Disorienting Race: Re(lationally) Choreographing Resistance

Celebrating 10 years of WhiteSpaces

Image Credit

Disorienting Race ran on 29th May 2019 at the Rose Bowl, City Campus, Leeds Beckett University.

It was curated to celebrate 10 years of WhiteSpaces activity.

Disorienting Race continued in the WhiteSpaces tradition of bringing together publicly engaged interdisciplinary scholars, artists, poets, producers and performers to explore the ways in which intersecting hierarchies of race are disrupted and reinforced through everyday practices such as how we look, talk, think and act though our biographies and identities, our institutions, in our common places; at the local shop, in the school and in our governing spaces. Taking its starting point as the reality of the global colonial present where the construct of race frames, interactions, ideas and feelings, the event brought together differently positioned voices to think about how these complexly positioned perspectives can come together to intervene in our common life for anti-racist anti-colonial futures.

The event format is mixed including discussion, film showing, performance and Q & A. The format models a way of publicly considering how the recognition of the everyday human violence of living in a white supremacist world can work with a reparative urge to work together for social justice. This challenging, discomforting, but loving urge is exemplified in the works of public scholar activist/practitioners like James Baldwin, WEB Du Bois, Audre Lorde, Bel Hooks, Stuart Hall, Vron Ware and Gail Lewis all of whom provide inspiration for the evening’s conversations.

The event takes its Leeds/Bradford West Yorkshire location seriously as an important vantage point from which to intervene in national and global debates on race. It forms part of a broader on going conversation between a number of the event contributors and WhiteSpaces. It follows on from the London based Social Performance Network curation Performing Race 2018. It marks the 10 year anniversary of the establishment of the WhiteSpaces Research Network and its recent move to Leeds Beckett’s Carnegie School of Education.

Contributors

Moderation by Anj Handa Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers

Mandy Samra The White Line Project/Lets Go Yorkshire

Zoe East Opal Film

Tribe Arts- a philosophically inspired, radical-political theatre company based in Leeds

Khadijah Ibrahiim, Poet, Author, Artistic Director Leeds Young Authors

Dr Shona Hunter, WhiteSpaces, Reader in the Carnegie School of Education

Dr Javeria Shah, Social Performance Network, Programme Leader, Learning and Skills, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

The event booklet can be found at this link:

DES00575 - White Spaces_programme_V2.pdf

Download PDF • 8.96MB

The full event can be watched here

Shona Hunter and Javeria Khadija Shah

Images from the event