Yasmin Gunaratnam
Biographic Data
| ID | 287393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yasmin Gunaratnam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yasmin |
| FAMILY NAME | Gunaratnam |
| SIGNATURE | GUNARATNAM Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9025-4981 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 302 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Fateful triangles
Informed by respective discussions of race as a floating signifier and performative politics, we examine and discuss how empirical evidence is used to secure political authority and camouflage racial thinking. Our focus is on integration-related evidence-based policymaking in Sweden and the United Kingdom, within a broader crisis of public mistrust of politicians, experts and empiricism, and at a time when immigration policy is politically charge…
Plantationo(s)cenes
This paper describes the methods of creative activism used by a women-led plantation trade union in Sri Lanka to improve workers’ living and working conditions. We discuss how the feminist idea of “relational humility” is a vital component of how creative activism with plantation workers can work against extractive forms of research and knowledge-making. The paper unfolds in three parts. After setting out our orienting ideas and describing the co…
Explosive legacies
Israel's deadly 2023 military assault on Gaza - recognised as genocide by humanitarian organisations - is at the heart of this article. We now know much more about the political economy of Israel's settler colonialism, in which leading institutions in North America and Europe, including universities, are embedded. And yet our anticolonial solidarity remains at best glitchy and unreliable. Rather than defaulting to complicity as an explanation, I …
Foreign bodies
This text is the result of several online conversations and an a-synchronous shared file. A process taking nearly two years. The incremental pace and long stretches of silence were invariably shaped by our struggles with workload, while joining industrial actions taken by the UK’s University and College Union over equitable pay, working conditions and pensions. Despite the runaway marketisation of university life, our exchanges were something of …
Time to think [Audio podcast episode]
Over the course of this series, we've talked about the importance of education beyond the university.We've taken you to a public park, a cathedral, an art gallery, a library, a living room, a laundromat and to the streets.But universities do matter, as institutions and as places.In our final episode, we visit two -Goldsmiths, University of London, and Bard College Berlinand listen to conversations taking place in-and outside their lecture halls.F…
Dragging the University
In this article, I discuss Lauren Berlant’s way of writing with/in the affective infrastructures of universities, embracing comedy and play, while engaging constraint. My case example is Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds (2019). In the company of Berlant’s incitements, I come back to the inconvenience of our latter-day crises of scholarly knowledge and writing, instigated by black and brown intellectuals and artificial intelligence, whi…
Full of Power
Knowledge and politics can be produced in a wide variety of places: a car, football terraces, picket lines, council estates. Doreen Massey was dedicated to popular education. In this introductory episode, we discuss the importance of intellectual spaces beyond the university
World City [Audio podcast episode]
Remember to die
Anticolonial and Black feminist scholars and artists have made a convincing case that political and social legibility for racially marked peoples requires active and multi-sensory reiteration. To presence what has been effaced or distorted, images, numbers, and texts must be redacted, annotated, rescaled, reframed, relocated, and repurposed. In dialogue with this work, this piece discusses the vernacular of the diasporic art made in English hospi…
Presentation fever and podium affects
In this article, I flesh out and crip the bodily experience and institutional terrain of academic feminist presentation, so as to socialise the increasing privatising of experience in the neoliberal academy. As a means of staging feminism, presenting is a vital part of the academic habitus, yet it is an experience and practice that is problematic for intersectional feminisms. Without critical examination, the reproduction of power and claims to p…
Young, unauthorised and Black
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Italian reception centre for male 'unaccompanied minors'. Drawing on the concepts of 'hostipitality' (Derrida), the Black Mediterranean, and 'intimate citizenship' (Plummer), we examine the political ambivalence of hospitality for young African men as they transition to adulthood and how this is experienced through the intersections of age, gender and race. The biographical transition to adult…
Not in my name
This article draws on narrative interviews with volunteers in an English charity, providing temporary accommodation to destitute migrants and refugees. The aim is to investigate the ethical and emotional complexities and ambivalence of the tensions between hospitality and hostility, and conditional and unconditional hospitality, with a focus on stories of empathy. The article engages Ken Plummer's concept of 'intimate citizenship' within the cont…
Infrastructures of racial violence, health and debility
Introduction Environment
