Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University

"A essential reading for all in Higher Education. The first in recent times to really present the state of UK HE from a truly liberatory perspective." - Melanie-Marie Haywood, Director of Education Development Service, Birmingham City University

Universities are regarded as safe havens for knowledge production and the educational transformation of lives. There is, however, a long history of universities as sites of contestation where structures of hierarchical legitimacy are played out.

In response to the upsurge in global protests against racial violence and the criticism of colonial, racialised and Eurocentric forms of thinking, universities have adopted new roles as ‘anti-racist’ and ‘decolonial’ beacons of hope. This book unravels how such liberal progressive ‘acts’ hide a much deeper racialised logic of whiteness-framed structural narcissism, producing insidiously powerful and difficult to trace forms of racialised harm.

The Social Science for Social Justice series challenges the Ivory Tower of academia, providing a platform for academics, journalists, and activists of color to respond to pressing social issues.  

Harshad Keval is a writer and activist scholar, with special interests in race-critical and decolonial social theory, theories of coloniality and racism, antiracism, social justice and institutional power and resistance. His work journey has involved exploring medical anthropology, medical sociology, mental health, cultural epidemiology and international health, across European and global sites. He has worked as a shop assistant, textile factory worker, labourer, bar tender, data analyst, lecturer, and consultant to organisations aiming at racial justice in education. More recently he has written on race and genetics, race-based trauma and epistemologies of whiteness and institutional ignorance. He works across and beyond disciplinary boundaries and seeks to connect with spaces and voices of creativity and liberation that often lie beyond the epistemic and physical walls of traditional Euro-modern systems of knowledge and practice. He remains resolutely an outsider on the inside of academia.