Black History Month: Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies hosts Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper
The Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) organised a 2024 Black History Month (BHM) event with Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, Queen Mary, University of London.
The event took place on 16 October 2024 and opened with a welcome from Professor Paul Johnson OBE, the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Professor Ipek Demir, the Director of CERS.
In his talk, Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, Lecturer in Social and Public Policy in the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London, addressed the audience focusing on ‘Anti-colonialism, Abolition and the Nationalist Backlash’ which was followed by a lively Q&A session.
A full recording of this talk is now available to watch on the CERS website.
Abstract: While 2020 saw the largest anti-racist protests in British history, 2024 has seen fascism attempt to reclaim the streets. For the antiracism of the BLM and Palestine Solidarity demonstrators, racialised people are criminalised as criminals, terrorists or illegals. For the far-right, Whites are the victims of a state which is too soft on borders, law and order. This lecture considers how these two contrasting critiques of racial crisis ended up pointing the finger at each other. I intend on doing this by considering how the liberal centrism of the Labour Party and its supporters have attempted to satisfy the left by adopting terms like institutional racism, while also trying to satisfy the right, by continuing to expand police, prison and border power. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this balancing act has satisfied neither party, resulting in a surge in both radical anti-racism at the grassroots, and radical nationalism on the streets. The resolution of these tensions won’t just shape the fate of Britain’s racial landscape, but the terrain upon which the future of politics, economics and the environment, is fought.
The Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Leeds. The centre engages the fields of race and ethnicity, decoloniality, migration and diaspora in a conversation in order to identify and unpack current trends in the global and political order, and thus enable us to contribute to better and more adequate understandings of our globalised world.
CERS members include over forty academics, visiting scholars, postdocs and PhD students working across a range of disciplines in Leeds, the UK and globally. CERS is based in the School of Sociology and Social Policy (SSP) but has members across the university. Irrespective of discipline, if you carry out research in these fields and would like to join CERS, contact CERS Director Professor Ipek Demir.
