Activism, Critique, Publications, Testimonials

Closing the BARC Circle: Passings, Crossings, Diffraction, Flows

BARC

Water passes through rocks, sculpting a narrow terrain through the impassable. Rivulets emerge and come together, one by one, each seeking the sea. BARC was started as a project for building anti-racist business management scholar-activism. We emerged in 2017 as part of the wider formation of the Decolonizing Alliance, a community of scholars of colour, global majorities, and white allies. The manifestation of BARC, as a container for action, represented a breach of the established, individualised way of practicing scholarship in our field, a forging together of scholarship and activism, as well as a conscious continuation of the practices of loving and caring among women of colour.

Inspired by a lineage of anti-racist scholar-activists who made our project thinkable and speakable, we formed with the intention of educating ourselves and each other about the possibilities and potentials of an anti-racist classroom. We did so with the knowledge that we ourselves had been conditioned into structurally racist pedagogical frameworks and dynamics and that we had much unlearning to do in order to build a space that looked unlike anything we had ever known. Led by the questions: What do we want to see? And, How do we want to feel? we developed innovative, creative methods including writing, gaming, art, and drama; and collaborated with artists and activists whenever we were able. Each step was negotiated together with awkwardness, tenderness, trepidation and delight. We spent a year honing our skills, creating our tools, practicing our craft, and delivering more #barcworkshops at other universities, to initiate or spark the conversations around anti-racism and decolonising that staff and students of colour, and white allies, knew needed to happen, but didn’t feel able to lead on their own. 

Some of this work involved learning from our mistakes. These took many forms and failings came often; as such, we had to learn on our feet. This is a written reflection of the years leading up to and since our inaugural workshop in October 2018. We write this to archive and bear witness again to our growth and changing form. 

These reflections offer us a moment of stillness, 
in still water
a retelling that is tenuous 
though seems contained for now. 

History is always threatening to burst 
to flood the edges of the present, 
shaping new horizons 
or receding from consciousness. 
Its elements transform 
only to fade with the light
of the sun. 

As we archive the passing of four years, we note the time. We add ink to memory.

How BARC Ltd. limited BARC

To make it possible for us to be compensated for our work in higher education, university systems and processes required us to formalise our organisation by establishing ourselves as a limited company. Because of the functional norms of white capitalist governance structures, universities in the UK do not partner with charities or grassroots organisations, nor do they donate money to causes. We never felt comfortable about this move as it jarred with our collective methodology grounded in generating community resources, and we did not meet the requirements to form as a community interest corporation. We did, however, recognise that the labour of women of colour is too often expected or even demanded for free, as well as appropriated, so we sought to protect the value we were creating and offering. We also saw the opportunity to redirect funding from institutions to students of colour and the antiracist work that they wished to develop. 

More generally, the narrowness of the university processes that we encountered served as a prototypical example of how UK universities are fiercely closed off from knowledge and practice that is outside of marketised or business sectors. Recognizing only ventures that work towards a pro-profit paradigm reinforces the logic that universities are primarily financial entities whose business model relies on selling services to student-consumers. So long as universities operate in a competitive environment governed by these logics, they are hostile to the possibilities of mutual ecologies of gain and growth.

Our first two-day workshop sold out and requests started to come in from members of further universities seeking advice, workshops, training, and research. We accepted a handful of these commissions. Some of these projects were positive and resulted in the production of resources that have been influential in the sector, such as the Student Journey Game, and other elements of our work that we released for free on our website. Such collaborations brought us into contact with new and dynamic communities of academics and students working on decolonisation, and drew us closer to incredible artists of colour, all of whom we were privileged to meet, connect with, learn from and with.

The Ltd. structure drove our work in an entirely different direction from our starting intentions. This occurred despite efforts to the contrary: we wrote a constitution that outlined our core purposes, working methodology, and prevented any member from receiving direct financial benefit from the collective labour of BARC. We committed to channeling all profits towards funding student activism and subsequent anti-racist workshops. The company format required that one of us be named as Director and thus shoulder the not insignificant labour of tax reporting and associated risks of liabilities and debts. To enable the process, this responsibility was taken up generously by one of our members, and aspects of the labour that could be shared were distributed, but we had no desire or capacity for this status to continue indefinitely.

