Race, Empire and Education Collective

Both Hacking and Omi and Winant employ the notion of ‘making up people’. Their discussions are different in that Hacking leads us through philosophical reflections on what it means to be an individual (or the possibilities available to be) in a world where social change is in the business of creating new categories of people, for example, for official government statistics. Omi and Winant particularly apply the notion to their discussion of racial classification and state formation in the United States. The idea of ‘making up people’ resonates with questions of how people are represented in a culture at any given moment; how they come to be, to be understood, their possibilities to be, and how – if at all – their category of ‘be-ing’ enables them to be controlled…Read more.