Dr Kavyta Raghunandan

The museum exhibition, Indo + Caribbean: The Creation of a Culture, which ran at the Museum of London Docklands, offers a captivating and insightful exploration of the rich heritage and diverse traditions of the Indo-Caribbean community. Through a combination of artefacts, personal miscellany, for example, jewellery, letters petitioning the government from planter Sir John Gladstone, contracts, shipping company records, postcards and papers from the Parliamentary Archives and art-works, the exhibition provides a decent, albeit not exhaustive, overview of the historical, cultural and social aspects of Indo-Caribbean identity.

This book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of the two pandemics of 2020: COVID-19 and racism.

This chapter sets up the national event of Carnival in Trinidad as a contested space of liberation and tradition. It explores the intersections of gender and race for a group of young Indian Trinidadian women and highlights the ways in which agency, articulated as sexual liberation and ‘free-up’, is enabled and disabled in relation to mas performance.

In recent times, there has been an emerging movement of menstrual activism on social media that attempts to address the absence of positive representations of menstruation. I am drawn to the collective feminist project of challenging and eradicating stereotypes of women’s bodies by exploring how social media, whether through blogging or posting pictures, has allowed young women to cast normal female bodily processes in a more positive light. If for many years, staining has signified shame, it can be said that 2015 was the year periods went public in a social media movement that seeks to discuss and deconstruct the stigmas stuck to menstruation.

This chapter provides a critical overview of the debates on how new developments in the digital age, such as forms of social media, specifically social networking sites, are influencing the social, cultural, and geographical dimensions of young people’s friendships. As a distinctive aspect of young people’s lives, friendships are regarded as sites of companionship, support, and at times intimacy but can also be fraught with anxieties or difficulties. Social networking sites are new technological platforms that exist explicitly to facilitate the practice of friendship. However, there are diverse opinions in both the scholarly and popular literature on the extent to which these sites and other forms of social media are transforming the nature and meaning of contemporary friendship. A range of commentators also debate in sometimes quite polarizing terms whether the net effects of these new social media are positive and negative. This chapter explores how social media practices shape friendship for young people and argues that it is unproductive to take a binaristic view of the effects of social media as young people in the digital age are diverse in the ways they “do” friendship and in the ways they mobilize newer social resources that have opened up to them.

This hybrid research article explores how comics function as both research methodology and pedagogical intervention for decolonising educational practice in schools in England. Structured through six panels that perform sequential art principles within academic argumentation, the piece draws on conversations with educators, publishers, and comics creators, alongside workshop observations and recent scholarship, to demonstrate how visual storytelling disrupts traditional epistemologies and challenges what counts as legitimate knowledge production. Through a methodology I term panel-based analytical reading – interpreting conversation transcripts through comics’ grammatical structures – I argue that comics-based research offers unique affordances for addressing educational inequities, representing intersectional identities, and developing critical consciousness. The article examines structural barriers across publishing, policy, and institutional assessment that perpetuate epistemic exclusion, while documenting how alternative models – from indie publishing to digital platforms – circumvent traditional gatekeeping. Attending to comics’ particular accessibility for neurodiverse learners and their capacity for multimodal meaning-making, I propose concrete implementation strategies for embedding visual literacy across educational and research contexts. Writing from my position as a non-drawing advocate for visual methods, this piece contributes to growing institutional recognition of creative research methodologies while foregrounding the urgent decolonial work that remains: challenging curriculum violence, resisting epistemicide, and creating space for all ways of knowing to be valued.

One, among many, areas of inequality on which COVID-19 has placed a spotlight is access to green spaces. That the nation’s local parks and green spaces have been a lifeline during the pandemic is a widely agreed-upon sentiment; yet while these have been invaluable, the Green Space Index released in 2020 revealed that 2.7 million people in Great Britain do not have access to such a space. Additionally, a survey by Friends of the Earth (2020) found that 42 per cent of people of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds live in England’s most green space-deprived neighbourhoods. If green spaces enable wellbeing practices such as walking, exercising and playing in the park, then the question of who gets to inhabit these spaces invariably arises. Over the course of the pandemic, recreational cricket, a sport widely played by South Asian communities nationwide in these green spaces, was confronted with this question of access. The issue further took on an intersectional dimension as we saw notions of privilege, race and identity collide in particular ways, which is explored in this chapter.

