5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This regular session calls for papers that are grappling with how whiteness has evolved and shifted from its colonial forms. Various literatures such as “transnational whiteness” (Arat-Koç 2010; Shome 1999; Tayeb 2021), “coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Quijano 2007; Tamale 2020), and “deep and malleable whiteness” (Christian 2019) underscore how the literal and figurative shades of whiteness continues to be expressed materially and discursively across scales – transnationally, nationally, and locally – but in complex ways rooted in specific geographies, histories, and socio-cultural contexts. Papers in this session could address the following topics: How is whiteness seen or not seen in different geographies and what are the embodied and disembodied markers of whiteness (Pierre 2012)? How do we understand whiteness in geographies where there are not discernibly “white” bodies (Christian and Namaganda 2021)? What does whiteness look like in institutions, cultural forms, and spatial patterns of movement, segregation, and or in the containment of non-white groups (Mamdani 1993)? Who are the groups separated outside of national forms of whiteness and which groups are placed at the bottom acting as reference points higher placed groups distance from (Carbado 2001)? How is whiteness challenged in micro and macro practices by individuals, groups, and geographies? How do we create a world beyond the reproduction of white supremacy and the quotidian, invisible, and subtle ways whiteness simply carries on.