Le séminaire « Approches Critiques de la Race – ACR » est co-organisé par la Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences Sociales, La GERME – Université libre de Bruxelles, le Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains – LAMC , le BIRMM, la VUB et l’Observatoire du sida et des sexualités de la Faculté de Psychologie, Sciences de l’Education et de la Logopédie.

La série de conférences Critical Approaches to Race (CAR) a pour ambition d’offrir un espace académique aux jeunes chercheur·e·s afin de présenter leurs travaux, en cours ou achevés, et d’enrichir leurs réflexions. Le séminaire CAR-ACR propose une démarche articulant théories décoloniales, postcoloniales et Critical Race Theory, en interrogeant les phénomènes liés à la race et au racisme dans divers contextes.

Il s’agit du premier séminaire universitaire organisé en Belgique sur les théories critiques de la race, un champ d’étude pluridisciplinaire majoritairement anglophone, qui analyse non seulement les formes de racialisation et de racisme dans les sociétés humaines (occidentales et non occidentales), mais aussi les formes de subjectivation auxquelles recourent les personnes racialisées face à la racialisation.

UPCOMING EVENTS :

24 SEP. 25 | 18H30
Pianofabriek, Rue du Fort 35, Saint-Gilles
Diffusion de “Tout contact laisse une trace” (ZIN TV 2024) suivie d’une discussion

This composite film draws on fragmented narratives, on the journeys of non-white, Afro-descendant and African people, and retraces the topographical and symbolic coloniality of the Capital of Europe, from Gaza to Goma.« Tout Contact Laisse Une trace » confronts discourse with voices, replaces slogans with acting bodies, and topples deceitful statuary.

Produced by ZIN TV, the film was directed by Nizar Saleh Mohammed Ali and is the result of a collective writing process led by Milady Renoir with the Collective for Colonial Memory and the Fight Against Discrimination, Jean Illi and Solina Diallo, researchers at ULB, Taslim Mamadou Diallo of the Brussels Undocumented People’s Voice, Sarah Bahja, Valentin Fayet and Thomas Michel of ZIN TV. With the participation of Taslim Mamadou Diallo (VSP Brussels), Bah Mamadou Moussa (VSP Saint Josse), Aurélie Disasi (Aru Lee), Jean Benoit Bokoli “microMéga le Verbivore,” Faiza Hirach (Samidoun Brussels), Lucas Catherine, Colonial Memory and the Fight Against Discrimination, Baladio, and Studio Baraka.

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23 OCT. 25 | 10H-12H
VUB BsOG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome
Session dedicated to Palestine – content to be confirmed

This seminar will be organized as a teach-out: a moment of collective learning and discussion on Palestine, in collaboration with the student movement. The event will take place outdoors on the ULB campus, and aims to create an open space for dialogue and reflection.

Abstract: Over the past two years, people around the world have expressed their rejection of the ongoing genocide and colonisation in Palestine, two intrinsically linked phenomena that have been accelerated since October 7^th 2023. Popular demonstrations, strikes, direct action, and a student intifada in the spring of 2023 with the occupation of universities around the world.

In Belgium, the student movement has been heavily involved in demanding sanctions against Israel and the economic and political actors supporting the genocide: student occupations in several universities, calls for a boycott of Israeli universities and the war industry… In October 2025, as a ceasefire comes into effect in Gaza, prisoner exchanges take place between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Israeli army’s ground withdrawal from Gaza is announced, Arab and Western heads of state and government meet in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for a ‘peace summit’ co-chaired by Abd-el Fattah Al Sissi and Donald Trump. The latter presented his ‘plan for Gaza’, which includes maintaining strong and privileged relations with Israel, as shown by his recent visit, and the disarmament of Hamas.

Does this ceasefire mean the end of mobilisations for Palestine? During this moment of exchange and discussion, we propose to analyse together the moment we are experiencing from an anti-colonialist perspective:

• Highlighting the imperialist, racist and colonialist aspects of the ‘peace summit’
• Review and discussion of the BDS and PACBI campaigns, as well as other boycott campaigns, which have existed for over 20 years and are one of the levers for action against the colonisation of Palestine, which has been ongoing for over a century and is part of the Zionist project.. 

