The Anti-Racism Working Group (ARWG)

We are a group of PhD students and staff, predominantly based at the University of York, as well as University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. We organise anti-racist training, activist and research events throughout the year which adopt an intersectional approach.

Our group was initially founded by masters students based in the Department of Politics at the University of York in May 2020. Set up during the resurgence of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, our voluntary group seeks to build a learning community grounded in Angela Davis’ idea that ‘In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must also be actively anti-racist’. Our approach is informed and guided by our engagement with anti-racist and anti-colonial scholarship, our work as activists and our lived experiences as a diverse team of PGR scholars who encounter white-centrism, racism and coloniality within our institutions, and the various intersections of power within that.

Although we also run smaller events throughout the year, and collaborate with various local groups and organisations to challenge harmful structures and institutions and work towards social justice, our current focus is on the 'Race' and Socially Engaged Research: Open and Inclusive Conference for PGRs and ECRs as we see this as providing a vital space to share, and receive feedback on, innovative and ‘disruptive’ research with social justice aims. We understand ‘disruptive’ research as that which challenges harmful hegemonic structures, power relations, institutions and epistemological and ontological assumptions. This includes research that disrupts the enduring coloniality of knowledge production; epistemic injustice; colonial structures and power relations; racism; heteronormativity; neoliberalism; ableism; and gendered injustice. 

As highlighted in our second volume Working Paper, this Anti-Racism Working Group

"set up the annual conference in 2023 after finding, from personal experience and discussion with colleagues and friends, that ‘traditional’ conference spaces and their subsequent outputs were too often unwelcoming and daunting spaces for PGRs and ECRs, especially those who are minoritised. Our team was initially made up of women postgraduate researchers from diverse backgrounds who led the organisation and running of the conference; including people who are racially minoritised, working class, Disabled and have caring responsibilities. As is well-established in anti-racist and anti-colonial literature about western Higher Education and academia, mainstream spaces of knowledge exchange are Euro- and white-centric, resistant to critical research that is focused on social justice, dominated by masculinised norms and extremely inaccessible to Disabled people (Hill-Collins, 1991; Small, 2012; Oliver and Morris, 2022; Smith et al., 2024; Arday, 2018). Witnessing and experiencing this ourselves, we felt compelled to create a space that was as ‘safe’ as possible for critical early career and postgraduate researchers to come together and discuss research, develop their skills and receive peer-feedback on their work. We also hoped to provoke discussions around forming communities in scholar-activist research and going beyond academic institutions, thereby disrupting structural racism and other injustices that are present in academic institutions (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021)."

And in our first volume Working Paper;

"The motivation for challenging the status quo of academic conferences was, therefore, due to our own personal experiences and knowledge of the harm done within spaces of knowledge production to racially minoritised scholars and scholars working on ‘race’ in a socially engaged and disruptive manner. During a working group meeting in 2022, our racially minoritised members reflected upon the challenges they consistently faced at academic conferences, including racist micro-aggressions, difficulties navigating the ‘unwritten rules’ of the conference environment and fierce pushback from senior academics who did not consider their decolonial approaches to research as ‘rigorous’. Simultaneously, white working group members had repeatedly experienced discomfort in these spaces when witnessing such exclusionary practices and racism at conferences and within other academic contexts, including when working closely with racialised scholars and the working group team members. We therefore aimed to create this safe space, whereby often-excluded and -silenced approaches to research were brought ‘from margin to centre’ (hooks, 1984), and delegates from diverse backgrounds could present their work in an inclusive, enriching and supportive environment."