Arts Collected Works - Research Publications
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ItemInterest convergence in the Land of the Cosmic Race:Mexican anti-racism and the motivation question(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-04)Recent contributions to the academic literature describe Mexican racism as structural: an unintended blameless outcome of the combined actions of many individuals and institutions. This conceptualization appears to hamstring individual motivation for collective action: who is responsible for redressing the injustice and why? In this paper, I appeal to interest convergence – a key tenet of Critical Race Theory – to argue that Mexican anti-racism could gain from strategically identifying and communicating “shared predicaments” with the beneficiaries of racial injustice. Employing Grounded Normative Theory as a methodological approach and examining empirical research through [Jackson, Taharee. 2011. “Which Interests Are Served by the Principle of Interest Convergence? Whiteness, Collective Trauma, and the Case for Anti-racism.” Race Ethnicity and Education 14 (4): 435–459] “disaggregation” of interest, I find hints of moral, psychological – even emotional and material – interest convergence between beneficiaries and victims of racial injustice in Mexico. I conclude that the contextual and erratic nature of Mexican racism could be strategically harnessed to produce social reform and advance racial equality.
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ItemClassification Algorithm for Skin Color (CASCo): A new tool to measure skin color in social science research(Wiley, 2023-02-24)Objective: A growing body of literature reveals that skin color has significant effects on people's income, health, education, and employment. However, the ways in which skin color has been measured in empirical research have been criticized for being inaccurate, if not subjective and biased. Objective: Introduce an objective, automatic, accessible and customizable Classification Algorithm for Skin Color (CASCo). Methods: We review the methods traditionally used to measure skin color (verbal scales, visual aids or color palettes, photo elicitation, spectrometers and image-based algorithms), noting their shortcomings. We highlight the need for a different tool to measure skin color Results: We present CASCo, a (social researcher-friendly) Python library that uses face detection, skin segmentation and k-means clustering algorithms to determine the skin tone category of portraits. Conclusion: After assessing the merits and shortcomings of all the methods available, we argue CASCo is well equipped to overcome most challenges and objections posed against its alternatives. While acknowledging its limitations, we contend that CASCo should complement researchers. toolkit in this area.
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ItemAvoiding backlash: Narratives and strategies for anti-racist activism in Mexico(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2023-12)Structural race-based inequalities in Mexico cannot be denied. Anthropologists and social scientists have thoroughly documented racism at both personal and systemic levels. Following I.M. Young’s framework, this paper identifies two possible pathways for the anti-racist movement in Mexico: the liability and the social connection models. The former uses guilt to assign responsibility —it requires an agent to be voluntarily and causally connected to injustice; the latter does not isolate perpetrators but assigns responsibility to all agents who contribute (voluntarily or not) by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice. After examining the trajectory of the Mexican anti-racist movement, this paper demonstrates that activists are relying too heavily on the liability model. Furthermore, drawing from ethnographic material from Brazil and the United States, the paper suggests that this model is not only unnecessarily confrontational and ineffectual, but potentially counterproductive for the anti-racist movement, as it is prone to provoke a defensive response. In turn, this paper suggests focusing on the structural nature of racism in Mexico and developing ways to communicate this effectively, in order to foster the positive prospects of successful anti-racist activism.