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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2025
DB: Alana Lentin, you and I got to know each other around 2019 when, as the then President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA), you asked me whether I would stand for a position on the executive committee. This was after you had examined my PhD thesis the previous year.
AL: Yes, I was looking back through my emails to see when it was we first started corresponding, because we had met before at the ACRAWSA conference in 2014, very briefly, and again at a dinner in Sydney, but we never really had the opportunity to chat properly. Your email was so kind. You wrote, ‘Now that I am officially Dr Debbie Bargallie, I wanted to reach out and thank you for examining my thesis. I honestly had no idea that you were marking it and I feel so honoured and proud that you examined my thesis. Your comments were so detailed, considerate and constructive and really gave me an incentive to advance my work.’ I was really moved by that, because I felt honoured to have been asked to examine your thesis and it's been such a thrill to see it developed into your first book, Unmasking the Racial Contract. You also wrote, ‘I hope that we can get to do some race work together in the future.’
DB: Yes. And we have been doing that work. After I joined the ACRAWSA committee in 2019, we started working closely together and, in 2020, during COVID- 19, and after our term at ACRAWSA ended, we applied for a research grant on racial literacy. We didn't get that, which was instructive as to the kind of research that gets funded and the kind that doesn’t. It seems very hard to get institutional support when you emphasize race as a technology of colonial power rather than, for example, racist discrimination that occurs within given circumstances.
AL: Yes, I have resigned myself to not getting research funding. But that is okay for me because I have the advantage of being a full professor and of not having my legitimacy as a researcher questioned by the university.
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