Hosted by Leila Mouhib and Omar Jabary Salamanca

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13 NOV. 25 | 10H-12H
ULB, bâtiment S, 12e étage, salle Rokkan
Amit PUNI – “British Indian Educational Success: A Critical Race Theory counter-story to the Rishi Sunak celebration of racial triumph”

This presentation draws on my doctoral research exploring how British-Indian families understand, pursue, and experience educational success across four generations in the UK. Dominant narratives often position British-Indian attainment as a “model minority” story — proof of meritocracy and post-racial progress. My work challenges this framing. Using a DesiCrit approach and multi-generational interviews, I examine how families navigate racism, migration, aspiration, and responsibility within everyday life. The research uncovers the emotional labour behind achievement: the silences around race that shape young people’s school experiences; the intergenerational pressures to succeed as protection; and the forms of love, ambition, and quiet resistance that sustain educational journeys. By centring counter-stories from British-Indian communities, this talk asks how universities and policy makers can better recognise racialised experience, move beyond celebratory narratives, and create spaces where belonging and justice are not conditional on success.

About the speaker: 

Amit Puni is a Senior Lecturer and the School Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Kingston University London. He teaches across professional programmes in Education, Social Work and Midwifery, leading work on race equity and anti-racism across the curriculum. Amit also leads the BA (Hons) Working with Children & Young People: Social Pedagogy and delivers CPD in schools on racial literacy and responding to racism. Before joining higher education, he worked as a secondary school teacher and curriculum lead in London. He is an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Adviser to the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT). His PhD examines British-Indian educational experiences across generations through a Critical Race Theory lens. 

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4 DEC. 25 | 10H-12H
VUB BsOG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome
Eline MESTDAGH – “Registers of Dissent. Mobilizing Memory of Racial Justice in Belgium’s Decolonial Moment (2010–2021)”

This lecture examines how public discourse on anti-racism in Belgium shifted between 2010 and 2021 from an emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity to a focus on colonial memory and decolonisation, conceptualised as a “decolonial moment.” Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s notion of a “populist moment” and on ethnographic and historical research conducted in Brussels, it analyses three activist memory campaigns: struggles to decolonise public space (including the campaign for Lumumba Square), community-based memory work aimed at youth empowerment in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, and a grassroots participatory truth commission responding to the 2020 parliamentary Congo Commission.

While all three mobilised memory as a tool for racial justice, they did so through distinct registers of dissent—educational, therapeutic, and representative—which function as flexible and relational strategies across different public, political, and institutional contexts. The lecture also critically engages with memory studies by challenging the assumption that memory politics are inherently transformative, and calls for a pluralist, context-sensitive understanding of decolonial memorial justice that asks which memories are considered emancipatory, why, when, and for whom.

About the speaker: 

Eline Mestdagh is a historian working at the intersections of memory studies, post- and decolonial theory, and public history. She obtained her PhD in History from Ghent University with a dissertation on the mobilisation of colonial memory for racial justice in Belgium between 2010 and 2021. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven on the ERC project Traveling Memories, Silences, and Secrets: Life Narratives of Violence Among Refugees from Africa’s Great Lakes Region. Her research interests include public engagements with the past in all their forms, from grassroots memory activism to populist politics of history. She co-edited Claiming the People’s Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and co-chairs the Memory and Activism Working Group of the Memory Studies Association.

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26 JAN. 26 | 10H-12H
ULB, bâtiment S, 12e étage, salle Rokkan
Thamy AYOUCH – “Psychanalyse et race: silences psychiques et politiques”

This presentation explores the place of race within psychology and psychoanalysis, drawing on Ayouch’s recent book La Race sur le divan (2024). Specialised in race and postcolonial studies as well as queer and gender studies, Ayouch offers a critical examination of psychology and psychoanalysis as historically white and colour-blind disciplines. Challenging this legacy, the talk argues for the necessity of integrating race into both the objects and epistemologies of clinical practice. Moving beyond analyses of racism as solely a macro-social structure, Ayouch examines its subjective and psychic effects, showing how race is lived, negotiated, and internalised within intimate and therapeutic spaces. By bringing questions of race onto the psychoanalytic couch, this work opens up important and challenging dialogues for scholars and practitioners in sociology, anthropology, and the social sciences more broadly.

