Sherene Razack

Sherene Razack is Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women's Studies within the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her groundbreaking work centers on systemic racial violence, with particular focus on its manifestations in legal institutions, spatial politics, and state power structures. She founded the Racial Violence Hub (RVHub), a virtual research and teaching network, and the Race and Deaths in Custody digital project to advance critical scholarship on racialized violence.

Razack's research interrogates the intersections of race, gender, and colonial power through frameworks of critical race feminism and anti-racist analysis. Her work examines how anti-Muslim racism operates within Western legal-political systems, analyzes the racialized dimensions of torture and terror discourses, and investigates the disposability of racialized bodies within settler colonial contexts. She critically explores how spatial arrangements produce racial hierarchies and constrain citizenship possibilities for marginalized communities, particularly Indigenous peoples and women of color.

Her publications over the past two decades reveal consistent engagement with institutional violence, from Indigenous deaths in custody to Muslim exclusion from political life. Razack's scholarship demonstrates how legal inquests often fail to address systemic racism while exposing connections between imperialism, peacekeeping operations, and racialized violence. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges critical legal studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial analysis to challenge conventional understandings of justice and citizenship.

Through the Racial Violence Hub and Race and Deaths in Custody project, Razack has created collaborative platforms for researchers, activists, and educators to document, analyze, and resist racial violence globally. These digital initiatives facilitate knowledge exchange across disciplinary and geographical boundaries while providing critical resources for understanding the structural nature of racialized state violence.