This Conjuncture: race, community, politics in the context of far-right escalation and resistance

In his seminal dissections of Thatcherism and the moral panic over mugging, Hall’s conjunctural analysis encouraged the need to pause and reflect on significant points in history when multiple processes intersect to create a unique combination of political and social constraints and possibilities. Centring attention on the present moment, this workshop responds to the need to make sense of the current conjuncture in the United Kingdom, to document and understand the increasingly entrenched rightward leaning shift, which mobilises on an intractable mix of revanchist nationalism, anti-immigrant fervour, cultural and status anxiety, all underpinned by racism. On the global stage, far-right and populist leaders such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban and Meloni mirror and amplify this rightward shift. Centre-left political parties (such the Social Democrats in Denmark or Germany) have adopted rightwing anti-immigration rhetoric and politics, with effects on both their electoral success and the wider legitimation of far-right and populist politics. These developments reverberate in local communities and streets, whether in the form of organised campaigns to display union jacks on lamp posts across the UK (opposed by local communities); and an MP’s racially-inflected criticisms of Handsworth in Birmingham as slum-like or devoid of ‘white faces’. The current conjuncture has also seen a mobilisation of anti-racist activity. Within UK electoral politics, by-elections in Caerphilly and Gorton and Denton saw the election of parties (respectively, Plaid Cymru and the Greens) who explicitly rejected Reform UK and Labour’s anti-migrant politics. An anti-far right march on 28 March drew at least 500,000 people, according to organisers. This workshop offers a space to map the current conjuncture.

DAY 1

9:30-10: Welcome and refreshments

10-12: Class and Race - “race is the modality through which class is lived”

● Articulating anti-essentialist whiteness with Stuart Hall: Steve Dixon-Smith (Goldsmiths)

● Working Class, Apparently: Race, Belonging, and the British Conjuncture: Nysha Chantel (University of Wolverhampton)

● Capturing Class, Problematising Politics: Performative Photography, Brechtian Estrangement, and Class Representation in Britain between the 1980s and the Present: Carla Hamer (Birmingham City University) and Francesco Sani (De Montfort University)

12-12:45: Lunch

12:45 - 3.15: Conceptualising Race and Racism

● Cedric Robinson’s ‘racial regimes’ as a conjunctural theory of racial capitalism: Tom Six (The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama University of London)

● Gramsci without Guarantees: Stuart Hall, Race and Resistance: Robert P. Jackson (Manchester Metropolitan University)

● Thinking While Black: MAGA, Race, and Anti-Intellectualism: Gil Rodman (University of Minnesota)

● Contemporary Racism: New Forms, Old Roots? Sadiya Akram (University of Birmingham)

15 mins break

3: 30 - 4:30: Keynote: John Clarke (Open University): The Country and the City: Reworking British racisms (title tbc)

DAY 2

10-12: Politics of Race and Immigration

● Fairness as fiction: how immigration policy constructs the British public: David Stark (University of Birmingham)

● The Uses of Crisis: COVID-19, Digital Bordering Technology, and the Expansion of Immigrant Surveillance in Massachusetts: Nabila Islam (Brown University)

● Framing the Flag: Photography in the Hostile Environment: Sarah El-Taki, (University of Copenhagen)

12-12:30 Lunch

12:30 - 2.30: Resistance and organising

● Black feminist organizing in London: Lucien Baskin, Robert Robinson, Frankie Chappell and Maithi Rajeshkumar

● Forming ‘Communities of Resistance’ via Community Assemblies and Community Wealth Building as ‘Commonsense Alternatives’: Nigel Carter

● Reflections on the past, present and futures of anti-racist activism: Kirsten Forkert (Birmingham City University)

15 mins break

2.45 - 4.15: Media, representation and the city

● Policing the ‘Crisis’, Revisited: Towards an Historical Criminology of Media Responses to Violence: Adam Kluge (University of Oxford)

● By-elections in Birmingham, focuses on the Wards of Northfield North, Northfield South and Monyhull in which Reform and the Green Party competed: Richard Fern (University of Birmingham)

4:15 - 5: Final Comments and Close