Introduction

Welcome to the second issue of ERS Review in this volume of the journal. We have been able to bring together a broad range of contributions that we very much hope will be of interest to the various scholarly audiences of the journal. Given the focus of the Review issues of the journal on encouraging critical conversations and debates the contributions to this issue are indicative of the range of papers that we receive as well as highlighting some key books that address issues of current interest.

We begin this issue of ERS Review with three articles that reflect on key facets of ongoing scholarly debates. The first article by Debbie Bargallie, Nilmini Fernando and Alana Lentin is a detailed critical exploration of the challenges faced in the context of education in Australia in teaching about race and antiracism (Bargallie, Fernando, and Lentin 2024). The paper discusses the early findings of a research project on questions of racial literacy in relation to indigenous Australians and other racialised groups and raised important conceptual issues about an issue of interest at a global level.

The second article by Yasmeen Narayan engages conceptually with scholarly and research debates about policing and violence in relation to racialised minorities in British society. Narayan brings together an analytical frame that weaves together the colonial and anticolonial to argue that the question of police violence against minorities over the past few decades needs to be seen against this much longer historical context (Narayan 2024). She suggests that it is important not to see recent histories of policing in isolation from the legacies of colonialism.

The final paper by Olivia Hu, Xiang Lu and Wendy Roth takes up the ongoing question of the impact of genomics on conceptualisations of race and ancestry (Hu, Lu, and Roth 2024). Drawing on detailed in-depth interviews the authors explore the complex ways in which genetic ancestry tests help to shape test-takers conceptualisation of the relationship between race and genes. Given the growing importance of this issue across the globe the issues addressed in this paper are of interest both to scholarly researchers and more generally.

This issue also includes two book symposia that provide a critical engagement with two recent books that are of interest to the readership of the journal. The first symposium is about Ann Morning’s and Marcello Maneri’s An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States (Morning and Maneri 2022). This book is an important effort to discuss the question of race comparatively in relation to Italy and the United States. In order to encourage critical discussion of its key arguments we bring together four critical commentaries that explore key facets of the book (Favell 2024; Ghebremariam Tesfau 2024; Giuliani 2024; Hawthorne 2024). The commentaries address a number of key aspects of the book, including what it means to compare meanings of race across the two countries. In addition the symposium includes a detailed response to the commentaries from the authors (Maneri and Morning 2024). The discussion about this book highlights the importance of developing more comparative research in relation to how ideas about race become part of different national cultures.

The next symposium is on Steve Vertovec’s Superdiversity: Migration and Social Complexity (Vertovec 2023). The book is an effort by Vertovec to develop a broader analytical frame for the notion of superdiversity, a notion that was first discussed in the pages of this journal. The symposium brings together responses to the book by three scholars who have engaged with questions about superdiversity in their own research as well as in relation to Vertovec’s framing of the concept (Sigona 2024; Song 2024; Yeoh 2024). The symposium concludes with a response by Vertovec that addresses the issues raised and looks forward to how the conversation may develop in the future (Vertovec 2024). Given the central role we have played in discussing the notion of superdiversity over the years we look forward to being part of ongoing debates in the future.

In addition to these research papers and book symposia we include a broad range of regular book reviews. We hope that all these book reviews are of interest to our readers. They certainly bring out the variety of topics and conceptual frames that have become part of studies of race and ethnicity in the current period. We are grateful to all the book reviewers who have helped us to keep this part of the journal going, as well as the publishers who work with us to get the books to our reviewers in challenging circumstances.