2016

German Vasquez Sandrin

La statistique ethnique au Mexique. Les nouveaux défis

Le Mexique est un pays particulièrement intéressant à analyser dans une perspective de statistiques ethniques. La population auto-identifiée comme indigène y a fortement augmenté ces dernières années. Elle est passée de 5,3% de la population en 2000, à 15,1% en 2010 puis à 23,4 % en 2015. Au cours des mêmes années, les évolutions ont été très variables en Amérique Latine. Certains recensements ont permis d’enregistrer une augmentation de l’auto-identification de la population indigène, d’autres au contraire une diminution. Cette situation apparemment chaotique amène à s’intéresser plus finement à la façon de mesurer l’identification ethnique, y compris au choix des catégories. Cela conduit aussi à rechercher les facteurs individuels et sociaux qui expliquent la déclaration d’une identité ethnique et leurs évolutions.

December 5, 2016

Aliya Saperstein

Racial Mobility: The Dynamics of Race and Inequality

Saperstein introduces a "racial mobility" perspective that brings together constructivist theories of race, a social psychological approach to categorization, and the tools of sociological studies of social mobility to make the case for a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between race, discrimination, and social inequality. In particular, she argues that a person’s race or ethnicity should be conceptualized as a changeable characteristic more like their occupational or marital status than their year or place of birth. Evidence for this perspective is presented from different historical periods in the U.S., across multiple outcomes and datasets, and is consistent with results from controlled experiments. Similar patterns of selective fluidity also are evident beyond the U.S. – from the 18th century Spanish American colonies to the Roma in contemporary Europe. This “racial mobility” highlights the socially constructed nature of race without losing sight of the remarkable persistence of racialized advantage and disadvantage.

November 18, 2016

In partnership with LIEPP and OSC at Sciences Po. More details here.

Rogers Brubaker

Transrace and Transgender : Reimagining the Study of Identity

In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was « outed » by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black?

Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up – in different ways and to different degrees – to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one’s sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet, while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry – increasingly understood as mixed – loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience – encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories – Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency and arbitrariness of racial categories. At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.

October 24, 2016

In partnership with the seminar "Migrations and multiculturalism" and the seminar "Antidiscrimination policies" at Sciences Po. More details here.