Research studies involving human subjects require collection of and reporting on demographic data related to race and ethnicity. However, existing practices lack standardized guidelines, leading to misrepresentation and biased inferences and conclusions for underrepresented populations in research studies. For instance, sometimes there is a misconception that self-reported racial or ethnic identity may be treated as a biological variable with underlying genetic implications, overlooking its role as a social construct reflecting lived experiences of specific populations. In this manuscript, we use the We All Count data equity framework, which organizes data projects across seven stages: Funding, Motivation, Project Design, Data Collection, Analysis, Reporting, and Communication. Focusing on data collection and analysis, we use examples – both real and hypothetical – to review common practice and provide critiques and alternative recommendations. Through these examples and recommendations, we hope to provide the reader with some ideas and a starting point as they consider embedding a lens of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity from research conception to dissemination of findings.

Obesity rates in Colombia are increasing, with variations among racial and ethnic groups. Studies on adult obesity often address socio-economic status, gender, and education but neglect racial-ethnic influences, notably in areas like Quibdó. Therefore, based on the theory of triadic influence, we conducted a qualitative study to identify biobehavioural, social, and cultural phenomena that, from the perspectives of the participants, influence the onset of obesity in Afro-Colombian and indigenous in Quibdó in 2022. The stratification variables were race, ethnicity (Afro-Colombian and Indigenous), and educational level (secondary or higher). Based on a literature review of qualitative studies that commonly explored food culture, nutritional status, and physical activity in analysing obesity within racial and ethnic populations, we incorporated these categories into our research methodology through semi-structured interviews. A framework analysis was used as a qualitative methodology to organise and analyse the collected data. We conducted 21 semi-structured interviews, 13 with the Afro-Colombian population and eight with indigenous inhabitants. The results indicate that cultural beliefs, forced displacement/migration, and alterations in public order have resulted in changes in food security, food culture, and physical activity practices, affecting the onset of obesity. Notably, distinctions in cultural beliefs regarding food culture and health as factors influencing obesity were observed between Afro-Colombians and the Indigenous populations; however, educational differences within the same racial ethnic group were not predominant. Findings indicate obesity is influenced by cultural, social, and biobehavioural factors, especially in regions with racial-ethnic communities facing complex conditions, necessitating targeted racial-ethnic public health policies.

This article contends that investigating relationalities between business continuity management (BCM), staff behaviours, and bureaucratic resilience advances understandings of the survival of international organisations (IOs). Drawing on in-depth interviews, a global staff survey, and a discourse analysis of United Nations (UN) reports and applying a post-colonial feminist theoretical approach foregrounding care ethics to the study of IOs, the article examines how the UN Secretary-General’s Alternative Working Arrangements directive to close physical offices and open ‘virtual offices’ was implemented in the first 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is contended that BCM is necessary for IO survival, since if the IO bureaucracy is unable to be productive and maintain its spheres of influence during a crisis, it risks losing power and authority. Between March 2020 and August 2021, staff facilitated IO survival organically, from the bottom up, in four ways: demonstrating good performance and productivity; being adaptable and resilient; maintaining personal spheres of influence; and building communities of care within the UN. However, the UN’s neoliberal, technocratic approach to business continuity and bureaucratic resilience-building neglected staff care needs. Consequently, IO survival is predicated on staff performing as exploited gendered and racialised ‘neoliberal subjects’, revealing a chronic structural crisis rooted in the UN bureaucracy’s hierarchical composition and unequal employment regime.

Ethnic movements continue to challenge state governments globally, with many ethnic conflicts revolving around the status of groups’ territories. Yet, politically mobilized ethnic groups vary considerably in their territorial demands: some press for increased autonomy or even outright secession, while others do not make such demands at all and prefer integration in the existing state. What explains this divergence in ethnic group demands with respect to the group's territorial status? We argue that the expected benefits of ethno-regional autonomy or secession compared to integration in a centralized state differ across distinct segments within the group as a function of three structural factors: heterogeneity in the group's income sources, cultural divisions, and territorial fragmentation, leading to disagreement over self-determination demands between different political organizations representing the same ethnic group. We test our argument using an expanded version of the Ethnic Power Relations–Organizations (EPR-O) dataset. Our pre-registered study finds support for one of our hypotheses: heterogeneity in groups’ income sources increases disagreement over self-determination demands. This finding sheds new light on the structural sources of internal divisions within ethno-political movements.

This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of “the people” necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose “authoritarian populism” feeds on and reinforces anti-Black racial prejudice. The second is Peronism, which has an ambivalent relationship with race that promises to shed important new light on this classic case of populism. The third case is that of the American Populists, whose pioneering experiments in interracial politics remain an enduring illustration of populism’s progressive potential. In each case, we focus on a key document from that political regime/movement: the Conservative Manifesto of 1979, the Peronist Constitution of 1949, and the Omaha Platform of 1892. The article concludes that populism, as a logic of action, acts as a catalyst that intensifies whatever specific content is mobilised – racist and anti-racist content alike.

In the wake of the establishment of the Portuguese in the region, slavery was fundamentally constitutive of early modern society on the west coast of India. While indigenous hierarchies and existing systems of slavery shaped Portuguese slavery, over time, indigenous society too was transformed by the extensive reliance on enslaved labor facilitated by European trafficking networks. Centering slavery in the study of South Asian history underscores the importance of considering the difference between elite projects of enforcing boundaries, both spatial and social, and the ways in which enslaved people negotiated these projects. Thus, instead of taking for granted the classificatory labels of race, caste, and blackness imposed upon enslaved peoples by elite institutions, a social history of slavery elucidates instead the evolution of these mechanisms for policing identity, and the centrality of the expropriation of labor in identity formation.

While tension-type headache (TTH) is the most common primary headache disorder, its effect according to sex, race and ethnicity remains unclear. We investigated disparities in sex, racial and ethnic representation in TTH clinical trials with comparison to global disease burdens. In this cross-sectional analysis, TTH clinical trials had female overrepresentation and racial and ethnic minority underrepresentation, which may affect understanding of the impact of TTH on different populations and personalized treatment development. Trial enrollment that is diverse and reflective of global disease burdens is crucial for improving study generalizability, understanding of diverse clinical presentations, and ensuring healthcare equity.

The article explores the discursive representations of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in the European Parliament (EP). The theoretical framework draws on Critical Securitisation Theory, pointing out the implicit hierarchies that affect the European Union (EU) reception policies in terms of race and gender. The main hypothesis is that a stigmatisation process based on race and gender affects the representation of refugees in the EU. Against this backdrop, the manuscript delves into how speech acts can either cast refugees as urgent threats or even facilitate the de-construction of the refugee as a threat. These are investigated through Computational Text-Analysis tools, such as Word- and Bigram-Frequency Analysis, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency test and Structural Topic Modelling. On the one hand, contrary to expectations of a securitisation of Syrian refugees primarily based on race, what emerges is also a process of de-personalisation that helps justify the anti-migration stand of some members of the EP (MEPs). On the other hand, the assumption that deconstruction of the refugee as a threat would mainly occur through an emphasis on cultural proximity between Ukrainian people and the EU is challenged. Instead, our analysis shows a gender-based victimisation of Ukrainian refugees, which contributes leading to protective measures being enacted by the EU.

In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d’être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to “White purity” was generally represented through images of White women—volks-mothers and daughters—in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women’s wombs symbolized the future of “Whiteness.” This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African “exceptionalism” paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa’s “petty apartheid” laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these “cornerstone” policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in trans-oceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.

This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.