Sociologie de la blanchité critique
As part of the Critical Approaches to Race Seminar Series, we are honored to welcome Martin Frager Perrier, PhD candidate at the Université libre de Bruxelles.
What does it mean for those socially identified as white to engage in struggles against racism? What affects, tensions, and contradictions emerge when individuals positioned as racial majorities participate in movements led by racialized minorities? This talk presents an ongoing research project toward a “critical sociology of whiteness” grounded in fieldwork across various activist spaces in the Paris region. It explores the motivations, affective dynamics, and political implications of white individuals’ antiracist engagement, with particular attention to situations of what might be called “white vulnerabilization.”
Drawing on current doctoral research, this intervention seeks to develop an ethnography of white affects: the emotions, dispositions, and ambivalences that shape how whiteness operates within activist settings. How are alliances formed, strained, or undone? How do white participants navigate their own position within structures they seek to contest? And what might a politically committed yet critically reflexive approach to whiteness look like within contemporary antiracist struggles?
The talk also engages a socio-historical perspective on the presence and role of white allies in minority-led movements, asking how broader dynamics of race, class, and power inform activist solidarities. In doing so, it contributes to wider efforts to de-center whiteness while interrogating its influence within political spaces of resistance and liberation.
About the Speaker:
Martin Frager Perrier is a doctoral candidate in sociology and anthropology, conducting a joint PhD at Université Paris 8 and the Université libre de Bruxelles. His research is supervised by Nacira Guénif (Laboratoire d’Études de Genre et de Sexualité, UP8) and Sasha Newell (Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, ULB). Perrier holds a doctoral fellowship from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) for the period 2023–2025, with a possible extension to 2027.
If you want to join this seminar, please send us an email at birmm@vub.be