Paper short abstract

This paper proposes a critical ethnographic study into the reconfiguration of whiteness and racism following the emergent South and Southeast Asian immigration to Romania and Eastern Europe, a country and respectively a region long imagined as ‘raceless’ or even 'anti-colonial'.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes a critical ethnographic study into the reconfiguration of whiteness and racism following the emergent South/east Asian immigration to Romania and Eastern Europe (EE), a country and respectively a region long imagined as ‘raceless’, even anti-colonial by virtue of its socialist ties with decolonizing countries. I interrogate how privilege, belonging, and racial categories are reordered as a result of racialized immigration in a statistically ‘white’ country that has a significant diaspora who is seen as 'white-but-not-quite' (Kalmar 2022) for often providing cheap and flexible labor to the wealthier countries of the European Union. There are significant overlaps but also racial frictions and gaps between the experiences of violence of Europeanization and labour migration of EE migrants in Western Europe and SE Asian migrants in EE. I am raising the provocative question of what does the arrival of bodies that seem ‘out of place’ (Puwar 2004) do to the ‘peripheral’ whiteness of EE, by investigating how Asian migration in Romania is reshaping racial hierarchies, identities and ideas. The affective encounters between migrants, Romanian diasporic visitors, and Romanian residents of different ethnicities deserve special attention. The research project focuses on hospitality and tourism during the summer months when Romanian diaspora visit ‘home’, creating intensified racialized dynamics in the service sector. What struggles around racialization become articulated in these encounters? What discourses about race, hierarchies, belonging, or social status become consolidated? The paper situates ‘non-racial’ EE as a key location for theorizing the ways ‘race’ hierarchizes people in contemporary Europe.

Paper short abstract

We trace how ‘Eastern Europeanness’ is produced in elder care and sex work. We note the mobilisation of shifting attributions of bodily and valued-based difference or proximity. This ambiguous racialisation as ‘Eastern European’ sustains the extraction of social reproductive labour over generations.

Paper long abstract

The concept ‘cultural racism’ is influential in scholarship on East–West mobilities in Europe. Balibar coined this term by observing that an essentialisation of ‘cultural difference’ has replaced the ‘biologist focus’ of historical racism. A neat separation between the role of ‘biology’ in history and of ‘culture’ in the present, however, insufficiently grasps how both feature within repertoires of racialisation. Here, we examine this for the racialisation as ‘Eastern European’ in Germany – including by looking at its histories, contemporary trajectories and material effects. Drawing on qualitative research, we trace how ‘Eastern Europeanness’ is produced in two employment sites – elder care and sex work – in which women from Europe's East often work. We find that shifting attributions of bodily and valued-based difference or proximity are mobilised in imaginaries of ‘Eastern Europeans’ in these sectors. These ambiguities constitute a key continuity in the gendered racialisation as ‘Eastern European’, which sustains the extraction of cheap social reproductive labour over generations. This racialisation also has material effects: working in these professions takes a toll on the worker’s physical and mental health. On this basis, we propose a research agenda that thinks racialisation not only from its dichotomies but also from its ambiguities.

Paper short abstract

Afrikaners, the architects of South African Apartheid, leverage language to inflect phenotypical markers in delimiting the racialized boundaries of a peculiar form of “indigenous” whiteness, in dialogical tension between British coloniality and African indigeneity.

Paper long abstract

The Afrikaners, the white Afrikaans-speaking architects of Apartheid, are customarily understood as the apex of white supremacy, underpinned by intransigent phenotypically determined racial boundaries.

Conflating the severity of Apartheid racial oppression with a purported rigidity of the Afrikaner colour line, however, understates the laborious relational identitarian narratives and the role of non-phenotypical dimensions in producing Afrikaner whiteness.

Drawing on 21 months of ethnography in South Africa, I highlight the dialogical tensions emerged among the Afrikaner’s white self-concept, the racialization of the culturally proximate “Coloured” speaker, and the serendipitous categorizing uncertainties introduced by the ethnographer’s ambiguous Afrikaans-speaking Balkan whiteness.

