Itay Lotem is the holder of the Transregional studies – EHESS / Iméra Chair for the 2025-26 academic year.
His research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix Marseille Université, ‘Talking about Race’ interrogates the reasons for the ‘discursive shift’ in antiracist activism in the 2000s in France and Germany, and with it the transformation of European antiracism and the circulation of ideas on ‘race’ beyond the anglophone space.
He examines how antiracist activists have negotiated their position in society as racialised subjects through vocabulary that was available to them and reacting to social backlash as they went. Bringing together oral-history interviews and digital humanities’ methods, his project provides insights into the circulation of ideas about ‘race’ between academia, activist objectives, and shifting public discourse.
To learn more, view his resident page by consulting the link below
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Video transcript
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0:08 My name's Tyler O'Tem. I'm a senior lecturer in French studies at the University of Westminster in London. I'm a historian, a historian of contemporary history, or what you call in French, history of the present. My work mainly focuses on memory politics and the history of ideas in Northwestern Europe. My current project is something I like calling Talking About Race, and it explores a transition and a shift in anti-racist activism in France and Germany in the mid noughties. And what I'm interested in is how a new generation of anti-racist activists actually moved
0:40 away from what you can call traditional anti-racist activism, in which the focus was especially on material motives, on material discrimination in housing or in the workplace. And instead, they focused on language. Their goal became to address race in the public sphere. They perceived the fact that race had become a taboo in France and Germany, mainly through its association with Nazism, as probably the obstacle in fighting against racism in the present day. So in a way, how to address racism without race. And in terms of my methodology, I will rely quite a lot on oral history interviews and on
1:19 digital research to get the voices of anti-racist activists, to get to the core questions of how do they perceive race? Why do they address race when they did? And how do they interpret it and translate it to their local context? And in a very sort of broad way, how do they think about the future, utopias in which talking about race was a necessary social construction? I've so far worked in memory politics. My first book was about the memory of colonialism in Britain and France. And with it also the question of why actors in society choose to address history and care
1:55 about it when they do. And within this research, I looked quite a lot at social movements and especially anti-racism. And that has led me to think quite a lot or to care quite a lot about the question of the circulation of ideas. How do ideas travel? How do they affect society? How do they make us think about ourselves the way we do? As a historian working on the circulation of ideas, Marseille is just a no-brainer. It's always been a place where people and ideas travel to, where they intermingled, intermixed, created something new, and that is just exciting.
2:33 And Ymirai is also one of these places where you can really enjoy exchange with other people from other disciplines, from other ideas. And also, that opens up a whole array of just work and inspiration with Marseille's academic community and especially the OSSS. So I am extremely excited about the possibility of getting a bit closer into Marseille's academic community, but also to engage with Marseille's activist communities and cultural actors as well.
