Research

Below is an illustrative list of recent and current research projects being undertaken by members of RACE.ED. More projects coming soon….

A Scottish Approach to Race- Equality? (Nasar Meer, Royal Society of Edinburgh)

This Fellowship Project examines whether a distinctive approach to race in public policy has been developing in Scotland since Devolution, and in what ways this is related to discursive formations in the making and re-making of nationhood.

Our Bondage and Our Freedom (Celeste Bernier, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC))

To mark the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), a formerly enslaved and self-emancipated African American author, orator, philosopher, activist, statesman and social justice campaigner, this international project draws together academics, activists, archivists, curators, teachers and artists to discuss the activism and authorship not only of Frederick Douglass himself but of his wife, his daughters and his sons.

The Cartographie des Mémoires de l’Esclavage (Map of Memories of Slavery) (Nicola Frith, Arts and Humanities Research Council)

This website was one of the key outputs from an AHRC Leadership Fellowship focusing the French Republic, including its overseas departments in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, it maps the different sites of memory and the multiple forms of activism that are linked to commemorating the history of slavery and addressing its legacies in the present-day.

International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR) (Nicola Frith, Arts and Humanties Research Project (AHRC)

The INOSAAR is a collaborative project between the University of Edinburgh and Wheelock College at Boston University. It represents the first international network that brings together scholars and activists dedicated to reparations and other forms of transitional justice for the enslavement and genocide of peoples of African descent.

CARISCC (Caribbean In/Securities: Creativity and Negotiation in the Caribbean) (Carol Dixon, Leverhulme Trust)

This international, interdisciplinary research project and academic network examined how issues of security and insecurity (‘in/security’) relate to each other, and how creative practice reveals these inter-relationships within the context of the Caribbean region and its diaspora. Carol Ann Dixon worked as the Network Facilitator whilst also co-curating several touring art exhibitions and contributing research papers on visual arts themes at conferences, symposia and networking events held in Birmingham, Leeds, London, Amsterdam and Kingston, Jamaica

Freedom to Believe (Diana Paton, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC))

Over the last three centuries thousands of people in the Caribbean have been prosecuted for their religious and spiritual healing beliefs and practices. Stories about some of them have passed down within families, but there has been little public memory of most. Painstaking work in newspapers and colonial archives, however, has revealed information about many of those prosecuted. This website tells some of their stories and provides resources for teaching about the history of African-oriented religions and their suppression in the Caribbean. This project is part of a theatre in education project exploring Caribbean social and religious histories.

Human Shield Archive (Nicola Perugini)

The Human Shield Archive reconstructs the appearance of human shields in key historical moments and contemporary political and cultural sites and shows how this relatively marginal and controversial legal figure has transformed and taken on multiple meanings and political uses.