I argue that Afrikaner whiteness relies on what I term the White Afrikaans Raciolinguistic Project (RLP), whereby language blends with linguistic purism, church segregation, class habitus, and ancestral mythologies to inflect and infuse racialized meanings to locally salient phenotypical markers of whiteness.

Afrikaners leverage RLP to construct a peculiar form of African “indigenous” whiteness, which legitimizes their presence in South Africa in relation to the more dominant but “less African” British colonizer, while insulating Afrikaner whiteness from the “browning” inherent to its proximity to the “Coloured” Afrikaans speaker.

The synergistic interaction between Afrikaans and phenotype in the constitution of Afrikaner whiteness, promotes the inclusion of ephemeral, customarily ethnicity adjacent dimensions such as embodied linguistic and class habitus in studies of racialization.

Furthermore, the Afrikaner’s location within the cline between British whiteness and African indigeneity, reiterates the importance of comparative approaches in unearthing the idiosyncrasies of localized iterations of global systems of whiteness.

Paper short abstract

This paper addresses explicit racism within contemporary Slavic Paganism in Poland. The study explores the logic utilized by far right Pagans who divide Poles into two races based on religion: Christians are considered "spiritual Semites" and therefore non-white, only Pagans are Aryans=Whites

Paper long abstract

Racialization is a popular interpretive framework that researchers apply to class differences, such as the people versus the elites, as well as to various religious or ethnic groups, such as Muslims and Roma. This intellectual practice is often justified by concepts such as "cultural racism" or "racism without racists." However, an overabundance of these metaphorical forms of racism has the effect of distracting attention from the investigation of literal forms of racism, that is, ideologies and practices explicitly based on the concept of race.

To counteract this, I would like to focus on the National Socialist movement existing within contemporary Slavic Paganism in Poland, as represented by the Order of Zadruga “Northern Wolf”, among others. In particular, I will explore the role of religion in forming racial hierarchies. I will argue that the racialization of religion in this context is enabled by the enrichment of global racist doctrine with the locally developed ideas of culturalism by Jan Stachniuk. According to Stachniuk, the "power of creation" is the sine qua non of culture. This power is said to be evident in Paganism, but not in Christianity, which Stachniuk disregards as anti-culture. From the culturalist perspective, the Pagan far right in Poland is able to challenge the default whiteness (Aryanism) of the Polish body by appealing to religious criteria. Therefore, the majority of Polish society are ‘spiritual Semites’ and in fact non-humans. Only the far right Pagan minority deserves to be called Aryans, and thus truly white people.

Paper short abstract

My research demonstrates that the Swiss naturalisation process reproduces a complex, classed racial hierarchy. By foregrounding the intersection of class and race, it shows how whiteness operates as a structural yet elusive standard of belonging, organising inclusion and exclusion.

Paper long abstract

In the Swiss naturalisation process, whiteness functions beyond skin colour, operating instead as a structural yet slippery position produced through affective assessments of candidates’ integration that enable selective recognition or exclusion. I examine how these dynamics operate—and are simultaneously obscured—through notions of merit and “effort-making”, often condensed by local decision-makers into the expectation to feel a candidate’s integration.

Conceptualising naturalisation as a rite of passage (van Gennep 1999), I show how candidates are expected to transform into “one of us” within Switzerland’s hegemonic emotional regime, structured around a racialised binary between a white We and the racialised Other (Ahmed 2014). Drawing on the naturalisation interview of Tarik, a teenage boy with a Kosovan passport and a working-class background, I analyse how class and race intersect to shape a candidate’s ability to “pass as white” and, consequently, to be recognised as Swiss. I situate these processes within Switzerland’s often-neglected colonial entanglements, post-war labour regimes, and enduring fears of over-foreignisation, through which the categories of “foreigner” and “working class” have historically converged.

