Racial Capitalism, the Pandemic & the Climate Crisis

You are warmly invited to the 2021 Social Theory Centre’s Distinguished Speaker Series event

Racial Capitalism, the Pandemic & the Climate Crisis: Dangerous Tactics of Differential Survival

In Conversation, Professor Gargi Bhattacharya with Dr. Sivamohan Valluvan

The Social Theory Centre is privileged to host Professor Gargi Bhattacharya for this annual event.

Professor Bhattacharyya’s body of work has consistently interlinked class, race, sexuality, and gender in relation to systems of capitalist power structures (globalisation, the war on terror, and neoliberalism). As an activist-scholar, Professor Bhattacharyya has interwoven the intensities of scholarly analysis with activism, key to addressing interconnected conditions of oppression. She continually inspires and participates in the resistant energies of collective struggle.

Her latest book, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (Rowman and Littlefield 2018) expands on Professor Cedric Robinson’s brilliant insights in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) by addressing crucial questions regarding the operations of racialised capitalism in the present. The conversation will explore these questions in relation to the differential experiences of the pandemic and the climate crisis.

Please join us for what promises to be an urgent and lively conversation around these questions. The conversation will be following by an interactive Q&A with the audience.

Biographies:

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, UK. They have widely published in the fields of racisms, sexuality, globalisation, and more recently on austerity, racism and racial capitalism. Her most recent co-authored book is Empire’s Endgame (Pluto Press, 2021).

A comprehensive list of her publications is available at their staff page at the University of East London.

Sivamohan Vallluvan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Their ongoing research areas focus on the rise of a contemporary nationalism that traverses a range of ideological and cultural repertoires – a project that culminated in the 2019 monograph, The Clamour of Nationalism (Manchester University Press). This has been complemented by a British Academy funded research project aimed at critically unpacking and challenging recent invocations of a ‘Left Behind’ in much public analysis.