By Anita Say Chan

Predatory Data illuminates the connections between the nineteenth century’s anti‑immigration and eugenics movements and today’s sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. Historical and globally multisited, the book examines how dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation are being magnified by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data. Technological advancement has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures. Anita Say Chan explores these important parallel stories of defiant refusal and liberatory activism, such as how feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors worked to develop alternative data practices. Their methods and traditions, over a century old, continue to reverberate through global justice‑based data initiatives today. Predatory Data charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice. “Anita Say Chan highlights the power of community‑based alternatives to extractive data that are rooted in feminist, people of color, and Indigenous perspectives.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025. 263p.

By The Australian Human Rights Commission

A study is being undertaken into the prevalence, nature and impact of racism in Australian universities for both staff and students, at the individual and systemic level. This interim report outlines how this will be done and provides initial insights reflecting stakeholder feedback, emerging themes and early issues for consideration. It highlights a range of concerns from both students and staff in relation to their experience of racism on university campuses.

Racism in universities is a long-standing problem, with research showing it is a persistent and systemic issue for students and staff from First Nations and other negatively racialised backgrounds. The severity of recent incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia combined with other experiences of racism across different groups, creates an urgent need to act decisively.

The findings reveal trends in racism and structural discrimination with significant impacts on wellbeing, participation and performance. At the conclusion of the study, the Commission will deliver comprehensive research findings and recommendations on how to effectively address and reduce racism, in all its forms, at universities.

Key findings

First Nations students and staff – Indigenous participants report enduring structural and interpersonal racism.

Jewish students and staff – Jewish students and staff cited a rise in antisemitism including extremist propaganda, intimidation and exclusion.

Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and staff – participants described hostility, threats and discriminatory practices, including restrictions on cultural expression and prayer spaces.

African and Asian students and staff – African students and staff frequently encountered severe racism, often feeling the need to moderate their natural ways of expressing themselves. Asian participants reported being stereotyped as high achieving but limited to specific academic disciplines.

International students – reports of exclusion, social isolation and fears of visa repercussions were common. Many felt reduced, viewed as ‘cash cows’ for universities.

Sydney: Australian Human Rights Commission, 2024. 137p

Edited by María do Mar Castro Varela and Barış Ülker

How is tolerance reflected in urban space? Which urban actors are involved in the practices and narratives of tolerance? What are the limits of tolerance? The edited volume answers these questions by considering different forms of urban in/exclusion and participatory citizenship. By drawing together disparate yet critical writings, Doing Tolerance examines the production of space, urban struggles and tactics of power from an interdisciplinary perspective. Illustrating the paradoxes within diverse interactions, the authors focus on the conflict between heterogeneous groups of the governed, on the one hand, and the governing in urban spaces, on the other. Above all, the volume explores the divergences and convergences of participatory citizenship, as they are revealed in urban space through political, socio-economic and cultural conditions and the entanglements of social mobilities.

Verlag Barbara Budrich: Opladen • Berlin • Toronto 2020. 278p.