In doing so, I demonstrate how contemporary naturalisation practices reproduce a classed racial hierarchy that regulates access to citizenship and seeks to preserve the racial purity of the Swiss nation, as ideals of “Swissness” become increasingly aligned with white, middle-class norms, affects, and lifestyles.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores sexual racism by analysing white people’s perceptions of beauty and desire towards Black people in contemporary Catalonia. Drawing on fieldwork, Critical Whiteness Studies and colonial history, it shows how racialised and gendered hierarchies reproduce in the intimate sphere.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates the role of racialisation in intimate relationships and desire in contemporary Catalonia (Spain). Informed by Critical Whiteness Studies, it centres on white people’s perceptions of desirability and attraction towards Black people, exploring how power dynamics intersect with "race" and gender in the intimate sphere. Moreover, it explores whether patterns of sexual racism that continue to shape contemporary racialised hierarchies of intimacy can be traced back to Spanish colonial history.

Drawing on literature on the representation of Black bodies and racialised desire in the Spanish colonial period, alongside contemporary accounts of racism and interracial relationships in Catalonia, the paper combines historical analysis with ethnographic multimodal methodology. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, visual surveys and experiential surveys, integrating qualitative and quantitative data, the research identifies trends of sexual racism among the white Catalan population. These manifest both in the penalisation of Black people as potential partners and in their prioritisation through practices of fetishisation, objectification and hypersexualisation, and can directly be correlated to colonial remnants of gendered and racialised patterns.

By focusing on the intimate sphere, the paper critically examines the construction of whiteness through interpersonal relations and prevailing notions of beauty and desire, while simultaneously challenging the construction of race as a social category.

Paper short abstract

Whiteness functions as a commodity in China’s fashion market, but at what cost to the migrant models who embody and sell it? Drawing on my multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the interplay of racial privilege and precarious labor in transnational fashion modeling.

Paper long abstract

While the racial politics of fashion have received growing attention in media, anthropological, and sociological scholarship, the role of transnational migration in shaping these politics remains under-examined. This paper explores the racial politics of China’s fashion industry, where surging demand for a “global” aesthetic has fueled a booming job market for transnational fashion models. It focuses on the influx of predominantly white Eastern European models into China’s fashion hubs, such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, to promote Chinese-made products. Drawing on my participant observation and in-depth interviews with foreign models and Chinese fashion professionals conducted between 2021 and 2026, this paper traces how racialized identities—particularly whiteness—are negotiated and commodified through the daily practices of their aesthetic work. It argues that while this modeling market perpetuates white superiority in media consumption, it simultaneously produces precarity for the migrant models who embody it. Their experiences reveal that whiteness in China is not a monolithic category conferring univocal privilege but is instead highly stratified and contested. The paper further shows how the transnational circulation of aesthetic labor intersects with China’s shifting national self-imaginary. As China positions itself as a global power and an emerging center of fashion, the symbolic value of the white body becomes increasingly unstable, caught between enduring racial hierarchies and new assertions of Chinese ascendancy. This study contributes to anthropological debates on race, migration, and the political economy of beauty by highlighting the layered and dynamic nature of racialization within the cultural industries.

Paper short abstract

In Santiago schools shaped by Haitian and Venezuelan migration, everyday talk of the ‘normal’ Chilean pupil marks some bodies and accents as out of place. Participatory action research shows how these practices construct the ‘white Chilean student’ as a civic ideal in education.

Paper long abstract

Chile has long been narrated as relatively homogeneous and “mestizo”/Europeanised; in the last decade, accelerated South–South migration has made racial difference more visible in public schools in Santiago. Building on critical whiteness scholarship and debates on the coloniality of power, and drawing on participatory action research conducted by the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Chilean Anti-Racist Education (MRACE) in municipal schools that enrolled large numbers of Haitian and Venezuelan students, this paper examines how everyday school interactions produce the figure of the “white Chilean student” as the unmarked norm of national belonging.

