Année académique 2024-25 | SEMINAIRE Approches Critiques de la Race - Critical Approaches to Races

• Lionel Zevounou | 10 OCT 2024 ULB - Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Bruxelles, bâtiment S, 12e étage, salle Rokkan

Titre : “L'égalité dans ses rapports à la race. Des discriminations subies par les travailleurs marocains de la SNCF (1970-2018)”

Cette enquête propose une plongée au cœur d’une discrimination instituée à l’échelle nationale visant des milliers de travailleurs marocains de la SNCF : les « Chibanis ». Accompagnés de leurs descendants, plus de 800 travailleurs ont introduit un recours devant le Conseil des prud’hommes de Paris puis devant la Cour d’appel du même ressort qui, le 31 janvier 2018, reconnaît définitivement l’existence d’une discrimination en raison de la nationalité. Ce recours demandait réparation pour les discriminations subies dès les années 1970 par la venue de travailleurs marocains dans le secteur des chemins de fer français. Alors que ces travailleurs relevaient d’une convention bilatérale signée entre la France et le Maroc en 1963, garantissant les mêmes droits entre travailleurs français et marocains, la Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer français (SNCF) et l’État vont s’attacher à les intégrer au sein d’un régime (celui d’auxiliaire) générant une discrimination raciale à l’encontre de cette catégorie de travailleurs marocains. En rabattant le critère de la nationalité (nécessaire à l’accession au statut de cheminot) sur la jouissance des droits sociaux du travailleur, ce dispositif discriminatoire mis en place par la SNCF avec les moyens actifs de l’État (français et marocain) va perdurer, alors même que la France ne va cesser de ratifier plusieurs instruments internationaux interdisant les discriminations fondées sur la nationalité ou la race (OIT, CESDH, directive « race », etc.)

Lionel Zevounou est maître de conférences en droit  public à l'université Paris Nanterre, chercheur au Centre de théorie et analyse du droit (CTAD, UMR 7074).
 

• Solène Brun | 14 NOV 2024 - VUB, BsoG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome

Titre: “Diffuser et vulgariser les approches critiques de la race en sociologie : retour sur deux expériences de co-écriture”

 A partir de l'ouvrage récemment paru aux éditions Textuel et co-écrit avec Claire Cosquer (chercheuse FNS senior, Université de Lausanne), Solène Brun reviendra sur les ressorts de la domination blanche et l'intérêt de justement penser les choses en termes de domination (plutôt, par exemple, qu'en termes de privilèges). La séance sera également l'occasion de revenir sur les manières d'enquêter sur la blanchité, position raciale indicible parmi toutes.

Solène Brun est docteure en sociologie et chargée de recherche au CNRS depuis 2023. Elle travaille sur les questions raciales et les processus de racialisation en France. Elle a co-écrit, avec Claire Cosquer, Sociologie de la race (Armand Colin) en 2022, puis La domination blanche (Textuel) en 2024. Elle a aussi publié Derrière le mythe métis (La Découverte) en 2024.
 

• Alana Helberg-Proctor | 12 DEC 2024  ULB, Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Bruxelles, bâtiment S, 12e étage, salle Doucy

Title: “Doing diversity in health(care), doing race?”

Inclusion and diversity are currently 'hot' topics in health research, care, and policy in Europe. In recent years there have been calls at national and EU levels for healthcare professionals, health researchers, and policymakers in Europe to attend to diversity and inclusion. Bias and inequality in health and healthcare are produced by the exclusion of diversity, but bias is also produced by the inclusion of racist and stereotypical thinking in medicine and healthcare. While inclusion and diversity are indeed crucial topics in healthcare and medical education, operationalizing diversity around ethnicity and population differences is a difficult task with many pitfalls and complications. During this lecture I discuss how scientific knowledge and facts about ethnicity and race related to health are utilized and produced in the Netherlands, and beyond, and how these modes of scientific knowledge production are deeply and problematically intertwined with society and politics.
 
