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The Racist Tail Wags the Welfare Dog - A Seminar talk with Prof Gary Craig
The Department of Sociology and Criminology Seminar Series presents:
a seminar with Professor Gary Craig entitled:
The Racist Tail Wags the Welfare Dog
Professor Gary Craig is a highly experienced social researcher, consultant on research and evaluation, writer, adviser and community activist and organizer. He has directed or co-directed more than 100 research projects in the fields of ‘race’ and ethnicity, community development, modern slavery and local governance and for a wide variety of funding bodies. Professor Craig has authored, coauthored, edited or co-edited almost 300 publications and some of his recent publications are ‘The Modern Slavery agenda (2019 Policy Press)’ and ‘Understanding 'race', ethnicity (2nd edition 2019) Policy Press’ and ‘Where is ‘race’ in social policy learning and teaching?, Social Policy and Society, (co-ed. 2022)’.
Abstract related to Professor Craig's talk:
Britain’s stance towards ethnic minorities has been Janus-faced: developing an increasingly repressive and restrictive stance towards immigration, and – supported by a strident media – portraying minorities and migrants as undermining British culture and values, ‘sponging’ on the welfare state. Domestic policies of successive governments, including some ameliorative community-based programmes of community and race relations, and occasional claims that governments were determined to create a compassionate and caring multicultural society, have not fundamentally addressed the racism inherent in immigration policy and practice. The consequence has been that the welfare of Britain’s minorities – measured by outcomes in every branch of welfare provision – has largely been disregarded by the British state. Despite these few liberal initiatives supposedly aimed at improving the lot of Britain’s minorities, the racism inherent in policy and practice persists. Worryingly for the social policy academic community, this racism extended beyond the political practice of social policy to the academic discipline of social policy. This is striking considering that the social policy discipline is concerned centrally with issues of citizenship rights, welfare, equality, poverty alleviation and social engineering. This lacuna extended to the practice of social research, where many proposals, proposers, funders or commissioners still treated the dimension of ethnicity as too complex, too expensive or too marginal to be worthy of serious attention.
Join in person at Boole 3 from 12-1.30pm, Monday May 9th
OR
Via Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84917030960?pwd=Z3ZOZm5tUTNHNlg4dmFoay9HT2ZEdz09