King's lecture series confronts race
The university's first full year lecture series on race 'retraces the genesis of the concept'
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Linda Alcoff talks with followers in King's Senior Common Room after her lecture. (Photo: Peter de Vries)
Jesse Robertson attends a lecture about race at the University of King's College about every two weeks. On Thursday, he joined a crowd of about 80 people in Alumni Hall to hear Linda Alcoff's lecture about social identities and the question of realism.
Alcoff's talk is part of an ongoing public lecture series at King's called Conceptions of Race in Philosophy, Literature and Art organized by King's history of science and technology (HOST), early modern studies (EMSP) and contemporary studies (CSP) programs.
King's brings in a lecturer about every two weeks to discuss an area of focus about race, how the idea of race came about and how the public understands it.
Robertson's class requires that he attend each lecture in the series. He says Alcoff's lecture left him with more questions about how to confront the idea of race.
"(Alcoff) talks about how we should be should be challenging bad theories and bad ways of identifying people, but I wonder how one challenges those identities?" says Robertson.
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Race lecture attendees enjoy food and drinks in King's Senior Common Room after Linda Alcoff's lecture. (Photo: Peter de Vries)
Audio Slideshow
Linda Alcoff talks about the ethnic split in the former Yugoslavia at King's Alumni Hall on Thursday. (Audio slideshow: Peter de Vries)
Lectures in the winter term of King's race lecture series will be given by:
- Filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin
- Sara Ahmed, professor in race and cultural studies at Goldsmith’s University
- Isaac Saney, professor of black studies in Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program
- Karim H. Karim, professor in jouralism at Carlton University
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, director for the centre of comparative literature and society at the Unversity of Columbia
- Joan Fujimura, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University
- Elunde Jones, tutor in King’s Foundation Year Program, with Taryn Della
"It's all very well to challenge them within academia, but as far as actually going out and trying to challenge harmful ways of looking at black or white identities, it's a lot harder to do."
Facing race at King's
King's usually has a lecture series every year about a particular topic. This year the topic is race.
King's has hosted a mini-symposium and the odd lecture about race in the past, but nothing as fully formed as a full year lecture series.
Dorota Glowacka, director of King's contemporary studies program, says a lecture series about race is something she and her colleagues have been interested in for a long time.
"Since we focus on the so-called western tradition, the questions pertaining to race and conceptions of race don't usually come across the horizon."
Glowacka says the idea of race as most people understand it today is a very recent notion that only became solidified in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"Considering that here at King's we study texts that go back thousands of years, I thought it would be important to look back and trace the genesis of the concept as a kind of historical narrative."
King's professors in CSP, EMSP and HOST organized the lecture series by choosing a speaker who had made a strong impression on them in the past. Glowacka says Alcoff's book, Visible Identities, made her an obvious choice.
"I was looking for someone who could address the issue of the intersection of race and gender. (Alcoff) is a feminist philosopher, so for her those kinds of intersecting axes of oppression are always on the horizon."
Alcoff's lecture is second to last of the term in the lecture series. The winter term will feature lectures by prominent speakers from both in and outside of King's.
Glowacka says the fact that King's student population is predominantly white influenced how she and her colleagues organized the program.
"We thought that exploring some of the canonical texts within the angle of how some of the main philosophers conceptualize racial differences between people would be really complimentary to what our students have been learning because our student population may not be as diverse as we would like it to be."
Academia and the public
Alcoff says she's glad King's is hosting a lecture series on race because "people need a period of time to process their thinking about it."
"(Race) is not like other abstract, general and intellectual topics we pursue in the academy," she says.
"These questions involve our own personal lives and history."
She says part of the process of developing responses to questions raised by the idea of race is self-reflective.
"We can learn a lot by mining our own knowledge that we have about race, identity and ethnicity that's latent and not always overt."
Born from a white mother and Puerto Rican father, Alcoff says she has "a sort of complicated ethnic background." She says she's drawn to questions that investigate the origin, nature, methods and limits of human knowledge that relate to her own life experiences.
She says metaphysical and epistemological philosophers weren't paying attention to those questions at all.
"I feel philosophy needs to contribute to some of those questions."
Alcoff says professors need to take up topics that emerge in the larger realm of public discourse rather than "in-group conversations amongst ourselves that raise puzzles we want to solve."
She says academics must co-operate with the public to achieve a better understanding of race.
"It's not like academics have the fully worked-out theory and haven't communicated it to the masses. We haven't done the work," she says.
"We need to do that in co-operation with larger publics because in some cases they have knowledge and points of view we need."
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