We negotiated making time and space for BARC work within and between our paid employed roles, and in the interstices of the white university more generally. One of our members was on research leave for the first half of 2019, and used the time that she was not conducting research to serve as BARC’s de facto operations and finance manager. There were periods where much of the work was unfairly left to a few members. As such, the demands of BARC workshops stretched, and even exceeded, the capacity of those of us on the ground in a damaging and unsustainable way. We were exhausted, and the tensions began to pull us apart from one another until we became resentful, critical and even suspicious of each other’s efforts. Our engagements with each other began to fragment.

BARC is Transforming

In the summer of 2019 we worked as part of the Decolonizing Alliance to challenge the Eurocentrism and white supremacy of the International Critical Management Studies 2019 conference, picking up the thread of dissent that had emerged in 2017. That same summer, as BARC, we held a second Organising for Liberation workshop in Leeds. There, our way of working inadvertently caused harm to some Black and people of colour participants; we reflected deeply and took on board this critique while feeling pushed to our own edges. 

We grappled with the issues that had accumulated within our collective. Some of these came from external demands, and others from a lack of dialogue or disagreements in strategy and politics amongst members. We did this on a retreat that we had intentionally planned for such purposes, while sharing space with primarily white, queer and feminist business and management colleagues interested in ‘Writing Differently’.

During our retreat, we explored our collective ancestry - as teachers, designers, builders, poets, and cooks - that drive us in this work. We unveiled and examined the shadow selves that both distract us from, and also inform, the ways in which we work. We read tarot cards that gave us insight into the roles that each of us play within the collective, and came to an overall decision to deepen and channel our efforts, and to simply do less. 

We came to two important, and connected, realisations: first, that the reason we had felt such discomfort at incorporating into a business was that this formation was simply not an appropriate container for our work, and second, for us to continue, we had to reconfigure, both in terms of our membership and our incorporated status as a limited company. As we were strained by the normative capitalistic structures of an incorporated business, so too were we strained by the capitalistic structures of the neoliberal, white Western academy. Whilst we had made efforts to build caring practices, we began to realise too late that other elements in our patterns of work and interaction had bred exhaustion and resentment. Despite our reflexivity, we were drawn into default patterns of organising that are designed to facilitate career-building and publication-chasing. We sped up trying to keep up with a pace set for us by these structures. In our haste, we sacrificed having difficult political conversations with each other; when we slowed down enough for these conversations to finally emerge, one member left the collective.

When energy encounters an obstacle or a barrier, it changes direction - this is known as diffraction. There were some issues and tensions between us that remained unresolved, things that we encountered again following the retreat, in processes of writing collaboratively and taking decisions about next steps. Our fracturing was deep and the process of diffraction had begun. Nonetheless, we attempted in the moment to consolidate our learnings thus far in writing. Our many hours of conversations, deliberations, and debates were distilled into a resolution statement which we wrote, members contributing line by line, on the train as we left:

BARC is an international collective of women of colour scholar activists. We aim to build anti-racist pedagogic communities of students and university workers through sustained collective organizing, collaboration and radical thinking. Our practice is led by our commitments to critical theory, intersectional feminisms and decolonizing frameworks.

BARC is transforming. In the past two years we have built spaces for communities of colour to learn from our own truths how to resist white supremacy. We have taught each other, as we were teaching others, how to bring about a future we wish to inhabit. At times, we have felt moments of liberation in ways that have affirmed the necessity for changing the way we relate to each other in higher education. We heard this echoed throughout the responses to our work. Because we recognise that this liberatory mode of being is inherently difficult to sustain in white patriarchal capitalist higher education structures, we have made a political decision to morph into the next most elegant (brown, 2017) manifestation of the spirit of the collective. We are and will continue responding to the calls we are currently heeding. We are committed to our own healing, ancestral healing, and personal and political liberation, which for us means actively and creatively shaping the possibilities emergent from the trajectories curtailed by imperialist colonialism and neo-colonialism (Gopal, 2019). In this travel through time, we take forward the skills we have developed and the bonds of kinship we have grown.

