Stephen Small

Stephen Small’s research is organized around the social scientific analysis of contemporary racial formations, and addresses links between historical structures and contemporary manifestations of racial formations. The two disciplines upon which he draws most heavily are Sociology and History. He has three active programs of research. The first is on public history and collective memory, in which he explores how colonialism, slavery and their legacies are represented and interpreted in museums, memorials and monuments in the 21st century. He has undertaken research in the US South, England, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Denmark and Brazil. His field research in the US South examines the distribution, role and treatment of the several hundred cabins originally inhabited by enslaved African Americans that now constitute part of the tourist infrastructure of the New South in the 21st century. He has recently completed a book manuscript tentatively entitled ‘Inside the Shadows of the Big House: 21st century antebellum slave cabins and heritage tourism in Louisiana’. He is co-writing a book (with Dr. Kwame Nimako) on Public History, Museums and Slavery in England and the Netherlands.The second area of research examines the social, cultural and political nature of Black Europe, with a focus on citizenship, institutional inequality and racial discrimination, community organization and community resistance, both within individual nations, as well as patterns across nations. His primary focus is on the striking similarities that characterize the experiences of people in the African diaspora across Europe: namely, ambiguous hyper-visibility, entrenched vulnerability, institutional racism and irrepressible resistance. The third area is race and race mixture (so-called ‘miscegenation’) in the United States and the Caribbean under slavery, and in the contemporary United States. He explores institutional experiences, material resources and ideological articulations of race mixture at different historical moments. He is completing a book manuscript on the experiences of enslaved Black people of mixed origins under slavery in Jamaica.