PRSS Faculty Working Group member, Sebastián Gil-Riaño's new book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South was published by Columbia University Press in August 2023.
"The Remnants of Race Science traces the influence of ideas from the Global South on UNESCO’s race campaign, illuminating its relationship to notions of modernization and economic development. Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines the campaign participants’ involvement in some of the most ambitious development projects of the postwar period. In challenging race prejudice, these experts drew on ideas about race that emphasized plasticity and mutability, in contrast to the fixed categories of scientific racism. Gil-Riaño argues that these same ideas legitimated projects of economic development and social integration aimed at bringing ostensibly “backward” indigenous and non-European peoples into the modern world. He also shows how these experts’ promotion of studies of race relations inadvertently spurred a deeper reckoning with the structural and imperial sources of racism as well as the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade." Click here to order a copy of the book.
Dr. Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvnia.