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Reading decoloniality
Reading decoloniality
  • ARTICLES
    • Recent articles ⌄
    • Entangled circulations and decoloniality: Rethinking from southeast Asian Islam
    • Defining decolonial liberation in Palestine
    • “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you”
  • ABOUT
    • Aims & scope
    • Editorial & Programming
    • Contact
    • FAQ
  • JOIN A READING GROUP

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We are an open-source publication and reading group that produces and disseminates international and interdisciplinary scholarship for liberation.

You have reached the registration page where you can sign-up to our reading groups, running in three-month programmes for at least half of every year since 2021. The discussions from these reading groups are captured in reflective pieces from authors within our publication, printed alongside the minutes.

Our next programme runs in May, June and July of 2025. The programme that follows this will span October, November and December of 2025.

Click below to register and sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of the page to be notified of our reading groups and articles on a monthly basis.

 

The return of biological races? With Celso Neto

Online reading group via Teams

Wednesday 9 July 2025, 16:00 - 17:30 (British Summer Time)

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Abstract

The belief in biological races has a long history associated with colonialism, eugenics, and scientific racism (Bernasconi and Lott 2000; Saini 2019). This belief was vigorously rejected in the aftermath of WWII, but some mainstream scientists and philosophers of race are now reviving it (Andreasen 2004; Spencer 2012; Hardimon 2017; Reich 2018). These scholars are self-declared anti-racists and some of them even claim that accepting biological races is a good strategy for anti-racist movements (Hardimon 2017). In this reading group, I critically evaluate this return of biological races. I start by presenting its motivations, showing how scholars attempt to free the notion of biological race from its past racist and political connotations. Then I consider arguments in favor and against this new notion of biological race. I argue that both sides of the debate fall into a common trap, namely they overlook how political values still shape beliefs in biological races. Exposing these values is key to fully understanding the implications of scientific and philosophical beliefs about race. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of why the return of biological races fails.

Reading

There are two articles for this reading group:

Celso Neto’s ‘The Risk of Biological Race‘, currently under review, please do not cite or distribute.

Nora Berenstain’s ‘Biological Race Realism and the Legacy of Racial Pseudoscience‘, Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming).

Bio

Dr Celso Neto is a philosopher of science and race, based at the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, University of Exeter (UK). He currently leads the ERC Project ‘Human Genomics without Racism’ (HUGERA). His main interest lies in understanding how biases and values influence methodologies and reasoning in science, with a particular focus on evolutionary biology and its intersection with societal issues. His publications cover a variety of topics, such as the social roles of scientific concepts, ancestry classifications, causal explanations, and alternative understandings of natural selection. Celso did his B.A and M.A in philosophy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG, Brazil). After spending 2 years studying at the Leibniz Universitaet Hannover (Germany), he moved to Canada and obtained a PhD in philosophy at the University of Calgary (2020). Before joining Exeter, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University (Canada, 2020-2022), working in the philosophy department and the department of biochemistry and molecular biology departments.

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