The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: Researching Race After Yugoslavia in ‘Post-post-Racial’ Times

Abstract

This chapter sets efforts to research race in the (post-)Yugoslav region in the context of what Kimberlé Crenshaw has termed today's 'post-post-racial' times, in which progressives who might have believed that global society was on an inevitable course towards overcoming racism have now had to confront its open resurgence. From the perspectives of Crenshaw and other critical race scholars whose work has opened up new possibilities to understand south-east Europe within the global politics of race, however, the persistence of structural racism as a historical legacy of colonialism and the enslavement of Africans means that the 'post-racial' moment was already an illusion. Movements to 'decolonise the university' and its knowledge production, which have significantly influenced my own working environment as a white anglophone scholar of south-east Europe in the UK, share this structural perspective. The chapter explains the significance of these movements, and struggles in related disciplines to confront sympathies with white supremacism, for researching race after Yugoslavia in a moment where Islamophobic narratives justifying violence against Muslims in the region have become points of identification for the far right worldwide.When young men bearing lit torches and medieval symbols to assert an imagined heritage of white European descent have marched through a US university town, the UK government has fulfilled 1970s repatriation fantasies by deporting more than 150 members of the symbolic 'Windrush Generation' of black Britons to the Caribbean, and violent pushbacks by Croatian border police have trapped thousands of black and Asian migrants in underequipped refugee camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), no-one can sustain the fallacy we still live in what were once called 'postracial' times (Goldberg 2015). This comforting fantasy that global society had learned from history to overcome the racism of the past was encapsulated, during the 1990s and 2000s, in cathartic moments such as post-apartheid South Africa's transformation into the Rainbow Nation (Evans 2010), the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the first black US president (Bonilla-Silva 2015), the racial diversity of 'Team GB's' athletics gold medallists at the London 2012 Olympic Games (Winter 2013), and perhaps even the Brazilian-born Eduardo da Silva starting to represent the Croatian national men's football team. Their iconic status belied the structures of racist oppression that continued to operate beneath their euphoric atmospheres.The rhetorical construction of a 'post-racial' society, exemplified in the then Croatian president Ivo Sanader's appeal that '[w]e are living in a century in which tolerance should be cultivated' when he condemned Croatian fans' racist chants against Eduardo and other Brazilian and Cameroonian players in 2006 (FARE 2006

From concept to clinical application: The importance of including trust in low‐value care curricula

“…Historically, guidelines have represented a unified voice from professional organisations on best practices. However, throughout the uncertainty of the COVID‐19 pandemic, we saw that some clinicians express a lack of trust in organisations issuing recommendations due to rampant misinformation 9,10 . Similarly, patient trust in health systems and recommendations has similarly decreased in recent years due to misinformation and inconsistencies in recommendations throughout the pandemic 11,12 .…”

“…However, throughout the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw that some clinicians express a lack of trust in organisations issuing recommendations due to rampant misinformation. 9,10 Similarly, patient trust in health systems and recommendations has similarly decreased in recent years due to misinformation and inconsistencies in recommendations throughout the pandemic. 11,12 In teaching guideline-based care, it is thus critical to teach students about where guidelines come from, how guidelines are developed and guidelines' quality of evidence so that students themselves can critically appraise the recommendations and make judgements about their clinical use and trustworthiness.…”