Combining classroom observation with co-designed workshops, collective mapping and student–teacher dialogues, I trace how evaluative categories such as “good student”, “respectful”, “clean”, “well spoken” and “participative” become proxies for whiteness. These seemingly mundane judgements attach to bodies (skin colour, hair), to sensory registers (smell, noise) and to linguistic practices (Spanish with an accent; Haitian Creole), while also intersecting with classed imaginaries of order and aspiration. In polarised debates about migration and diversity, “we” narratives are assembled through comparisons with the racialised “migrant other”, legitimising differential discipline, lowered expectations and exclusion from participation spaces.

By foregrounding the making of whiteness—rather than only the marginalisation of non-white students—this paper offers an ethnographic account of how racial hierarchies are consolidated through schooling, and reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory methods for unsettling them.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses whiteness in Britain’s first indigenous Muslim community, showing how racialised hierarchies and elitism were reproduced through religious practice and identity. It examines how second-generation members deconstruct these legacies to reimagine faith, belonging, and agency.

Paper long abstract

For many Muslims born in Britain, profound intergenerational, socio-economic, and demographic shifts are underway. Yet dominant public and scholarly discourses continue to frame Islam and “British values” as incompatible, with convert Muslims and their post-convert families occupying a particularly racialised position within these debates. This paper examines how whiteness operates within Britain’s first indigenous Muslim community, the Murabitun, shaping religious authority, belonging, and racial hierarchy.

Drawing on the concept of liminality, or dihliz (Al-Ghazali), the paper explores processes of self-formation among second-generation convert Muslim women who inhabit the threshold between Muslim and Western traditions. The Murabitun emerged through a synthesis of Sufi cosmology and Western philosophy; however, rather than producing integration, this formation reproduced inherited structures of whiteness, aristocratic hierarchy, elitism, and Protestant Christian moral grammars. These dynamics became embedded within community organisation, embodied practice, education, and normative gendered ideals of marriage and family life, generating a corporeal and affective schema through which authority and legitimacy were racialised.

The paper argues that second-generation members are actively deconstructing and decolonising these inherited formations. Through questioning community belonging, prioritising gender justice, and redefining faith practice via work, social media, and alternative spiritual repertoires, they disrupt racialised and patriarchal modes of authority. This process of self-formation reimagines faith as an ethical, reflexive, and relational practice rather than an inherited hierarchy. By centring lived experience and affect, the paper contributes to critical debates on whiteness, religion, and racial formation, demonstrating how religious spaces can both reproduce and unsettle racial hierarchies in contemporary Britain.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how whiteness is reproduced through institutional uncare. Based on ethnography with undocumented women care workers in Brussels, it conceptualises uncare as necropolitical governance that makes prolonged exhaustion survivable for some while life-threatening for others.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how whiteness is sustained and reproduced not only through regimes of care and protection, but through the uneven distribution of institutional uncare at and within the border. Drawing on ethnographic research with undocumented women engaged in domestic and care labour in Brussels, we analyse uncare as a necropolitical technology that exposes some lives to lethal mental exhaustion and bodily usure, while rendering such exposure survivable for others.

Building on necropolitical scholarship, we conceptualise uncare as the routinised withdrawal or deferral of care in the management of workers’ sickness through labour and legal regulation. For undocumented workers, institutional care is exemplified in bureaucratic deferral, barriers to care, and emergency-only forms of medical treatment that prioritise immediate stabilisation over recovery. Rather than treating uncare as absence or neglect, we approach it as a structured mode of governance that differentially allocates livability. We argue that whiteness operates here not as a fixed identity or phenotype, but as a positionality from which institutional uncare towards migrants remains morally legible and politically tolerable.

By asking “who can afford uncare,” the paper shifts analytical attention from overt exclusion to the background conditions that make institutional abandonment survivable for some and life-threatening for others. In doing so, it contributes to debates on whiteness by foregrounding its ambivalent, infrastructural, and embodied dimensions, and by demonstrating how necropolitical governance operates through differential endurance rather than direct killing.