Dr. Paola Bacchetta (Professor and Vice Chair for Research, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley), Dr. Elizabeth Löwe Hunter (PhD from Berkeley’s African Diaspora Studies, currently a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Fellow), and Dr. Lene Myong (Professor, Chair of Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway), won a Peder Sather research grant for their collaborative research project on "Transracial Intimacies: Exploring Racialization from within the Nordic Family".
The objective is to address and engage with racism and racial inequality in the allegedly raceless Nordic context by centering the experiences of first-generation racialized minority subjects raised within white or white-multiracial family constellations. Racialized minorities in white families are often left conceptually in-between both emerging feminist studies of racism in the Nordic region and the established fields of African American Studies, Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies in US academia. The promise of Transracial Intimacies is to bridge these disciplinary gaps and to bring Critical Adoption Studies into this conversation. Building on a transnational feminist framework the project proposes a methodological framework inspired by Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Collaboratory Inquiry. The research process will be organized around symposiums and a workshop with invited participants. The project will make an original contribution to critical race theory through the creation of theoretical and analytical perspectives on the relations between race and intimacy.
Dr. Löwe Hunter is a specialist on racism in Nordic countries and is currently carrying out research on "Afropean Feminist Methodologies: Towards an Ethnography of Togetherness".
Dr. Lene Myong’s contribution to the project is grounded in her research on transnational adoption and the biopolitical governance of reproduction, kinship and race in the Nordic context. Dr. Bacchetta's contribution is in theorizing racism and racialization in Europe through its inseparability with colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, gender and sexuality.
Photo Credit: Collection of Elizabeth Löwe Hunter.