explain why we need to talk about “race” and what the epistemic costs are if we don’t.

Why this event series? - Earlier this year, people in the US and around the world came together to protest against institutionalized racism and racialized violence. At the Zukunftskolleg, we decided that we cannot stay silent at such a moment and expressed our solidarity with this movement. In order to translate this solidarity into action, we set up a series of commitments.

This event series is part of our commitment to address institutional racism in our place of work, in research and teaching, in academia.The approach taken by this event series is broad. It features events on the fundamentals of racism, underpinning biases contributing to racist discrimination and different antiracist approaches, examples of research related to racism and racist discrimination from specific fields such as politics, anthropology and IT, a discussion of the experiences of African researchers in academia and the debate on racism and teaching, in particular curriculum design.
Although this event series started in solidarity with oppressed communities in the US, we are putting a special geographical focus on institutional racism and racist discrimination in Europe and Germany in order to highlight that racism is not an American issue, but an issue that concerns us all.