IV ISA Forum of Sociology (February 23-28, 2021)

61

Breaking Apart the Margins: Unpacking the Politics of Exclusion

Abstract Submissions Closed

RC05 Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnicity (host committee)

Language: English

Session Type: Oral

This session will cover sociological works that address the divergent ways in which processes of exclusion operate within and across various racialized and indigenous communities. There is a lack of specificity in the ways in which racial exclusion is conceptualized within academic scholarship. Typically, the varied tactics and methods of exclusion used to subjugate, erasure, and marginalize non-white populations are flattened into one singular archetype of racialization that is thought to homogeneously mark the subjectivities and experiences of all non-white subjects. However, different racial, ethnic, and/or cultural identities threaten the stability of whiteness in distinct ways and are therefore subject to varying degrees and forms of political and social violence. The tendency within academia to conflate divergent experiences of and with racial exclusion obscures this fact. Consequently, academic notions of exclusion tend to be constrained to monolithic categories of racial “otherness” that limit the possibility of enacting precise strategies of resistance within and across different racial-ethnic groups.  

In this session, we contend that understanding the complex and divergent processes of exclusion that operate to subjugate different racialized and indigenous communities is an important step towards the eradication of racial violence and injustice. Accordingly, this session will focus on sociological works that shed light on the racial-colonial-imperial structures that function to order non-white people in general, while still drawing attention to the particular ways in which these logics operate in relation to distinct racial-cultural formations.