Relational Racisms In a Global Perspective — Session 2

This panel is the second of a series. A relational approach to race and racism challenges both methodological nationalism and regionally bounded accounts of racial formation. Rather than treating racisms as discrete phenomena located within particular national or regional contexts, it asks how racial logics travel, mutate, and become entangled with other systems of dehumanisation as they move across histories, geographies, and structures of power.

This panel builds on conversations initiated through the Relational Racisms conference convened at Cambridge in 2025 and subsequent discussions at LASA 2026. These exchanges raised shared questions: What becomes visible when racisms are analysed relationally rather than comparatively? How do racial logics become imbricated with caste, ethnicity, religion, nationalism, indigeneity, and colonial governance in different contexts? To what extent can concepts developed in one location travel elsewhere without reproducing forms of conceptual extraction, flattening, or misrecognition? And does "region" remain analytically useful when emphasis falls on historical and contemporary connections rather than bounded geographical units?

Bringing together scholars working across Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, the panel explores relationality as both an intellectual and methodological intervention. Rather than comparing cases from a distance, participants will place their empirical research in direct conversation with one another, examining processes of translation, imbrication, circulation, and transformation. In doing so, the panel seeks to contribute to emerging debates on global racisms, dehumanisation, and relational methodologies while advancing a more connected understanding of how racial formations are produced, contested, and transformed globally.