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical overview of the debates on how new developments in the digital age, such as forms of social media, specifically social networking sites, are influencing the social, cultural, and geographical dimensions of young people’s friendships. As a distinctive aspect of young people’s lives, friendships are regarded as sites of companionship, support, and at times intimacy but can also be fraught with anxieties or difficulties. Social networking sites are new technological platforms that exist explicitly to facilitate the practice of friendship. However, there are diverse opinions in both the scholarly and popular literature on the extent to which these sites and other forms of social media are transforming the nature and meaning of contemporary friendship. A range of commentators also debate in sometimes quite polarizing terms whether the net effects of these new social media are positive and negative. This chapter explores how social media practices shape friendship for young people and argues that it is unproductive to take a binaristic view of the effects of social media as young people in the digital age are diverse in the ways they “do” friendship and in the ways they mobilize newer social resources that have opened up to them.

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Scandal Simone Adams, Kimberly R. Moffitt, Ronald L. Jackson. 8. #Olitz. The Erotics of (E)Racing in Scandal kavyta kay there are a multitude of blogs, websites, and social media platforms ...

This article examines the transformative potential of a combination of creative pedagogies, particularly comics and graphic novels and applied drama pedagogy, in fostering racial literacy amongst young learners within British educational settings. Drawing upon anti-racist frameworks and culturally responsive pedagogy, we argue that graphic narratives such as Sanghera's Stolen Empire, the Manga Shakespeare adaptation of The Tempest and Colfer's Global graphic narratives are essential to reimagining classrooms as spaces of critical consciousness and transformative praxis. By foregrounding creative pedagogical approaches to the ‘how’ of teaching that prioritise participant agency, multimodal meaning-making and embodied learning, this study demonstrates how comics can move anti-racist education beyond cognitive understanding towards active, creative engagement with difficult histories.

This book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of two pandemics: COVID-19 and racism. Offering a snapshot of experiences through counter storytelling and micro narratives, this collection assesses the racialised responses to the pandemic and investigates acts of discrimination that have occurred within social, political and historical contexts. Capturing the divisive discourses which have dominated this contemporary moment, this is a unique and creative resource that shows how structural racism continues to operate insidiously, offering invaluable insights for policy, practice and critical race and ethnic studies.This book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of two pandemics: COVID-19 and racism. Offering a snapshot of experiences through counter storytelling and micro narratives, this collection assesses the racialised responses to the pandemic and investigates acts of discrimination that have occurred within social, political and historical contexts. Capturing the divisive discourses which have dominated this contemporary moment, this is a unique and creative resource that shows how structural racism continues to operate insidiously, offering invaluable insights for policy, practice and critical race and ethnic studies.

This book seeks to examine the complexity of the collision of the pandemics of COVID-19 and racism that become evident when examining the intersection between race, health, public policy and culture. The contributions in this edited collection are an important intervention in speaking back to dominant discourses and the 13 chapters that make up this collection cover a range of facets that have been organised according to key themes that are outlined in this chapter.

This chapter provides a critical overview of the debates on how new developments in the digital age, such as forms of social media, specifically social networking sites, are influencing the social, cultural, and geographical dimensions of young people’s friendships. As a distinctive aspect of young people’s lives, friendships are regarded as sites of companionship, support, and at times intimacy but can also be fraught with anxieties or difficulties. Social networking sites are new technological platforms that exist explicitly to facilitate the practice of friendship. However, there are diverse opinions in both the scholarly and popular literature on the extent to which these sites and other forms of social media are transforming the nature and meaning of contemporary friendship. A range of commentators also debate in sometimes quite polarizing terms whether the net effects of these new social media are positive and negative. This chapter explores how social media practices shape friendship for young people and argues that it is unproductive to take a binaristic view of the effects of social media as young people in the digital age are diverse in the ways they “do” friendship and in the ways they mobilize newer social resources that have opened up to them.

This book takes a journey into the new and exciting created by a the wave of Indian comedians today, described affectionately here as the New Indian Nuttahs, and looks at what these tell us about identity, Indianness, censorship, feminism diaspora and millennial India. It provides a unique analysis into the growing phenomenon of internet comedy and into a dimension of Indian popular culture which has long been dominated by the traditional film and television industries. Through a mixture of close textual readings of online comedy videos and interviews with content creators and consumers in India, this book provides a fresh perspective on comedy studies in its approach to a global South context from a sociocultural perspective. As a protean form of new media, this has opened up new avenues of articulation, identification and disidentification and as such, this book makes a further contribution to South Asian, communication, media & cultural studies.

Rooted in lived experiences and real conversations, this book challenges mixed-race studies which often prioritise Black/white binaries in the Global North while excluding multiracial experiences across the Global South.