To do so, we are taking some key decisions: we are winding down our limited company, and will no longer be taking commissions to train white staff. We believe this form of work needs to be undertaken by those who currently uphold white structures and only in pursuit of change at an institutional level. While we will retain and maintain resources on our website and social media, we refuse the additional emotional labour expended to combat or soothe white ignorance, guilt and fragility. We also refuse the labour of fighting intersectional capitalist structures that devalue, commodify and deny rightful compensation for our work.

At the same time, this experience brought into relief the magic we each bring to the table and what that means for what we make together. We laid out all our cards. We became foils for each other, allowing us to sharpen our vision of what the collective could be and what collective work can do. This vision includes walking directly into the unknown, building a reality that has not before been seen. BARC will continue to be a container for action, a shaper of change, a changer of worlds, recognising throughout that pleasure is a measure of freedom (brown 2017, 2019). We are committing to transformation as a practice of liberation.

Directly after our retreat, as part of the Decolonizing Alliance, we enacted multiple interventions at the European Group of Organisation Studies Conference (EGOS) 2019. We hosted a DA social event to bring together anti-racist business and management scholars, especially those of colour, challenged white supremacy that surprised us when it appeared in one of EGOS’ first streams explicitly on race and racism, confronted EGOS leadership at the AGM and lifted up, in a banner drop, the memory of the Latin American-European Management and Organisation Studies (LAEMOS) Conference, support for which had been unceremoniously withdrawn by EGOS board without membership consultation. The risky, politically complex, and concentrated scholar-activism of the summer left us spent, and afterwards, we kept to our intentions and slowed down BARC work substantially. 

Documentation

We supported the efforts of one of our members to host an anti-racist conference at her institution in October 2019, an international event that drew hundreds of student activists and scholars alike. Shortly after this event she experienced a severe burnout and was signed off from work for 6 weeks: a consequence of the accumulation of racial stress, institutional bullying, and lack of support within our own working practices. However, the sense that this kind of work was becoming unsustainable preceded this burnout. At the conference, we began the process of distributing the remainder of our profits to student anti-racist projects via the BARC Bank initiative. In early March 2020, as COVID-19 hit, we facilitated what was to become the final #BARCworkshop. This last gathering was for friends, colleagues and students at the University of Kent Canterbury where they were also marking and celebrating the end of a period of intense organising within the institution, and going through their own process of transformation. Not even a week later, we joined the rest of the world in entering into COVID19 lockdown, the start of an ongoing pandemic period which was to radically affect relational norms at a species level. This was followed soon after by Summer 2020’s revolutionary Movement for Black Lives, an international amplification and re-positioning of the Black Lives Matter movement that in 2013 marked a beginning for the contemporary period of anti-racist activism. This 2020 rupture both opened up new opportunities for anti-racist scholar-activism as well as instigated intensified waves of white supremacist violence and epistemic carcerality.

We watched in horror as conservative, authoritarian and fascist governments around the world failed to take appropriate action on the pandemic, such that illness and deaths accelerated at exponential rates. Amidst such grief and loss, with interpersonal activity on an indefinite pause, we wished to continue doing meaningful anti-racist work that was more playful, creative, and less demanding. As such, we decided to employ a brilliant student legal scholar from the Australian National University, Niroshnee Ranjan, as an intern from the end of 2020 to Spring 2021, to work closely with us to document the detail of our practice and learnings from the previous three years of work in the wonderful BARC Workshop Guide. In this document we explicitly spelled out the manner in which we were able, in a replicable, adaptable way, to build anti-racist classrooms in university settings. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with Niroshnee, who inspired us with her own student scholar-activist collective, Coalition for Anti-Racism at ANU (COAR). Throughout our time with BARC, it was these types of intergenerational collaborations and partnerships that pushed our thinking and practice most.

