Historicizing Anti-racism: UNESCO's Campaigns Against Race Prejudice in the 1950s
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers a revised historical account of how scientific experts associated with the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the post-WWII era sought to overcome the legacy of scientific racism. Situating UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives within the geographic context of the South and North Atlantic and the intellectual context of Latin American, Francophone, and Anglo-American social science this study shows that mid-century discussions of ‘race’ were intertwined with the multiple narratives of modernization and societal change that emerged in tandem with decolonization and the Cold War. Thus, one of this dissertation’s key arguments is that anti-racist projects in the post-war era were often cast as projects of redemption that involved coming to terms with the painful and destructive legacy of scientific racism and the anticipation of an improved and harmonious future where ‘race’ did not figure as a source of conflict and tension. However, because mid-century anti-racist scientists hailed from a variety of cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds the question of redemption took on different meanings and involved different stakes. This study examines social science experts’ anti-racist narratives of redemption in the context of four different UNESCO initiatives from the 1950s: 1) in projects of ‘cultural change’ (which were predicated on the anti-racist notion of the inherent educability of all peoples) 2) in UNESCO’s study of race relations in various locations in Brazil 3) in the elaboration of anti-racist approaches to ethnographic observation, and 4) in UNESCO attempts to produce anti-racist handbooks for teachers. These projects reveal how anti-racist experts from the 1950s were very much haunted by ‘race’ and concerned with neutralizing and dampening the affective and political impact of racial conceptions in the geopolitics of post-war era. Thus, this dissertation argues that rather than indicating a definitive retreat from ‘race’ UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives in the 1950s speak to the persistence and plasticity of ‘race’ and of the fraught attempts to escape its legacy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it