16-28.03 | Documentary selections on the occasion of the week against racism

The University of Geneva Library is taking part in the Week Against Racism with four documentary exhibitions across its sites at Uni Arve, Uni Bastions, Uni CMU and Uni Mail. Each exhibition explores the historical construction of racism and its contemporary consequences, from different perspectives — medical, anthropological, sociological, historical and literary. Drawing on a carefully curated selection of works from the Library’s collections, these exhibitions highlight how racial categories have been constructed over time, the forms of discrimination that stem from them, and the scholarly work that helps to challenge and dismantle them.

Discover these online selections together with the exhibitions which will be visible on the four sites between the 16th and 18th of March:

Biology versus ideology : racial classifications  under the lens of science 

The Bibliothèque de l’Université de Genève, site Uni Arve (Sciences II), Bibliothèque Ernst et Lucie Schmindheiny presents a selection of works exploring the relationship between human biological diversity, evolution and the social construction of the concept of race.Bringing together works from genetics, anthropology, the history of science and social analysis, the selection provides a scientific perspective on human diversity while challenging biological interpretations of race and the classifications historically derived from them.

>> Link to the book selection : https://dis.unige.ch/avatar/1060

Art, culture and postcolonial perspectives. The rights of racialised women in the postcolonial era 

The Bibliothèque de l’Université de Genève, site Uni Bastions, Espace Jura (Multi purpose room, lower ground floor)  presents books focusing on intersectionality, highlighting the specific forms of discrimination experienced by women from cultural, ethnic or racial minorities. The selection includes works of history, cultural and literary criticism, as well as novels and essays by authors from countries shaped by colonial histories, such as Angola, Brazil, Cuba, India and Zimbabwe. It offers a reflection on women’s experiences in postcolonial contexts and on the artistic and intellectual responses to these historical legacies.

>> Link to the book selection :

• Histoire de l’Art et culture sous le prisme des questions postcoloniales
• Droits des femmes : vers une approche intersectionnelle en sciences humaines et littérature

Racism and  health :  medicine confronting its legacy

This selection from the Bibliothèque de l’Université de Genève, site Uni CMU explores  how Western medicine contributed to shaping the concept of “race” between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Stereotypes such as resistance to pain, hypersexuality or intellectual inferiority were at times presented as biological facts in medical literature. These ideas also reached the wider public through visual and performative displays, including world fairs, “human zoos”, ethnographic shows and so-called scientific photography.

>> Links to the book selection : https://dis.unige.ch/avatar/1031 

Racism in perspective : représentations, power and resistance

This selection from the Bibliothèque de l’Université de Genève, site Uni Mail suggests to explore racism as a historical, social, and political phenomenon. Far from being reduced to individual attitudes, racism is approached here as a system of representations, practices, and power relations that structure societies. The collected texts examine its origins, transformations, and contemporary manifestations, whether institutional, cultural, or economic. Through complementary approaches—sociology, history, political science, anthropology, fiction, and essays—these documents shed light on the mechanisms of racial category construction, the processes of discrimination, and the forms of resistance that oppose them. This selection thus aims to provide conceptual and empirical tools for understanding the complexity of racism.

>> Link to the book selection : https://dis.unige.ch/avatar/1037