Diffraction

Our diffraction continued like this: other than engaging in the process of winding down our limited company, and delivering a couple of online #BARCworkshops (one for the rescheduled SCOS 2021 and a research pop-up for another member’s institution), on the whole we ended our collective working efforts, each of us enduring the pandemic and its manifold challenges in our own respective bubbles: Bristol, London, Nottingham, Sydney. We set an out of office message for our email account: BARC is on hiatus. We disseminated instead our workshop guide and a recording and resources from a groundbreaking Decolonizing Alliance webinar on Decolonizing the Business School. We made personal choices about what the future would hold, and further diffraction occurred; we said goodbye to another member and hello to one member’s first child, born just after Christmas 2021. Some of us made inroads in our individual institutions, building community and redistributing resources as our practice dictates, and navigating, uncomfortably, the inherent limitations of white governance structures. Separately, though connected, we prioritised our well being through leave taking: stress leave, medical leave, parental leave, and compassionate leave.

Over this long hiatus, it became plain to see: our belonging to the collective transformed us, but our relationships to it, and to each other, had changed. BARC, the collective entity, the vehicle, the container for action, now no longer exists. We will retain the website as an archive but do not plan to maintain it nor pay for its upkeep, and will change our email auto-responder to reflect the same. We will continue to seek knowledge and pleasure by engaging with the Twitter account through which we have connected with a vibrant, transdisciplinary, international anti-racist higher education community. We come together in September 2022 to present one final time for the University of Birmingham Business School Teaching and Learning Conference, to tell our story and to ask the following questions: where were you in 2018, and will you now do what is necessary to respond to our call?

Although we are at the close of this chapter of our journeys as anti-racist business and management scholar-activists, we recognise that others are at different stages in theirs. We thank all those who contributed to our development and encourage others to learn from our story and build on our published outputs rather than reinvent the wheel. As before, we suggest collective listening and reflection to determine a course of anti-racist action, ensuring that people of colour are in positions of power with appropriate recompense - enabled to lead, without having to do all of the work. 

Closing the Circle

  • This is on-going work, because white power will reconfigure and work against anti-racist efforts - we need to continue being vigilant.
  • We continue to un/learn because knowledge is structured by power.
  • Feeling close to your edge / feeling pushed are welcome reactions to this work, you have been working in a principled space.
  • Your students are the academy - they hold the reins of change

These thoughts with which we closed all of our workshops remain true: our work is ongoing as individuals and as a wider anti-racist community. We continue to learn and unlearn through seeking the edges between what we know and the unknown, we meditate on the feelings of comfort and discomfort in ourselves and others; we believe in and value students not just as customers or consumers of the university, but as its lifeblood and purpose. We are inspired by them, seek to support them through partnership, and are led by their vibrancy and radical will.

The energy we, with our community, concentrated in the container that was BARC was generative, life-giving, and vital - and it has not disappeared. Rather, recalling Lorde’s exhortation that self-care is an act of political warfare, it lives on in our continued practices of care for self and others. At this critical juncture where racial capitalist catastrophe and crises surround us, we can still see solutions on the horizon. We remain full of the love, radicality and generosity that forms the heart of an anti-racist, queer feminist of colour liberation praxis. As we recommit to transformation as a practice of liberation, we continue to trust in this and the ancestral lineage as our guide.

Activism, Publications, Workshops

Launch of the BARC Workshop Guide

BARC

Too often anti-racist discourse in the academy is dominated by abstract discussions and theoretical approaches. However, the very nature of anti-racism demands proactive and conscious efforts to work against the multidimensional structures of racism. 

For this reason, over the last six months, members of our collective - Sadhvi Dar, Angela Martinez Dy, and Deborah Brewis - have been working with student organiser Niroshnee Ranjan to create a practical guide to running your own anti-racist workshops. This guide is our contribution to help create intentional and proactive anti-racist work around the world, for the higher education context in particular. In it, you will find workshop modules that we also designed and facilitated. Drawing on our experiences of collectivising and community building, we offer the guide to support anti-racist scholars, students and practitioner communities in their own anti-racist journeys.

This guide provides comprehensive information about the different sessions you can run, how you can prepare for your workshop, our take on compensation for anti-racist labour, and so much more! The structure of the guide itself mirrors that of a workshop: beginning with guiding principles and frameworks, moving into activities, and then encouraging reflections. This guide also provides insight into logistical issues such as participant registration and welcome packs.