INTRODUCTION, 'Environment'When we decided upon the broad theme for this issue we toyed with different terms.Inevitably, given its current cachet in the environmental humanities, 'Anthropocene' came up.Although a relatively recent addition to the scholarly lexicon, the term has begun to accumulate baggage, not least as Sarah Kember (2017) points out in how it 'identifyies agency as anthropos or Man' (p.348).'Is it not a marker of masculine disemb…
Go home
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next. The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, o…
Go home
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message ‘In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.’ The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate control and toughness around immigration. This book explores the effects of such performances of toughness: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist ac…
Introduction the Wherewithal of Feminist Methods
Concepts, devices and practices have proliferated considerably since the signifier ‘feminist’ was first attached to ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, most prominently in the 1980s. Early discussions suggested that feminist research and knowledge-making demanded a distinct approach to empirical inquiry: one that recognised and overturned systemic gender disparities, validated women’s ‘experience’, rejected hierarchies between the researcher and research…
Earthing the Anthropos? From 'socializing the Anthropocene' to geologizing the social
Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought's own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we 'socialize the Anthropocene' without also opening 'the s…
Breathe/Swallow/Feel
Introduction Frailty and Debility
Morbid mixtures
Rethinking hybridity
Introduction Black British Feminisms
This article is an introduction to the Feminist Review special issue 'Black British Feminisms', jointly edited by Joan Anim-Addo, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Scafe \n \nFor us at Feminist Review, it’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since the publication of the issue Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Many Voices, with its flamboyant pink, four-handed goddesses dancing across a green and black…
The Branch on Which I Sit
Death and the Migrant
Using sociological research with dying migrants and care professionals, Death and the Migrant describes the unfolding drama and ordinary predicaments of transnational dying in British Cities. At times of dying, lives are looked back on and memories and losses surface. For migrants and settlers, questions of belonging and ‘home’ can loom large. The impact of these novel psycho-geographies is also transforming care provision as professionals encoun…
Researching Race and Ethnicity
Earthing the Anthropos? From 'socializing the Anthropocene' to geologizing the social
Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought's own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we 'socialize the Anthropocene' without also opening 'the s…
Introduction the Wherewithal of Feminist Methods
Concepts, devices and practices have proliferated considerably since the signifier ‘feminist’ was first attached to ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, most prominently in the 1980s. Early discussions suggested that feminist research and knowledge-making demanded a distinct approach to empirical inquiry: one that recognised and overturned systemic gender disparities, validated women’s ‘experience’, rejected hierarchies between the researcher and research…
Learning to Be Affected
The practice of live sociology in situations of pain and suffering is the focus of this article. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu's 'social suffering' (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of 'total pain'. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in at…
Race’ and Health in Contemporary Britain
(1994). ‘Race’ and Health in Contemporary Britain. Disability & Society: Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 571-573
Not in my name
This article draws on narrative interviews with volunteers in an English charity, providing temporary accommodation to destitute migrants and refugees. The aim is to investigate the ethical and emotional complexities and ambivalence of the tensions between hospitality and hostility, and conditional and unconditional hospitality, with a focus on stories of empathy. The article engages Ken Plummer's concept of 'intimate citizenship' within the cont…
The Branch on Which I Sit
Where Is the Love? Art, Aesthetics and Research
This paper discusses the use of different forms of artistic representation (poems, images, music, literature) to convey research findings. It theorises creativity as emerging from the precarious interplay between external and internal worlds that can surprise and demand invention and representation. Using examples from palliative care and ideas from post‐structuralism and psychoanalytic aesthetics, the article examines the form and content of art…
Young, unauthorised and Black
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Italian reception centre for male 'unaccompanied minors'. Drawing on the concepts of 'hostipitality' (Derrida), the Black Mediterranean, and 'intimate citizenship' (Plummer), we examine the political ambivalence of hospitality for young African men as they transition to adulthood and how this is experienced through the intersections of age, gender and race. The biographical transition to adult…
Auditory Space, Ethics and Hospitality
