What’s Your “Street Race?” Cartographies and Ontologies of “Race” and the Future of Knowledge Production on Inequality, Resistance and Social Justice

Dear Colleagues,

Genealogy is now accepting submissions for a Special Issue on the theme: What’s Your “Street Race?” Cartographies and Ontologies of “Race” and the Future of Knowledge Production on Inequality, Resistance and Social Justice. We place “race” in quotation marks to underscore “race” as a social construction that has no innate biological or genetic essential characteristics, but is best understood as a social construction and a relationship of power at the individual, institutional and structural levels. For example, the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association both agree that race is a social construction; however, they depart on whether race should be invoked as a category of analysis in its on right. This issue invites essays from scholars from multiple disciplines to engage in on-going, critical and self-implicating, reflexivity about the meaning of race and how “race” is conceptualized in their own work and within their discipline, workplace, institutions and structural arrangements at the local, national and global levels. For example, in the social sciences it has become common to employ multidimensional measures of race that go beyond the standard self-identified questions and also include ascribed race in addition to measures of lived experiences with everyday discrimination. A preponderance of research evidence illustrates that in addition to self-identified race, we also need measures of "socially assigned race" or "street race" as a social status and ontological and conceptual tool for mapping the social construction of race, relational power, inequalities and resistance in different contexts and at multiple levels. Consider how you would respond to the following question: If you were walking down the street, what race do you think strangers would automatically assume you were based on what you look like? “Street race” – or the social meanings ascribed to you in a given sociohistorical and political economic context based on based on a conglomeration of physical characteristics including your skin color, facial features, hair texture and other visual and ocular markers – is an important aspect of a person’s experiences for understanding the dynamics of inequality and resistance in fair housing, voting rights, equal employment opportunity, educational opportunity structures and even health care access (See López et al., 2017 What’s your Street Race? Article in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Journal). We invite you to engage in on-going, critical and self-implicating reflexivity about the meaning of race in your life as relationships of power do shape one’s reality of identity.

We welcome a wide range of knowledge projects, conceptual contributions, empirical studies employing qualitative and quantitative methods representing a wide range of disciplines, from the social sciences to the humanities, from philosophy to geography to urban studies to cultural theory. The goal of this special issue is to publish promising current work on “race.” This special issue is an invitation to rethink many of the key concepts in scholarship on as real ground-level political practice. Broadly conceived, the editorial team is interested in articles that provide insights on the debates between race and ethnicity as interchangeable concepts, the relationship of race to the human genome and the value added or complexities of employing more than one conceptualization and/or measure of race. All work should clarify how their unique contribution helps us to understand the importance of conceptualizations of race for understanding and creating solutions for eliminating inequality at the individual, interpersonal, institutional, structural and/or global levels.

Some of the topics that would be appropriate for this special issue include but are not limited to:

• Knowledge production on ‘race’ is a contested terrain. What are the master narratives about race and the counternarratives? Under what structural conditions is research on ‘race’ viable in academia, grant agencies and think tanks?
• What are the controversies, debates, paradoxes and ethical dilemmas in researching race?
• How can social scientists, humanities scholars engage in conversations about the meaning of race with biologists and geneticists? How might these interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogues break new ground that helps us rethink our ontologies, conceptualizations and theories of race knowledge production?
• What are promising innovative ways of conceptualizing and measuring race at multiple levels (e.g., individual, interpersonal, institutional, structural, global levels)?
• What are the social forces shaping people’s understandings of race? What is the role of on-going critical self-implicating self-reflexivity about one’s own social location in structural inequities?
• Genealogies of conceptualization of race across the disciplines/scholarly associations, funding agencies, global and national government agencies, corporations, and think tanks, corporate media, non-government agencies, corporate responsibility programs, law, etc..
• Genealogy as a method for understanding the ontologies, conceptualizations of race within a given discipline or across disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities, as well as biology and genetics.
• Re-thinking, through genealogy, the politics of race and intersectional knowledge production that considers the simultaneity of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nativity/documented status, and other systems of inequality and resistance.
• Genealogy of race and color-power evasiveness in knowledge production against the backdrop of neo-liberal logics operating in academia, funding agencies and think tanks.
• Genealogy of the social construction of race in practice, with respect to, for example, how governmentality and its institutions affect the lives of real individuals and communities in terms of access to voting, housing, employment, education, physical and mental health, law and justice, immigration and other policy-relevant arenas.
• Scholarly Associations have defined race as a social construction that has for centuries shaped our society and continues to do so today, and therefore do not consider races to be genetically homogenous populations (see also, AAPA, 1996, 2019; AAA, 1998; ASA, 2003; APA, 2002). Instead race is understood as social status in particular historical contexts, rather than as a reified category that is essential or fixed. Given persistent racism as shown by a wide range of indicators of racial inequality and the continuing role of race as a fundamental organizing principle in American society, how should we engage the concept of race in our knowledge production?

Prof. Dr. Nancy López
Prof. Dr. J.E. Jamal Martín
Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Long
Prof. Dr. Luisa N. Borrell
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Racial Conceptualization
• Ontology
• street race
• street gender
• street race-gender