About the speaker

Thamy Ayouch is a psychoanalyst whose work bridges race and postcolonial studies with queer and gender studies. His research critically interrogates the racialised foundations of psychology and psychoanalysis, advocating for approaches that take seriously the psychic dimensions of domination, inequality, and lived experience.

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12 FEB. 26 | 10H-12H
VUB BsOG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome
Amal MIRI – “Blurring Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries: Narratives of Migrantised Artists and Producers in the Cultural Scene in Flanders”

Arts practices have been used by undocumented or refugee migrants to achieve the aim of belonging in their new immigrant society in different ways. This paper contributes to this field by studying how second and third generation migrant artists and cultural producers inherently shape this cultural scene while navigating existing ethnic and cultural boundaries. A postmigrant analysis of fifteen interviews, conducted in Flanders, is used to move beyond the migrant subject, centralising how migration and migration-related consequences become a part of their cultural products. Using this lens helps to reframe one-dimensional notions of (migrant) identity, culture and belonging, and to make space for a plurality of voices and experiences of both artists and cultural producers that go beyond simply belonging or not in the cultural and artistic field. This paper centralises the agency and situated lived experiences while emphasizing on their journey in which art is considered a complex and continuous changing process of identity formation, empowerment and/or resistance.

About the speaker

Amal Miri’s research interests focus on exploring the intersections of migration, critical feminist theory, and participatory research methodologies. Her work investigates the nuanced experiences of migrantised people through the lens of affective citizenship and agency emphasizing how culture shapes and is shaped by these experiences. In sum, she is passionate about amplifying marginalized voices and fostering collaborative approaches that challenge dominant narratives in both academic and community contexts.

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19 MAR. 26 | 10H-12H
ULB, bâtiment S, 12e étage, salle Rokkan
Shanshan LAN – “I don’t know how to be submissive”: racial privilege, gender predicament and shifting positionality among white western women married to Chinese men

This research examines the experiences of young white Western women who move to China for professional opportunities and cosmopolitan lifestyles, particularly in neoliberal niche sectors such as English Language Teaching (ELT), where whiteness and Western education are fetishized, commodified, and exploited. Drawing on 26 semi-structured interviews conducted in several Chinese cities between 2019 and 2024, the study explores an under-researched pattern of interracial relationships between white women and Chinese men in the context of Covid-19, rising popular nationalism, and xenophobia.

It highlights the tension between white women’s racial privilege in the workplace and their gendered vulnerability within patriarchal family settings, showing how economic independence can both enable negotiation of gender relations and generate marital conflict, including instances of domestic violence linked to wounded masculinities. The analysis situates these ambivalences within broader structural dynamics, including shifting geopolitical relations, the racialized profit-driven ELT industry, and growing cultural confidence among grassroots Chinese communities.

About the speaker

Shanshan Lan is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her research interests include urban anthropology, migration and mobility regimes, comparative racial formations in Asia and Euro-America, transnational student mobility, global cities, African diaspora in China, Chinese diaspora in the United States, and class and social transformations in Chinese society. She is the author of two books: Diaspora and Class Consciousness: Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago (2012), and Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging (2017). Both are published by Routledge Press. She is also the co-editor (with Milos Debnár) of Migration, Transnational Flows, and the Contested Meanings of Race in Asia, an open access book published by Springer in 2025.

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23 APR. 26 | 10H-12H
VUB BsOG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome
Sarah GERWENS – “The Postracial Discursive Contract: Complicity and Collaboration in the (Un)hearing of race”

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7 MAY 26 | 10H-12H
ULB, bâtiment S, 12e étage, salle Rokkan
Sophie Marie NIANG – “Repenser l’Hexagone dans la production culturelle noire contemporaine”

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11 JUN. 26 | 10H-12H
VUB BsOG, Pleinlaan 5, -1 floor, room Lisbon/Rome
Amalia de ROOVER – “The Role of DEI Policies in Reducing the Ethnic Gap in Higher Education”

If you want to join one or more of the seminars, please send us an email at birmm@vub.be.