At the heart of this guide lies the importance of collective learning and community development. Relatively small interactions in our own communities teach us the skills needed to shape systemic change, and transform the world around us (brown, 2017). Therefore, we recommend that you undertake these sessions with a group of individuals as opposed to on your own.

In solidarity and struggle,

The BARC Collective, with Niroshnee Ranjan

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How to cite this publication: Building the Anti Racist Classroom (2021).
Workshop Guide. Accessed at: https://barcworkshop.org/workshop-guide/

References

brown, adrienne maree (2017) Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press.

research

CfP: Debating black slavery in Management and Organizational studies from decolonial and Afro-Diasporic perspectives

BARC
CLICK HERE FOR FULL DETAILS
Em Portugues

Guest Editors

Prof. Cintia Cristina Silva de Araujo
Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Contábeis, Atuariais
e Financeiras – FIPECAFI (Brazil)
E-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Alexandre Faria
Fundação Getulio Vargas – FGV EBAPE (Brazil)
E-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Jair N. Santos
Universidade Salvador – UNIFACS (Brazil)
Universidade do Estado da Bahia – UNEB (Brazil)
E-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Nidhi Srinivas
The New School (United States)
E-mail: [email protected]
Western institutions report that over 30 million people in the contemporary world system can be reasonably described as enslaved (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2012), and this number has risen dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic and the consolidation of ‘modern slavery’ from a managerialist perspective – it “has been, is, and will likely continue to be a business” involving victims, exploiters, large corporations and consumers (Michaloiva, 2020). A contested umbrella term that includes slavery, human trafficking, forced labor, bonded labor and other forms of exploitation (Kara, 2017), modern slavery has been institutionalized in the global North as an emerging issue of contemporary capitalism (Bales, 2005) and hence transformed into a ‘global topic’ by a US-led management and organizations literature (Crane, 2013; Phung & Crane, 2018).

The US-led field of management and organizational studies (MOS) reaffirms the lasting dominant idea in the US and other countries in the West (Baptist, 2016) that black slavery is a matter of the past with remaining traces in the backward South. In contrast, decolonial and Afro-Diasporic perspectives from both the South and North embodying black slavery epistemes and cosmologies frame ‘modern’ slavery as a changing continuation of the longue durée of colonial/racial/patriarchal slavery capitalism inaugurated in the XVI century with the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Eurocentric conquerors/discoverers (Marable, 2015; Mignolo, 2011). Modern slavery as a ‘managerial problem’ emerges in the North in tandem with the resurgence of dewesternization, decolonization and deracialization movements on a global scale accompanied by renewed backlashes and alternatives, as well as increasingly radical dynamics of expropriation against the ‘invasive others’ in both the North and South (Stoler, 2017). The denial of slavery/enslavement as constitutive of modern management and organizations, from an increasingly heterogeneous, discriminatory and unequal Global North (Boatca, 2015), is cited by critical authors (Cooke, 2004), Afro-Diasporic voices in general (Nkomo, 1992) and, in particular, decolonial authors from the South who reframed racism and coloniality as constitutive dimensions of capitalism and predominantly Eurocentric managerial/organizational knowledge (Faria & Abdalla, 2017; Ibarra-Colado, 2006).

A growing ‘global’ Northern MOS literature on modern slavery denies these contributions by embracing a renewed ‘managerial’ agenda of sustainable development and human rights (Voss et al., 2019), which frames modern slavery as a contingent managerial problem for organizations and supply chains, which is triggered by the globalization of modern capitalism in crisis (Gold, Trautrims & Trodd, 2015; New, 2015). This managerial agenda embodying contested claims of civilizational superiority of the West/North in relation to the ‘rest of the world’ (Davis, 2011; Gonzalez, 2020; Wynter, 2003) has been put forward by North Atlantic research institutions shaping rewesternizing re-articulations of universalist debates, agendas, narratives and policies (Bales, 2005). In our view, the ‘globalization’ of modern slavery puts at risk a growing, heterogeneous and unequal population of the enslaved and the planet by denying the constitutive relationship between capitalism and black slavery highlighted by decolonial and Afro-Diasporic literature. After all, is it mere coincidence that in Latin America “the people who descend, partially or totally, from the populations colonized by the Europeans are, in their vast majority, dominated and discriminated against wherever they live?” (Quijano, 1993, p. 205).