This article examines the limits and potential of hospitality through struggles over auditory space in care at the end of life. Drawing upon empirical research and a nurse's account of noisy mourning in a multicultural hospice ward, I argue that the insurgent force of noise as corporeal generosity can produce impossible dilemmas for care, while also provoking surprising ethical relations and potentialities. Derrida's ideas about the aporias of th…
Roadworks
Narratives of street life from British Bangladeshi Muslim mothers, collected in the aftermath of the suicide bombings in London in 2005, are the focus of this article. The author examines how temporal schemas that combine the unpredictable time of racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of living with ontological insecurity a…
Ethnic monitoring in higher education
Ethnic Monitoring in higher education has been limited and piecemeal. It often fails to explore the relationships between ethnicity and student progress and achievement, and to account for any ethnic inequalities revealed. In this paper an approach to ethnic monitoring that utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods is discussed. We argue that such an approach gives a clear statistical picture of group progress and achievement, identifies soci…
World City [Audio podcast episode]
Presentation fever and podium affects
In this article, I flesh out and crip the bodily experience and institutional terrain of academic feminist presentation, so as to socialise the increasing privatising of experience in the neoliberal academy. As a means of staging feminism, presenting is a vital part of the academic habitus, yet it is an experience and practice that is problematic for intersectional feminisms. Without critical examination, the reproduction of power and claims to p…
Infrastructures of racial violence, health and debility
Introduction Frailty and Debility
Introduction Black British Feminisms
This article is an introduction to the Feminist Review special issue 'Black British Feminisms', jointly edited by Joan Anim-Addo, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Scafe \n \nFor us at Feminist Review, it’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since the publication of the issue Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Many Voices, with its flamboyant pink, four-handed goddesses dancing across a green and black…
Care, artistry and what might be
This paper provides a critical examination of cultural competence approaches, using the findings of a development project in the black voluntary sector that aimed to increase awareness of palliative care amongst older people and carers from groups most commonly referred to in the UK as being ‘minority ethnic’. The project involved narrative interviews with a convenience sample of 33 older people and carers and 11 focus groups with a convenience s…
Eating into multiculturalism
Using an innovative analysis, this article concocts an imagined ‘dialogue’ between hospice staff and minoritized service users. It mixes together narrative extracts about food from separate qualitative interviews, enabling staff and service users to ‘talk’ to each other against a context of the multicultural provision of food within an English hospice. The dialogue is put to work through an analysis that explores the connections, exchange and con…
Race’ and Health in Contemporary Britain
(1994). ‘Race’ and Health in Contemporary Britain. Disability & Society: Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 571-573
Ethnic monitoring in higher education
Ethnic Monitoring in higher education has been limited and piecemeal. It often fails to explore the relationships between ethnicity and student progress and achievement, and to account for any ethnic inequalities revealed. In this paper an approach to ethnic monitoring that utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods is discussed. We argue that such an approach gives a clear statistical picture of group progress and achievement, identifies soci…
‘We mustn’t judge people … but’
Increasing attention is being given to the challenging of racism and racial harassment in health care organisations. Very little, however, is known about anti‐discriminatory practice in the health services, or how professionals give meaning to ‘race’ in their work with service users. This paper examines these issues through representations of the ‘dilemmas’ that were talked about by hospice staff in managing incidents of racial harassment amongst…
Eating into multiculturalism
Using an innovative analysis, this article concocts an imagined ‘dialogue’ between hospice staff and minoritized service users. It mixes together narrative extracts about food from separate qualitative interviews, enabling staff and service users to ‘talk’ to each other against a context of the multicultural provision of food within an English hospice. The dialogue is put to work through an analysis that explores the connections, exchange and con…
Researching ′Race′ and Ethnicity
Researching `Race' and Ethnicity provides an innovative discussion of the methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of doing qualitative research that is informed by questions of `race', ethnicity and social difference. By identifying and challenging `categorical thinking' and many longstanding assumptions about the meanings of `race' and ethnicity, the author gets to the heart of many of the everyday dilemmas and difficulties that r…
Researching Race and Ethnicity
Where Is the Love? Art, Aesthetics and Research
