The Racial Violence Hub

This site creates a virtual community of feminist critical race scholars, artists, activists, and organizations working on issues of racial violence and the state. The Hub’s goal is to foster research, develop critical pedagogies and share resources for anti-violence practices around state violence against Indigenous and racialized peoples. The Hub emphasizes the race line that runs through state violence and terror.

The RVHub generates an analysis built around the following ideas:

  1. Racial power is articulated through violence and terror.
  2. Racial violence is an identity-making practice
  3. Racial violence is often legally and socially authorized and is integral to the making of states.
  4. Racial violence is gendered and sexualized.

Questions taken up include: How should feminists respond to racial violence? What is the connection between moments of extraordinary racial violence and our everyday world? How do we understand violence at specific sites, e.g. carceral sites, schools, streets, borders? How do individuals come to participate in, remain indifferent to or approve of violence? What is the role of hegemonic masculinity and femininity in these processes? Subordinate gender and sexualities? How do states legally authorize acts of racial violence and how do legal narratives operate to secure social consent to acts of racial terror? How do Indigenous and racialized communities resist state violence?

The hub offers an opportunity to explore these questions in collaboration with other scholars, artists and activists. Hub activities include: an annual workshop, the ongoing development of a virtual network that serves as a repository for shared research and teaching resources, online graduate courses, and publications.

The RVHub is coordinated by Sherene Razack, Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA.

Annual Workshop Design: The workshop is a small one (30 participants) and by invitation only. Participants will be urged to make use of and to contribute to the virtual resources of the Racial Violence Hub (RVHub).