In spite of and in response to the radicalization of Occidentalist geopolitics of knowledge and the dominance of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil, studies in several areas such as Anthropology, Sociology, History (Fernandes, 2008; Ferraro, 2019; Nascimento, 1978; Ribeiro, 1995), Architecture and Urbanism (Gomes, 1990; Santos, 2013, 2016) show how and why Brazilian capitalism continues to both challenge and reproduce discriminatory traits and structures of the colonial-slavery period/system (Baptist, 2016; Gonzalez, 2020; Sousa, 2017). These enduring dynamics embody everyday situations of racial, class and gender oppression and discrimination as well as struggles against unequal distribution of opportunities (Fernandes, 2008) within and outside higher education institutions and organizations (Bento, 2002; Jaime, Barreto & Oliveira, 2018; Silva, Vasconcelos & Lira, 2021).

These remnants of black slavery have been shaped by the confusing classification and perception of race in Brazilian society, which varies according to social context and such factors as affective ties and social class (Sansone, 1996). The intricate process of miscegenation called morenização1 (Ribeiro, 1995) implied favoring some black individuals while marginalizing others due to tone of their skin.

Sadly, organizations and management education institutions have reinforced these problems, repeating stereotypes harmful to minority groups (Paim & Pereira, 2018), ignoring and even trivializing the racialization of relationships and the differences of privileges between white professionals and individuals belonging to minority groups (Bento, 2002).

Despite the ethical commitment to the creation of scientific knowledge of quality, in both research and education, we observe an enduring disengagement with the extraordinary contributions historically produced by the ‘enslaved’ and diasporas engaged with decolonial and anti-racist struggles within and outside organizations and academia (Bernardino-Costa, Maldonado-Torres & Grosfoguel 2018; Robinson, 2000). Thus, by denying both the long duration of black slavery and the crucial contributions from decolonial and Afro-Diasporic praxis and epistemes to social justice at large, academia tends to perpetuate racist, colonialist and patriarchal MOS and business schools which are in need of decolonial and Afro-Diasporic perspectives in both the South and North (Dar et al., 2020; Faria & Abdalla, 2017; Jaime et al., 2018; Rosa, 2014).

Due to this colonialist and frankly racist denial of the legacy of black slavery (Cooke, 2003; Godfrey, Hassard, O’Connor, Rowlinson & Ruef, 2016), Northern agendas on ‘modern slavery’ gain traction. In this scenario, the process of reconstructing and reporting the memories of the slavery period/system is usually done by privileged individuals who do not identify with the events and consequences of the colonial-slavery system, which reaffirms the dynamics of epistemic-material expropriation (Santos, 2008).

In tandem with the radicalization of coloniality and Eurocentric mechanisms of appropriation of liberating knowledge triggered by the globalization of US-led counter-revolutionary neoliberalism, a resurging decolonial and Afro-Diasporic praxis has challenged this epistemic-material brutality of more than five centuries of slave capitalism (Bernardino-Costa et al., 2018). Together with researchers from other parts of the Global South in general, Brazilian researchers have resisted, re-existed and recognized other voices, bodies, and epistemes in their search for transformative knowledge engaged with the oppressed majority that personify such an ambivalent legacy.

Organizations, universities, individuals, communities and society both challenge and reproduce the ambivalent legacy of black slavery, which is underpinned by anti-racist intersectional struggles accompanied by the radicalization of recolonizing dynamics. This call for papers aims therefore to engage a growing population struggling against the radicalization of slavery capitalism in both the North and South by fostering transformative engagement with black slavery in MOS from decolonial and Afro-Diasporic perspectives (Mignolo, 2020; Quijano, 2000), by recognizing the remnants of black slavery in management and organizations and recovering decolonial and Afro-Diasporic epistemes.

We thus welcome diverse theories, cosmologies, methodologies and ideas in order to answer a variety of questions such as:

• In what ways can decolonial and Afro-Diasporic perspectives help the field of Management and Organizational Studies (MOS) to fight against modern slavery, structural racism and abyssal social inequality?

