RASTER.FI continues as a research-based platform for anti-racist dialogue

rasterverkosto,

by Leonardo Custódio and Minna Seikkula
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Suomeksi

For the past year, we – Leonardo Custódio and Minna Seikkula – have discussed the next steps of RASTER.FI. In this post, we (a) review RASTER.FI’s history, (b) explain our administrative roles, and (c) invite you to contribute to international and interdisciplinary anti-racist dialogue.

History

RASTER.FI has been a platform for anti-racism dialogue since August 2015. In the first post, it welcomed “researchers, whose work touches upon questions of racialisation, racism and boundary-making in Finland and elsewhere” to “discuss topical racism-related questions relevant to their work.”

Six years later, RASTER.FI remains an important platform to communicate anti-racist research beyond academia in Finland. Consequently, it has contributed to the increase in public conversation about and against racism. The book “Racism, power and resistance: Racialisation, whiteness and coloniality in Finland” (Gaudeamus, 2021) features some of these discussions.

Now we are working together to restructure and reactivate the website. Our main goal is to remain as a space of dialogue in feasible, healthy and collective ways. How do we plan to do it?

Our roles

First we need to define our tasks. Minna is the coordinator of the RASTER Network. She is the network’s main contact person and is also responsible for the mailing list. Leo is the RASTER.FI’s editor-in-chief. He is responsible for the content, including the communication with contributors.

Contributions

One of our main challenges is to maintain RASTER.FI’s collective character. How to mobilize overloaded colleagues to voluntarily produce content for the website? One sustainable possibility is to recommend contributors to submit materials based on or related to their ongoing work. These materials do not have to be original contributions.

Examples of contributions include: 

  • Shorter versions or summaries of their peer-reviewed publications; 
  • Concise reviews of publications;
  • Edited transcriptions of conversations and interviews; 
  • Ethical and/or methodological reflections; 
  • Research-based commentary on current affairs; 
  • “Press releases” of coming events and reports of previous ones; 
  • Commented description of courses’ contents, syllabi and teaching experiences;
  • Translations of previously published materials; 

Some of these suggestions are not new. However, our hope is that contributing to the website will not be a burden (read the instructions for contributors here). RASTER.FI does not abide by the capitalist rule of productivity quota and predatory requests for contributions. 

In addition, we are deliberately taking a slow-scientific approach. RASTER.FI is a database for continuous construction of research-based anti-racist knowledge. In practice, this means that publications respect the pace of contributors rather than suffocating deadlines. We will receive proposals and contributions continuously. Together with the authors, we will decide how the editorial process will be. 

Finally, let us reinforce the invitation made back in 2015: 

We continue welcoming contributors from multiple disciplines and career stages to making RASTER.FI an even stronger platform for anti-racist dialogue in Finland and beyond. Would you like to publish with us? Send your proposal or contribution to leonardo.custodio@abo.fi. 

Julkaissut rasterverkosto