Building space for Blackness in interdisciplinary conversations

Earlier this summer, the PSA Race, Migration, and Intersectionality Specialist Group hosted a symposium on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Blackness and Black Politics. It was a delight to gather in the Special Collections Room at Goldsmiths, University of London to share and exchange ideas around research on Blackness and anti-Blackness from a range of disciplinary perspectives across the humanities and social sciences. The gathering included scholars from a wide range of career stages, including PhD students all the way up to tenured Professors – with colleagues joining from far and wide across the UK and even beyond.

We heard presentations spanning a variety of topics. This included the gendered and racialised politics of hair, practices of anti-racist resistance in the digital sphere, transnational histories of anti-Black state policies, the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in the construction of academic knowledge, Indigenous and Black political representation, and literary contributions to discourses of Blackness and anti-Blackness amongst other topics.

This symposium forms part of a wider route towards the publication of a Symposium Special Section in Political Studies Review some time in late 2026. The genesis for this project came out of conversations with colleagues in the PSA during Black History Month last year. We noticed that there has been some brilliant scholarship on Blackness and anti-Blackness published in PSA journals over the years – but that there remains space for much more. This symposium has given us the opportunity to work with a concentrated group of scholars whose scholarship speaks to these themes. Through these collaborative efforts, the Special Section will feature the work of both established and emerging scholars engaging with themes of Blackness and Black politics from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including sociology, cultural studies, history, political theory, and political science.

Though our gathering was not exclusive to Black scholars, one attendee remarked that they had never been in a room with so many Black scholars before our event. We are reminded that in the UK, out of 164 Vice Chancellors, only two are Black. Out of 25,670 UK Professors (academic staff at the highest rank), only 250 are Black. And only 70 of those Professors are Black women. Indeed, there is urgent need to continue creating and building space for Black scholars and scholarship on Blackness and anti-Blackness. This is not just about addressing issues of diversity and representation within Politics and other departments – though this is vital. It is also, importantly, about creating and building space for rigorous and critical scholarship that deals seriously and forcefully with the logics, violence, and outcomes of anti-Blackness as a potent ideology. It is about addressing the ideas and politics that are reflected in these rather bleak statistics on Black representation in the academy. This is the driving motivation of our symposium.

We very much look forward to the publication of the Special Section in Political Studies Review and are thankful for the support that Dr James Dennis and the PSR team have offered us in putting together this initiative so far. Thank you to the PSA team and in particular Joan McDappa for their support of the symposium.

Additionally, we are thankful to the Library team at Goldsmiths who hosted us for the symposium in July. We are most grateful, too, to our generous discussants who offered comments and reflections on each piece presented at the symposium. They are Dr William Ackah (Birkbeck, University of London), Dr Dayo Eseonu (Lancaster University), and Dr Yaz Osho (University of Westminster). We recognise the time and effort this kind of work takes and appreciate it deeply.

Final thanks go, of course, to all of our presenters whose work we are excited to see in print in the near future!

Dr Lydia Ayame Hiraide, Convenor, PSA Race, Migration & Intersectionality Specialist Group