2025/07/24 by Alphonso Alva Hopkins · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice #Critical Race Theory in Education #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1080/01419870.2025.2531304
openalex publication_date 2025/07/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This paper joins conversations on the contribution of public scholarship to antiracist politics in Britain. It takes up the dilemmas of authority in knowledge faced time and again by scholars and activists alike. I propose an understanding of the knowledge politics of public scholarship through the lens of storytelling. Using the motif of “the changing same” (Gilroy 1993; Murji 2017), I consider how scholarship engages with possibilities of change and repetition, and differentiated desires for the fulfilment of justice and for more transformative modes of relating. The paper suggests and explores three forms of storying practice: collaborative evidencing, counter-storying and collective archiving. I argue that representation is performatively contested by scholars and other experts. Stories refigure relationships between those who tell them and re-work the material fields in which they are told; they underrun and exceed the state as arbiter of the political and narrator of (post)racial (un)realities.