Dr. Alana Helberg-Proctor is an Assistant Professor in the Health, Care and the Body programme group at the UvA Department of Anthropology. In her work, she focuses on diversity and inequality in healthcare and medical science. She investigates how 'race' and 'ethnicity' appear in biomedical research, health policy, and healthcare in the Netherlands and Europe. More specifically, she explores how scientific and technological practices in care and medicine are intertwined with society, politics, cultural values, and context. In 2021 she was awarded the Marie Curie Sklodowska research grant (2021-2022).

• Remi Joseph Salisbury | 23 Jan 2025  - VUB, BsoG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome

Title: "Universities, Black students, and the (re)production of whiteness through securitisation”

In this talk, I examine the presence of security services and police on university campuses, focusing on their disproportionate impact on racially minoritised students generally, and Black students specifically. Drawing on high-profile case studies and original empirical research, I explore how the construction of the university as a ‘white space’ positions Black students as ‘space invaders’ or ‘bodies out of place,’ a reality that is (re)produced through campus securitisation. Using the concept of whitening-securitization, I highlight the overlooked role of security services in perpetuating institutional racism and maintaining whiteness. Engaging with securitisation, I argue, provides a much fuller understanding of institutional racism in Higher Education.

Remi Joseph-Salisbury is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester, specializing in racisms and antiracisms, particularly in education and policing. He is also visiting scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York. He recently led the first study to examine the impact of security services on students in British universities, resulting in the publication of Whose Campus, Whose Security?

Remi is currently leading a Leverhulme-funded project exploring the impact of police presence in schools. He co-authored Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism (2021, Manchester University Press), which won the 2023 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and co-edited The Fire Now: Anti-Racism in Times of Explicit Racial Violence (2018, Zed Books). His first book, Black Mixed-Race Men (2018, Emerald Publishing), received the Philip Abrams Prize for best first book in Sociology.

His recent work covers topics such as police in schools, campus securitization, pandemic policing, police abolition, and racism in British education. Remi is a steering group member of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, the No Police in Schools campaign, and a member of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE).
 

• Khaoula Matri | 13 FEB 2025 - ULB, Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Bruxelles, bâtiment S, 15e étage, salle Janne

Dans le cadre du Séminaire ABBA

Titre : “Vulnérabilités, racismes et subjectivités politiques en Tunisie : le cas ethnographique des migrant.e.s de l’Afrique de l’Ouest”

• Folashade Ajayi | 20 MAR 2025 - City Venue TBC

Title: “Black Utopia in Berlin”

• Zehra Colak & Zakia Essanhaji | 24 APR 2025 - VUB, BsoG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome

Title: “Rethinking methodology as a technology of social (in)justice?”
 

• Martin Frager Perrier |15 MAY 2025 - ULB, Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Bruxelles, bâtiment S, 15e étage, salle Janne

Titre: “Sociologie de la blanchité critique”

• Omar Jabary Salamanca |12 June 2025 - VUB, BsoG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome

Title: « Palestine: between colonial epistemologies and liberation worldmaking »

Epistemologies matter. They are doors into how we come to recognize and apprehend the world. They determine what counts as knowledge, what kinds of things can be known or who can produce knowledge. Epistemologies have indeed the power to erase, remake and transform worlds. They can distort and render unrecognizable the experiences, histories and geographies of those contained within their conceptual constructs. Epistemologies however can also be emancipatory and contribute to the fundamental task of liberation. This intervention considers settler colonialism as a central paradigm to the epistemologies that inform the worldview and experience of genocidal violence and national liberation. Drawing on the intellectual work and knowledge infrastructures of Palestinian and revolutionary scholars, it explores the lives of settler colonialism as a concept – from its consolidation and decline during the long revolutionary 1960s to its recuperation in the aftermath of the Oslo accords and its attempted suppression in the current political juncture. In following the lives of settler colonialism, the contribution reasserts the significance of this indigenous analytic to challenge the imperial legitimacy of settler sovereignty and contribute to the internationalist struggle for self-determination and liberation in and beyond Palestine.

Omar Jabary Salamanca is a research fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles. His work and teaching lie at the intersection of political geography, settler colonialism, uneven development and political ecology. He is also interested in internationalist histories and archival practices of anticolonial movements.