This paper discusses the use of different forms of artistic representation (poems, images, music, literature) to convey research findings. It theorises creativity as emerging from the precarious interplay between external and internal worlds that can surprise and demand invention and representation. Using examples from palliative care and ideas from post‐structuralism and psychoanalytic aesthetics, the article examines the form and content of art…
From competence to vulnerability
This article discusses the care of older people from groups most commonly referred to in the UK as being “minority ethnic”. It considers the significance and growing popularity of social policy initiatives aimed at cultural competence in care provided at the end of life. Drawing upon qualitative focus group interviews with 56 health and social care professionals involved in the delivery of palliative care in the UK, this paper examines how the en…
Care, artistry and what might be
This paper provides a critical examination of cultural competence approaches, using the findings of a development project in the black voluntary sector that aimed to increase awareness of palliative care amongst older people and carers from groups most commonly referred to in the UK as being ‘minority ethnic’. The project involved narrative interviews with a convenience sample of 33 older people and carers and 11 focus groups with a convenience s…
Women, pain and death
Women, pain and death: rituals and everyday life on the margins of Europe and beyond." Mortality, 14(4), pp. 379–380
Auditory Space, Ethics and Hospitality
This article examines the limits and potential of hospitality through struggles over auditory space in care at the end of life. Drawing upon empirical research and a nurse's account of noisy mourning in a multicultural hospice ward, I argue that the insurgent force of noise as corporeal generosity can produce impossible dilemmas for care, while also provoking surprising ethical relations and potentialities. Derrida's ideas about the aporias of th…
Learning to Be Affected
The practice of live sociology in situations of pain and suffering is the focus of this article. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu's 'social suffering' (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of 'total pain'. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in at…
Death and the Migrant
Using sociological research with dying migrants and care professionals, Death and the Migrant describes the unfolding drama and ordinary predicaments of transnational dying in British Cities. At times of dying, lives are looked back on and memories and losses surface. For migrants and settlers, questions of belonging and ‘home’ can loom large. The impact of these novel psycho-geographies is also transforming care provision as professionals encoun…
Roadworks
Narratives of street life from British Bangladeshi Muslim mothers, collected in the aftermath of the suicide bombings in London in 2005, are the focus of this article. The author examines how temporal schemas that combine the unpredictable time of racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of living with ontological insecurity a…
Morbid mixtures
Rethinking hybridity
Introduction Black British Feminisms
This article is an introduction to the Feminist Review special issue 'Black British Feminisms', jointly edited by Joan Anim-Addo, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Scafe \n \nFor us at Feminist Review, it’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since the publication of the issue Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Amos et al., 1984). Many Voices, with its flamboyant pink, four-handed goddesses dancing across a green and black…
The Branch on Which I Sit
Introduction Frailty and Debility
Breathe/Swallow/Feel
Go home
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next. The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, o…
Go home
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message ‘In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.’ The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate control and toughness around immigration. This book explores the effects of such performances of toughness: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist ac…
Introduction the Wherewithal of Feminist Methods
Concepts, devices and practices have proliferated considerably since the signifier ‘feminist’ was first attached to ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, most prominently in the 1980s. Early discussions suggested that feminist research and knowledge-making demanded a distinct approach to empirical inquiry: one that recognised and overturned systemic gender disparities, validated women’s ‘experience’, rejected hierarchies between the researcher and research…
Earthing the Anthropos? From 'socializing the Anthropocene' to geologizing the social
Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought's own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we 'socialize the Anthropocene' without also opening 'the s…
Introduction Environment
INTRODUCTION, 'Environment'When we decided upon the broad theme for this issue we toyed with different terms.Inevitably, given its current cachet in the environmental humanities, 'Anthropocene' came up.Although a relatively recent addition to the scholarly lexicon, the term has begun to accumulate baggage, not least as Sarah Kember (2017) points out in how it 'identifyies agency as anthropos or Man' (p.348).'Is it not a marker of masculine disemb…
Sociology (37 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (17 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works)