Three Years of GRIST
GRIST: Completing a Design Phase and Looking Towards the Future
Over the past three years, the Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST) has been developing within the Department of Sociology, led by Professor Mónica Moreno Figueroa and an exceptional team — Lisa Watson, Elmira Kakabayeva, and Paola López, with Joe Cotton in our first year — and with the active involvement of colleagues, students, and researchers from across the Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Physical Sciences. At the heart of the work has been a question that is simple to ask and genuinely difficult to answer: what can a university meaningfully contribute to understanding and addressing global racisms — and through them, the interconnected inequalities of which racism is both a driver and a lens?
Rather than establishing a conventional research centre from the outset, the Design Phase, generously funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the SHSS, Research Culture Fund, ESRC Impact Fund and the UKRI ODA, focused on experimentation — testing methodologies, building relationships, and exploring the conditions under which research on racism can become more collaborative, more globally grounded, and more actionable.
A major strand has been the Thinking Us initiative, building an interdisciplinary community within Cambridge committed to anti-racist and intersectional research practice. This has taken shape through the Thinking Us Festival, a day of workshops, dialogue, and creative practice asking how we align our anti-racist goals with our academic work; the Caring for Transformation course, exploring the emotional dimensions of oppression and what they demand of us as researchers and colleagues so we can work together; the Creative Methodologies workshop series, developing experimental approaches to knowledge-making that can reach beyond academic audiences; the Decolonising Practice through Creative Writing Practice workshops, opening up academic writing as a site of ethical and inclusive inquiry; and the Thinking Us Retreat— a residential gathering centring rest and reflection through creative, somatic and movement-based practice.
Within Cambridge, GRIST has also piloted the PhD Transformative Fieldwork Fund, supporting doctoral researchers in embedding genuinely collaborative and impact-oriented approaches into their research on racism and intersecting inequalities – we have worked with two projects: Black hair and Antiracism and Transnational Reproduction and Race in China; and continued the End Everyday Racism initiative, running since 2018, which collects anonymous testimonies of racism at Cambridge and builds the cumulative evidence base for institutional change.
Beyond Cambridge, GRIST has convened the Relational Racisms in Global Perspective Conference and Workshop, bringing together 60 scholars from 15+ countries to develop comparative and relational approaches to how racisms operate alongside and through other systems of inequality across different global contexts; developed The Structure Within, a bilingual public engagement project exploring internalised oppression — and its implications for social justice work — through animated films, a podcast series, and community listening circles; and collaborated with 20 indigenous-led social justice organisations in Mexico on the Academia and Social Justice Project, co-producing a set of ethical principles for non-extractive collaboration between universities and activist communities. GRIST also contributed to a new phase of Black British Voices Project, using the Caring for Transformation methodology to bring large-scale survey findings on race and belonging back into dialogue with Black British communities in Cambridge and Birmingham — testing how research data can become a resource for the people it concerns.
An independent evaluation has confirmed that GRIST is doing something unique and relatively radical at Cambridge — creating a methodology and community through which different ways of working on racism become possible: more global, more intersectional, and more oriented toward transformation than conventional academic structures typically allow.
As the Design Phase closes, GRIST has continued fundraising for a Development Phase that would build on this work — with a GRIST Residency at its core, bringing together a cross-sectoral global cohort of scholars, activists and movement leaders, artists, filmmakers and media makers, campaigners and communicators, journalists, policy makers, and philanthropists to develop concrete interventions grounded in GRIST's global racisms framework, alongside new public events and a transformative research stream.
In the meantime, GRIST is working with a newly established Thinking Partners Group — a group of senior scholars and movement-builders, spanning multiple regions and disciplines — which will hold its first meeting soon, and is undertaking a branding process to help articulate the distinctive approach that has emerged through three years of experimentation.
We look forward to sharing more about the next phase as it develops, and to deepening connections across the university.