RACE.ED Director announcement

Dear RACE.ED community,

It is a joy to return to RACE.ED as Director and to begin this next chapter together. The role of a director is small in relation to the work before us: to deepen antiracism while experimenting with what lies beyond it, and what decolonial futures we might make possible. RACE.ED can be a place where communities (in the plural!) of scholars, students, staff, artists, activists, civil society and policymakers come together to exchange knowledge, build relationships, and rethink power through an ethics of care and accountability.

Over the next three years, I hope we can expand what an academic network can be: a space for teaching, researching, learning and strategising other-wise. We will reconnect people and projects across the University of Edinburgh and beyond the borders of national and disciplinary grounds, provide a platform for postgraduate and early-career colleagues, and build collaborations.

At the heart of my work as a director, I am holding a simple commitment that is not only to critique the worlds and structures we have inherited from colonial power, but to cultivate the methods, relationships and collective imagination needed to promote racial and ethnic diversity, equality and repair. Keep tuned to our creative writing workshops, seminars, podcast, reflections on decolonising the curriculum, among other ideas that is coming up with(in) the network.

Audre Lorde reminds us that we must know the tools of existing power even as we participate in redefining another power, the power of the future. I would like RACE.ED to inhabit precisely that tension, attentive to the histories and structures that shape our present, while making room for new possibilities in producing, validating and exchanging knowledge. I warmly invite you to join us in imagining, questioning and building what comes next…together.

Katucha Bento

Director RACE.ED Network