Race Space Research Articles

Imagining Bradford: Islam, Space, and Anxiety in Multitudes and Combustion

Two recent British performance works set in the north English city of Bradford— Multitudes (2015) and Combustion (2017)—consider the lived experiences of British Muslim communities. Both plays are set against the backdrop of particular sociopolitical experiences that have affected Britain, including young people joining extremist militant groups and pedophilic grooming rings. The plays portray these communities as tied to the history of Pakistani, working-class migration to the UK. However, in doing so, both plays imagine Bradford as a site of conflict between Islam and the West when viewed through literature on place/space and the racialization of space. This imagining reifies a dangerous “clash of civilizations” logic while neglecting the city’s complexity, rearticulating Islam and its adherents as Britain’s social bogeymen. The plays’ use of the offstage space furthers this process, ultimately functioning to racialize the audience’s imagination. Ultimately, the plays create an anxious spatial politics vis-à-vis British Muslim communities in the UK that complicate theatrical efforts at representing the experience of British Muslimness.

“Our skin is a monument”: corpo, raça, mulher em alguma poesia africana em português

My article focuses on how poetic word works as an instrument of emancipation in issues related to gender and race in the Portuguese-speaking African space and diaspora. Starting from the 1950s and from the notebook / manifesto Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesaorganized by Mário Pinto de Andrade and Francisco José Tenreiro, and considering the idea that knowledge and its artistic manifestations create genealogies of concepts, I intend to present a brief overview to illustrate the moments of rupture and cleavage that have existed in the evolution of such themes. In this context, particular attention will also be paid to the most recent experiences of new textualities created in Portugal by Afro-descendant and anti-racist subjectivities, such as Djidiu: A Herança do Ouvido, an idea of collective textual production contaminated by practices such as rap or slam poetry.

A Developing Arms Race in Outer Space? De-Constructing the Dynamics in the Field of Anti-Satellite Weapons

Fears about the militarization of space are widespread. For example, the recent development of Anti-Satellite (ASAT) capabilities by rising powers like China and India is often described as a technologically driven arms race. This article takes a social constructivist approach to deconstruct the dynamics of this supposed arms race. Using a case study of Mission Shakti, the 2019 Indian ASAT test, the conclusion is that the ASAT arms race is more complex than it seems at first glance. Most importantly, states seem less motivated by security gains but frequently make status-seeking arguments. This offers possibilities for de-securitizing outer space again.

The Stuplime Loops of Becoming-Slug: A Prosthetic Intervention in Orientalist Animality

The Stuplime Loops of Becoming-Slug: A Prosthetic Intervention in Orientalist Animality

The Impact of Racial Identity and Social Spaces on the Academic Experiences of Biracial Students: A Phenomenographic Study for School Administrative Intervention

This study explored the identity and social spaces that affects academic performances, and behavioral difficulties of biracial students. As teachers have direct experiences with biracial students in every working days in school, these serve as an opportunity for the researcher to study the academic experiences of biracial learners. This research paper is qualitative research that used the phenomenographic approach. Phenomenography is investigative, and, explanatory as, it charts the different ways on how the participants understand, conceptualize, perceive and observe the different aspects of a phenomenon in the environment around them. The participants were grade school teachers wherein their experiences with the biracial students were explored. The researcher interviewed the participants, and the interviews were transcribed verbatim. As findings, five themes were drawn by the researcher from the interview. These are: classroom profile of biracial students, academic performances, behavioral difficulties, racial identity shaped by the parents and environment, and the intervention.

A Jim Crow State of Mind: The Racialization of Space in the McKinney, Texas Pool Party Incident

Violence against Black bodies is not new, but contemporary discussions of these matters often focus on police or other state-sanctioned violence against male Black bodies. While this is important, it ignores the perils all Black bodies face as they navigate White spaces. In this article, I utilize an analytical framework, which highlights intersectional bodies in order to expose the extent to which a Jim Crow-like mentality about where people belong still persists in U.S. society. I examine the 2015 McKinney, Texas, pool party incident as a case study to demonstrate how gender and the social status of children operated to imperil Black (and Brown) bodies in the social environment of a predominantly White upper middle-class suburban neighborhood. I offer a counternarrative reading of the incident utilizing a framework I term bodies out of place, a critical extension on critical race theory scholarship and the work of Nirmal Puwar (2004). The article makes an important contribution toward understanding White epistemologies of ignorance with respect to the existence and maintenance of continuing racial oppression and White supremacy in society.

Right to the Classroom: Seeking Spatial Justice in Kindergarten

This article uses Lefebvre’s concept of right to the city to frame the practices of a Kindergarten teacher and her ability to create a more racially equitable classroom space. It explains how the teacher and researcher collaboratively engaged in racial spaces analysis and critical race theory to develop greater racial spatial awareness. The teacher was able to use this awareness to resist neoliberalism and the racialization space in her classroom. The article explains how framing classroom practice according to right to the city can help teachers and researchers work together towards spatial justice in schools, where the educational rights of students of color are not limited by reductive notions of property based in whiteness.

Can We Talk About Race? Exploring Online Comments about Race-Related Shootings

A quantitative content analysis was conducted of online comments (N = 1,840) posted on news stories about 4 shooting deaths involving Black Americans and police officers to assess how Americans talk about race in the digital space. Findings showed that uncivil attributes, such as profanity or name-calling, were more frequent than deliberative attributes, such as using evidence to support one’s point. Findings suggested there are scant but meaningful deliberative discussions about race in the comments we studied, but incivility mires that conversation. Results are discussed in terms of critical race theory and deliberative democracy.

Building the Digitally Gated Community: The Case of Nextdoor

The neighborhood is a historic and contemporary site of the assertion of white racial and economic domination, particularly over Black people. Although there is strong evidence that whites continue to prefer racially segregated neighborhoods, fifty years of fair housing jurisprudence has made it more difficult to openly bar non-white residents. Among the many strategies used to protect white domination of residential space is the coordinated surveillance and policing of non-white people. In this paper, I show how Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, has become an important platform for the surveillance and policing of race in residential space, enabling the creation of what I call digitally gated communities. First, I describe the history of the platform and the forms of segregation and surveillance it has supplemented or replaced. Second, I situate the platform in a broader analysis of carcerality as a mode and logic of regulating race in the United States. Third, using examples drawn from public reports about the site, I illustrate how race is surveilled and policed in the context of gentrification and integration. Finally, I discuss implications, questions, and future issues that might arise on the platform.

A Horse Race in High Dimensional Space

In this paper, we study the predictive power of dense and sparse estimators in a high dimensional space. We propose a new forecasting method, called Elastically Weighted Principal Components Analysis (EWPCA) that selects the variables, with respect to the target variable, taking into account the collinearity among the data using the Elastic Net soft thresholding. Then, we weight the selected predictors using the Elastic Net regression coefficient, and we finally apply the principal component analysis to the new “elastically” weighted data matrix. We compare this method to common benchmark and other methods to forecast macroeconomic variables in a data-rich environment, dived into dense representation, such as Dynamic Factor Models and Ridge regressions and sparse representations, such as LASSO regression. All these models are adapted to take into account the linear dependency of the macroeconomic time series. Moreover, to estimate the hyperparameters of these models, including the EWPCA, we propose a new procedure called “brute force”. This method allows us to treat all the hyperparameters of the model uniformly and to take the longitudinal feature of the time-series data into account. Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, the “brute force” method to estimate the hyperparameters is more stable and gives better forecasting performances, in terms of MSFE, than the traditional criteria used in the literature to tune the hyperparameters. This result holds for all samples sizes and forecasting horizons. Secondly, our two-step forecasting procedure enhances the forecasts’ interpretability. Lastly, the EWPCA leads to better forecasting performances, in terms of mean square forecast error (MSFE), than the other sparse and dense methods or naive benchmark, at different forecasts horizons and sample sizes.

Strategic Landscape of South Asia and Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space

ABSTRACTSouth Asia is in part volatile because of the historical rivalry between India and Pakistan. After non-conventional and conventional military buildups in the past, an arms race in the domain of outer space is now a possibility. Space is an advantageous frontier for military uses. In this context, the consensus in international law defines space as a global commons to be used for peaceful purposes. Nonetheless, space powers, including India, engage in space militarization, which can lead to the weaponization of space. India is motivated in this regard by aspirations of regional hegemony and to balance its capabilities with respect to China in an effort to counter China’s increasing influence in South Asia. These developments posit adverse effects on the strategic equation in South Asia, leading to strategic instability, and can undermine nuclear deterrence and bring about a South Asian arms race in space. Moreover, the security dilemma in South Asia has prompted defensive and offensive reactions from rival states in the region, exacerbating repercussions on the South Asian strategic landscape. Analysis of the issues suggests that keeping space free from weaponization can alleviate strategic instability in South Asia.

