It is a great joy to develop this project alongside brilliant colleagues such as Dr Tana Forrest and Dr Edineia Tavares Lopes. The project arises from an urgency: we need to speak about race and racism from contemporary perspectives, as there is still little academic production addressing the new dynamics of mixed racialisation and their implications for social structures.

This urgency is not only academic. It is also visible in the ways public conversations — especially on social media — have shaped the debate on race. It is in these spaces, often chaotic yet creative, that we see society inventing and disputing new categories of inclusion and exclusion.

Themes such as colourism, parditude, Blackness and indigeneity challenge us to think critically about race, without falling into biologising or essentialist traps. After all, we are speaking of a violent colonial construction, one that insists on updating and reinventing itself — and which, for that very reason, demands that we too invent other ways of resisting, thinking and acting collectively.

This series of workshops will explore racialisation and mixed racial identities (or mestizaje) in Brazilian and South African contexts. Inspired by Black feminism, we consider it fundamental to bring critical readings, references and practices that point towards a decolonial approach — opening space for new ways of thinking about race, racialisation processes and, above all, imagining and contributing to the building of new anti-racist legacies.

• Katucha Bento, Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh