Annual Wertheim-Lecture

Can universities be antiracist? Liberal scholarship in genocidal times

The Moving Matters research group has invited Arun Kundnani to deliver this year’s Wertheim lecture on the urgent topic of how universities can become antiracist institutions in our current political context. After the lecture, the floor will be open for debate.

This lecture proceeds from the question: If universities are committed to intellectual liberation, must they also be committed to liberation from racial oppression? And if they are to be antiracist institutions, to what kind of antiracism must they adhere? Surveying histories of antiracism through the twentieth century to today, drawing on the work of scholars such as Anton De Kom, Frantz Fanon, and Stuart Hall, this lecture will explore the obligations of solidarity that fall upon European and US universities, in the shadow of racially organized police, military, border, and prison violences, from the United States to the Netherlands to Palestine.

About the speakers

Arun Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism? (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007), and co-author of Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters (Common Notions, 2024). A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University and is an Associate of the Transnational Institute.