УСКОЛЬЗАЮЩАЯ МАТЕРИЯ (предотвращение гонки вооружений в космическом пространстве)

The subject of the prevention of arms race in the outer space is not new, but remains important for strategic stability and international security. The laws of space dynamics and its physical properties harshly limit its use, in particular the introduction of space-based weapon systems. This is exactly the reason why up to now all spacecraft of military or dual purpose are performing only information-command support of armed forces in traditional land, sea and air environments, as well as of ballistic missiles and anti-missiles which transit space as part of their trajectories. Nonetheless, a number of states are developing and testing anti-satellite systems of various basing modes. Hence, in the foreseeable future, the outer space may turn into the environment of arms race and use of force, prone with the growing threat of armed conflicts, their fast escalation to nuclear war, and of the collapse of arms control regimes. In 2008, at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament, Russia and China proposed a joint draft of the “Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects”. This draft has been met by the approval of the international community, except for the United States and its allies. Nonetheless, this draft treaty will hardly become a legal agreement, even if the U.S. attitude towards the subject changes in a positive way, since the draft has a number of substantive deficiencies and omissions. Apparently, if space arms control is ever to become a matter of practical negotiations, this would be a long and phased process reminiscent of the strategic arms limitation and reduction (to which space systems are technically closest), rather than a single overwhelming treaty as chemical or biological conventions. Despite all the complexities of the issue, in a better political environment, a first step might be feasible in the form of an agreement on the prohibition on testing anti-satellite systems of any basing mode against real space objects. If such a partial first step were made – it may pave the way to the follow-on treaties with broader and more stringent provisions and intrusive verification, as happened in the history of U.S. – Soviet/Russian strategic arms control after the first SALT 1 agreements of 1972.

Racial trauma, microaggressions, and becoming racially innocuous: The role of acculturation and White supremacist ideology.

Acculturation theories often describe how individuals in the United States adopt and incorporate dominant cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors such as individualism and self-reliance. Theorists tend to perceive dominant cultural values as "accessible to everyone," even though some dominant cultural values, such as preserving White racial status, are reserved for White people. In this article, the authors posit that White supremacist ideology is suffused within dominant cultural values, connecting the array of cultural values into a coherent whole and bearing with it an explicit status for White people and people of color. Consequently, the authors frame acculturation as a continuing process wherein some people of color learn explicitly via racism, microaggressions, and racial trauma about their racial positionality; White racial space; and how they are supposed to accommodate White people's needs, status, and emotions. The authors suggest that acculturation may mean that the person of color learns to avoid racial discourse to minimize eliciting White fragility and distress. Moreover, acculturation allows the person of color to live in proximity to White people because the person of color has become unthreatening and racially innocuous. The authors provide recommendations for research and clinical practice focused on understanding the connections between ideology, racism, microaggressions and ways to create psychological healing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cultivating sacred spaces: a racial affinity group approach to support critical educators of color

ABSTRACTDespite repeated pleas for diversifying the U.S. teacher force, teachers of color who are committed to social justice are often unsupported and even pushed out via structural, interpersonal, and pedagogical obstacles within the profession. In response to neoliberal, colorblind, and apolitical approaches to teacher development and support, educators and organizers have reclaimed and reframed their pedagogies through critical professional development and grassroots activism to center healing from the impacts of oppression in its myriad forms . The ethnographic case study in this article examines how, over the course of three years, a grassroots racial affinity group became an important space for learning and healing for its members. I explain how the group explicitly centered twelve members’ voices, needs, and collective knowledge, and in so doing: (a) collectively cultivated a critical, humanizing, and healing space for their sustainability; and (b) navigated various positions within socially toxic education institutions and organizations. I conclude by discussing how and why critical racial affinity spaces for educators of color are necessary in order to support their personal, political, relational, and pedagogical growth, which has implications on their retention and leadership within the field.

Colonial Specters: The Extramuro, History, Memory, and Urbanization in La Paz, Bolivia, 1900-1947

This essay examines the racialization of space and the role of memory in the twentieth-century urbanization of La Paz, Bolivia. Historical memory linked particular races to specific spaces; this in turn helped determine spending on infrastructure, hygiene, and other urban projects. The essay analyzes the ways in which the extramuro (outside the walls of the city) was marked as the place for undesirable, but necessary elements of the city, and as the point of origin for the filth and a whole host of diseases within the city. The relationship between La Paz and the discourses on indígenas in public space in the twentieth century takes center stage: these discourses marked indígenas as undesirable and yet redeemable. This essay analyzes the close connection between the construction of race and the urbanization of that same space. I conclude by reassessing the links between race, space, and memory in Bolivia.

Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

This article analyzes how the spatial metaphor of 53206, a zip code within the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, connects with crises in the legitimacy of policing and politicians’ claims to care about Black lives. It examines how, in the context of deepening racialized poverty, ongoing mobilizations against police violence, and increasing rates of violent crime, liberal and conservative rhetoric about 53206 largely obscures the roles that decades of deindustrialization and labor assaults, metropolitan racial and wealth segregation, and public school and welfare restructuring play in producing racial and class inequality to instead emphasize racializing tropes about ‘Black-on-Black crime,’ broken homes, and uncaring Black communities. Situating the examination within critical analysis of urban poverty, geographic scholarship on the racialization of space, and critical criminology, the authors consider the salience of the term territorial stigmatization as a means to understand how historical and contemporary processes of racialized capitalism shape Milwaukee’s urban and social divides. They argue that discursive constructions of 53206 and the rhetorical posture of saving Black lives deployed by elected officials have had the effect of entrenching policing power while further rendering neighborhoods like Milwaukee’s Northside as already dead and dying.

Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

AbstractRecent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA)—the production of food in cities—argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio‐temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, I propose that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes. As an analytical framework, racial capitalism considers how distinct forms of colonization, settler colonialism, and White supremacy function relationally as part of a unified system of capitalist accumulation built on the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference. By focusing on UA's contributions to racial Othering, the racialization of space, and dispossession, on the one hand, and on struggles of resistance and self‐determination, on the other, this review attempts to sheds new light on the dialectical, “both/and” nature of UA, while also addressing recent calls to consider how settler colonial logics persist in the contemporary North American city.

Shifting boundaries of racial space in post-apartheid South Africa: The case of Afrikaner youth in East London

South African democracy has brought about changes like freedom of associations, as opposed to apartheid which emphasised separateness of races and cultures. This social change warrants new ways of living among South Africans, especially among young people. Using a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews, this study examined how white Afrikaans-speaking university students carve out their identities, given the reality that political, social and cultural circumstances have changed in the last two decades. Participants consisted of Afrikaner university students, based in East London. This study attempts to understand difficulties and privileges associated with being a young white South African 20 years after the fall of the apartheid regime. Seeing that the participants were not born during apartheid, we wanted to understand the extent to which their parents’ perception, influence and stories affected the way participants identify themselves, their place and their roles in the democratic South Africa. The study found that Afrikaner youth are caught between two worlds: the democratic and contemporary social context, and their parents’ traditional or orthodox way of seeing things. This study also found out that, in spite of some of their parents’ influence on racism and the perception of the South African community about white people, these young people are able to carve out their own identity in which they are able to shift racial space boundaries.

Mapping the Postcolonial Across Urban and Suburban College Access Geographies

ABSTRACTIn US cities, a domino effect of concentrating poverty and suburbanizing wealth shapes discourses of local higher education access for residents of color. How the racialization of space mirrors colonial binaries of Good/Evil, Black/White and Civilized/Uncivilized is part and parcel to understanding city and county geographies surrounding college campuses. Although the college access and choice literature addresses racial and ethnic issues related to the likelihood of students of color attending college, the literature excludes how external campus racial climates are part of postcolonial geographies that contribute to racial and ethnic diversity on local college campuses. Situated in the City of Rochester, New York, I employ Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect and analyze data from the US Census and Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS). This article finds that there are postcolonial relationships in the racial composition of urban and suburban areas, local colleges, urban economic underdevelopment, and transportation.

‘An Injurious Effect on the Neighbourhood’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Decline and Racialised Class Identities in Late Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

Spatial narratives of neighbourhood decline – stories about threats to neighbourhood resources – were crucial in reinscribing racialised class boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1894, white middle-class property owners in San Francisco’s Powell Street district protested the Board of School Directors’ decision to relocate the city’s only Chinese public school to a condemned building in their neighbourhood, leading to the renovation of the school’s existing structure within Chinatown and new efforts to restrict both Chinese and Japanese urban settlement. I analyse this event to show the importance of space for the race–class intersection. Protesters described the financial, social and moral costs of living near a Chinese school, thereby establishing racial criteria for middle-class identity and mobility. Theories of racial space must consider discursive links between race, class and space because spatial narratives that reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities help to maintain the racial order.