Since the worldwide theatrical release of one of the most talked about films of 2015 on Valentine’s Day weekend, Fifty Shades of Grey has continued to generate immense interest, much as the novel did when first published in 2012. Some of the main sticky points raised, amidst the soaring box office collections, were the flummoxing popularity of the novels and film, a dull plot, lack of chemistry between the protagonists, and the contested representations of gender and sexuality. This article is premised on the idea that female sexuality and female-focused erotic pleasure, in the context of Hollywood cinema, is a contested terrain which throws more shade and less heat to the latter. In this paper, I show that the film’s inability to convey female sexuality and pleasure as an experience rather than ‘to-be-looked-at’ is indicative of the gender politics of Hollywood which legitimises hetero-sexist tropes as I claim the Fifty Shades film does under the guise of a love story. I demonstrate that this film adaptation, while mainly targeted towards a female audience, invariably reifies and upholds the dominant cinematic framework of Hollywood, and that is the male gaze (Mulvey 2003).

There has long been a refusal to regard race as a legitimate category of analysis in higher education, whether from a scholarship or policy perspective. The recognition of the role that universities have played in (re)producing racial injustice is one that is being gradually taken up by scholars who challenge this ignorance by drawing attention to racialised cultures and practices. As a British Asian early career researcher who has found herself at various points in her working life at these charged junctures, it is my firm and absolute belief that these conversations are overdue. Though higher education (HE) is generally regarded as a liberal and progressive space, I offer a counter-narrative in locating myself in this environment in which racial microaggressions (Pierce, 1970) are the norm in order to "keep those at the racial margins in their place" (Pérez Huber & Solórzano, 2015). This article seeks to briefly illustrate some of the ways in which race is experienced through working in HEI with a specific focus on South Asian descent academics. There is a limited understanding of the diversity of British Asians as an ethnic category which is often conflated with an even further limited understanding of Muslimness. This manifests not only in HEI but in the cultural industries and the shaping of the British curriculum, both key sites of knowledge production which circulate discourses about ‘the other’ and in which South Asian communities are either stereotyped or silenced.

Rooted in lived experiences and real conversations, this book challenges mixed-race studies which often prioritise Black/white binaries in the Global North while excluding multiracial experiences across the Global South.

This book seeks to examine the complexity of the collision of the pandemics of COVID-19 and racism that become evident when examining the intersection between race, health, public policy and culture. The contributions in this edited collection are an important intervention in speaking back to dominant discourses and the 13 chapters that make up this collection cover a range of facets that have been organised according to key themes that are outlined in this chapter.

COVID-19 and Racism: Counter-Stories of Colliding Pandemics is a book of stories. Broken into sections of Asian Lives, Black Lives, Politics, Health and Education, authors discuss the effect of epidemics of coronavirus and racism upon their lives, institutions, health outcomes, and even death. Using a variety of expressions – poetry, autoethnography, Critical Race Theory and others – discourses of betrayal, pain, hope, truth and insecurity are woven throughout the book, just as they are felt throughout our lives. This book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of two pandemics: COVID-19 and racism. Offering a snapshot of experiences through counter story-telling and micro narratives, this collection assesses the racialised responses to the pandemic and investigates acts of discrimination that have occurred within social, political and historical contexts. Capturing the divisive discourses which have dominated this contemporary moment, this is a unique and creative resource that shows how structural racism continues to operate insidiously, offering invaluable insights for policy, practicend critical race and ethnic studies. This book addresses the prejudices that emerged out of the collision of the two pandemics of 2020: COVID-19 and Racism. One, among many, areas of inequality that COVID-19 has placed a spotlight on is access to green spaces. That the nation’s local parks and green spaces have been a lifeline during the pandemic is a widely agreed upon sentiment; yet while these have been invaluable, the Green Space Index released in 2020 revealed that 2.7 million people in Great Britain do not have access to such a space. Additionally, a survey by Friends of the Earth (2020) found that 42 per cent of people of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds live in England’s most green space-derived neighbourhoods. If green spaces enable wellbeing practices such as walking, exercising and playing in the park, then the question of who gets to inhabit these spaces invariably arises. Over the course of the pandemic, recreational cricket, a sport widely played by South Asian communities nationwide in these green spaces, was confronted with this question of access, which further took on an intersectional dimension as we see notions of privilege, race and identity collide in particular ways, and which is explored in this chapter.

Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk, and Jane O. Newman, eds., Refugee Routes: Telling, Looking, Protesting, Redressing (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2020), 318 pp. Open access.

David Lambert and Peter Merriman, Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 248 pp. £80.00 (hardback).

David A. Turner, ed., Transport and its Place in History: Making the Connections (London: Routledge, 2020), 250 pp. eBook ISBN 9781351186636.

Mia Bay, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Massachusetts, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021), 391 pp. $35.00.

