Ethnic minority people, racism and the Covid-19 pandemic: Exacerbation of existing inequalities
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Birkbeck's Annual BSc Social Science Lecture delivered by the Department of Geography.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the inequalities facing ethnic minority people in the UK. To many of us, the racist abuse experienced by racialised groups, the ensuing impact on their lives and the persistent ethnic inequalities with roots in structural and institutional racism do not come as a surprise. We have known about these inequalities for many years. But the extent to which ethnic minority people have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic is shocking. It is not only the excess deaths and hospitalisations from Covid-19 that are disturbing. The effect of the pandemic and the associated lockdowns have had markedly worse effects on ethnic minority people compared with the majority White population in terms of their jobs, financial security, mental health, and the way in which citizens have been policed.
In this lecture, Dr Dharmi Kapadia will talk about the work that they are doing at the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, as part of their programme of work, ‘Ethnic and Racial Inequality in a Time of Crisis', bringing together different strands of their research to show how the impact of the pandemic has had particularly damaging effects for ethnic minority populations in the UK.
Dr Dharmi Kapadia
Bio: Dr Dharmi Kapadia is a Lecturer in Sociology at The University of Manchester and a member of the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and the Synergi Collaborative Centre. She has research interests in racism, mental health and illness, stigma and older people. Dharmi has also conducted research on ethnic inequalities in women’s use of mental health services, socioeconomic inequalities in suicide, as well as undertaken work looking at ethnic inequalities in the labour market, and the role of social networks in poverty for different ethnic groups.
Contact name:
Tarek Qureshi