Race, Culture and Equality Working Group

RACE members engage in individual and collective research. As a group, we are interested in a diversity of research relating to race, including race in the academy, colonialism/decolonisation, racial oppression and diasporic histories.

In 2021, RACE Secretary Dr Pat Noxolo was awarded the prestigious Murchinson Award from the RGS-IBG for her research (you can watch her acceptance speech here).

Here are some recent examples of our research involvement:

Fi Wi Road (Our Road): Freeing Up Futures for Black British Geographers (Antipode Foundation)

Pat Noxolo (University of Birmingham; Race, Culture and Equality Working Group of the RGS-IBG; and Society for Caribbean Studies) and Cynthia Nkiruka Anyadi (Black Geographers)

The phrase ‘Fi Wi Road’ comes from Jamaican poet Kei Miller (2014).  In a collection that contends with conventional cartography’s colonial violence and considers Jamaican people’s own modes of place-making, Miller (p. 54) asserts: “Them roads was mapped out by song… Listen nuh, dem roads don’t sound no harmony all like you would used to – fi wi road don’t round up or decent up them mouth… Fi wi road say reeeeyyy! Big chune a play!”  Within a similar mood of working towards the joyful freeing of our own futures, this project centres black geography undergraduate voices within the discipline and their modes of making space within it, valuing the joy and creativity (and voicing the pain and isolation), through which they are making their own futures.  By creating eight paid summer internships, culminating in a critical, multi-vocal, black-led special issue for Antipode, the project aims to provide the academic experience and critical forums that will free up futures, not only for eight black pre-career researchers (PCRs) but also for the emergence of potential audiences of black British geographers, and by extension for a disciplinary space that can be radically open and empowering for black geographers.

Frontiers of Environmental Justice: Building Transoceanic Solidarity Between the Pacific, the Caribbean and the UK (Antipode Foundation)

Anja Kanngieser (University of Wollongong), Leon Sealey Huggins (University of Warwick), and the Race, Culture and Equality Working Group (Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers)

“Frontiers of Environmental Justice” was a closed two day workshop held on 8 and 9 July 2019, bringing together activists and social scientists from the UK, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Its aim was to think through questions of climate crisis and the ongoing violences of extractivist colonialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean. While calls for self-determination and climate strategies driven by on-the-ground communities have been coming from the Pacific and the Caribbean, organisers from Island nations have rarely been given space for self-representation in UK climate activism and scholarship. This workshop responded to this notable oversight. With specific attention to centring the experiences and expertise of Indigenous and LBT women, it focused on the campaigns of four policy makers and advocates from Jamaica, Belize (the Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management), and Fiji (Pacific Network on Globalisation; Diverse Voices for Action and Equality).

More info here.