Giada Peterle, Lines: Moving with Stories of Public Transport in Turku (Padova: Becco Giallo, 2021), 44 pp., 11

Gracia Liu-Farrer, Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 276 pp. $39.95 illustrations. €10.00.

Whether denied, derided or determined to overcome it, COVID-19 has impacted many lives in ways that we are only now beginning to witness, as we move from old configurations of normality and adapt to new realities, be it flexible ways of working and learning or working to change social systems. This conclusion summarises the reflections from the preceding chapters, and ends with a call to develop and maintain critical, anti-racist, decolonial and intersectional approaches that acknowledge the complexities and effects of diverse lived experiences in long COVID society.

This thesis explores how teachers and school leaders in England unlearn structural racism through participation in the Anti-Racist School Award. With little existing literature on contemporary experiences of leading anti-racism in schools, the study follows twelve participants at various stages of the Award process during a pivotal global shift towards anti-racism. Addressing three key research questions, the study examines motivations for engaging with the Award, schools' experiences throughout the process, and the expected and unexpected outcomes. Using Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies, it analyses data from surveys, interviews, reflections, and a focus group. Findings reveal that while participants recognise racism as socially constructed and deeply embedded, it remains a persistent force in schools. Despite post-George-Floyd commitments to anti-racism, teachers' limited racial literacy leaves them vulnerable to entanglement in interest convergence, using the tools of whiteness, and questions of culpability. The study calls for robust racial literacy, awareness of white supremacy culture, and critical self-examination as essential markers of anti-racist professionalism. Sustainable anti-racism work requires continuous racial literacy, which is capable of identifying and disrupting the ways racism iterates to remain an available tool for ordering society.

Comedians can push those boundaries and make people think again about race, religion, sexism or whatever subject matter they choose to talk about. Comedians can walk on stage with a mic and, metaphorically, drop bombs—because a brain, and a mouth, and a microphone are incredibly powerful things. Funny is power. (Henry & Ryder, Interview Nish Kumar: Do they just hate my jokes?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/may/16/nish-kumar-standup-comedian-do-they-just-hate-my-jokes, 2021, p. 293) This proclamation by renowned British comedian Sir Lenny Henry on the possibilities of comedy and humour serves as a crucible for this chapter and also more generally for debates in relation to race and national identity, which have come to the fore in diffuse and divisive ways in Britain over the past few years. Indeed, contemporary concerns of race representation, anti-racism, equality and diversity have come to feature prominently in cultural and creative industries (Saha, Race, culture and the media. Sage, 2021; Malik & Newton, Adjusting the contrast: British television and constructions of race. Manchester University Press, 2017; Malik & Shankley, Arts, media and ethnic inequalities. In B. Byrne (Ed.), Ethnicity and race in the UK: State of the nation. Bristol University Press, 2020), more recently following the global re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. This chapter considers and critiques how popular ideas of being South Asian, or to put this colloquially, being Brown, have been engaged through screen and stand-up comedy in Britain. It also looks to the potential of comedy as a medium to challenge and/or support dominant discourses as well as articulating new identifications that goes beyond stereotyping, re-orientalising and othering that has long defined South Asian communities in Britain.

This study investigates the educational experiences of African Zimbabwean males as they moved to England, shedding light on a previously understudied aspect of educational migration during 2000-2020. At this time, many Zimbabwean males transitioned into English schools and experienced the changing dynamics from majority to minority. Understanding the significance of prior education becomes crucial. However, little attention has been devoted to the lived experiences of African Zimbabwean males within these two educational systems. Employing the counter-storytelling research design of Critical Race Theory, this study investigates the lived educational experiences of seven African Zimbabwean males selected through purposive sampling. The data collection process involved audio-recorded semi-structured interviews conducted between December 2019 and February 2020. The narrative analysis revealed these individuals' challenges in navigating academic expectations and social and cultural shifts upon their transition to English schools. The study emphasises the need to address educational disparities affecting racialised migrant students transitioning into English schools, especially from marginalised communities. This study fills a significant gap in the research by examining African Zimbabwean students' practical challenges and academic achievements within the English education system. The participants' stories reveal African Zimbabwean males' unique linguistic and academic identities, often overlooked within broader Black African classifications. The study also highlights how racial biases in England affect the educational potential of African Zimbabwean males. The research emphasises how race, class, and gender intersect to shape the educational path of African Zimbabwean males. It also highlights the challenges faced by immigrants from a colonised nation in the immigration process and the English education system. This emphasises the need for policy interventions to promote inclusivity and equal opportunities for all students, regardless of their background or migration status.