• ‘Slavery’, ‘enslavement’, or ‘a proslavery system’ How do these concepts allow (or not) the radical analysis of the colonial/slave period in MOS and in the geo-historical evolution of theories and practices in the field?

• To what extent do predominantly Eurocentric MOS contribute to global capitalism in general and large companies in particular benefitting from different forms of slavery, racism and prejudice against blacks and other minorities and from the ‘democratization’ of injustice-social inequality in the South and in the North?

• What decolonial and Afro-Diasporic voices and perspectives have been denied and appropriated by predominantly Eurocentric MOS? How can MOS researchers change these dynamics?

• What decolonial and Afro-Diasporic initiatives in MOS, in education and in research, have been helping to transform the contradictory realities of peripheral societies in the Global South?

• How do large companies, governmental organizations, and third sector organizations respond to criticism of the involvement and complicity of ‘organizations’ of global capitalism in the dynamics of recolonization via slavery, forced labor or human trafficking?

• What is the role of the different actors of heritage tourism in the dynamics of the dismantling and rearticulation of the dominant narratives about the colonial period in historical tourist developments? (Buzinde, 2010).

• What are the biggest challenges to combat slave labor in countries of the South and North marked by the continuous rearticulation of the hegemony of slave capitalism?

• What are the remnants of black slavery in corporate changes and resistance practices linked to the concepts of diversity and inclusion in organizations, universities and business schools?

• To what extent does the continuation of the period of slavery in modern capitalism influence and challenge contemporary labor relations in organizations?

• What is the role of predominantly Eurocentric Critical Accounting in the analysis of the processes of legitimization of black slavery from decolonial and Afro-diasporic perspectives? (Silva, 2014).

• What is the role of the large companies and economic sectors that benefit most from the black slavery regime and in the maintenance of systems of domination and patriarchal and racial stratification inside and outside academic organizations and institutions? (Nkomo, 1992).

We hope that this call for papers promotes dialogues with other movements, inside and outside the Management and Organizational Studies, engaged with transformations of decolonial and Afro-Diasporic perspectives in and for a pluriversal world in which different worlds coexist. We expect the participation of academics, professionals and ‘general public’ to recover and co-construct possibilities that continue to be denied and appropriated-contained by systems that reaffirm coloniality via black slavery.

Keywords: Decoloniality. Afro-Diasporic perspective in Management and Organizational Studies. Remnants of black slavery in management practices and organizational environments. Contemporary slavery.

1 lightening of the skin (Ribeiro, 1995).

FOR FULL DETAILS VISIT: http://www.fgv.br/mailing/_EXT/2021/RJ/EBAPE/CADERNOS/45116_engaging_black_slavery_eng/index.html

Em Portugues


REFERENCES


Abdalla, M. M., & Faria, A. (2017). Em defesa da opção decolonial em administração/gestão. Cadernos EBAPE.BR, 15(4), 914-929.

Bales, K. (2005). Understanding global slavery: A reader. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Baptist, E. E. (2016). The half has never been told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Bento, M. A. S. (2002). Pactos narcísicos no racismo: branquitude e poder nas organizações empresariais e no poder público (Doctoral Dissertation). Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.11606/T.47.2019.tde-18062019-18151

Bernardino-Costa, J., Maldonado-Torres, N., & Grosfoguel, R. (2018). Decolonialidade e pensamento afrodiaspórico. Belo Horizonte, MG: Autêntica Editora.

Buzinde, C. N. (2010). Discursive constructions of the plantation past within a travel guidebook. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 5(3), 219-235.

Caruana, R., Crane, A., Gold, S., & LeBaron, G. (2020). Modern slavery in business: the sad and sorry state of a non-field. Business & Society.

Cooke, B. (2003). The denial of slavery in management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 40(8), 1895-1918.

Cox, T. H., & Blake, S. (1991). Managing cultural diversity: implications for organizational competitiveness. Executive, 5(3), 45-56.

Crane, A. (2013). Modern Slavery as a Management Practice: Exploring the Conditions and Capabilities for Human Exploitation. Academy of Management Review, 38(1), 49-69.

Davis, A. Y. (2011). Women, race, & class. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

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