In human diversity research, race is a moving target. It is rarely clearly defined, and takes on different meanings and labels in different contexts, and often reveals itself as racialized connotations of other terms. From an international perspective, it is apparent that while race is used in political and scientific contexts in the USA or Brazil, for example, in continental Europe, by contrast, today it is commonly considered a taboo. This difference is partly rooted in divergent conceptual meanings in different languages, and various political as well as scientific strategies for dealing with the historical burden of the concept. However, even in countries that are largely imagined as post-racial, race remains as an “absent presence” (M’charek/Schramm/Skinner 2014) within other terms in use such as “ethnicity”, “population”, “migrant background”, “biogeographical ancestry”, “metapopulation” etc.
In this panel we welcome contributions inquiring into the national, disciplinary and/or temporal specifics of human difference categorizations – with a focus on, but not limited to, the life sciences. We are particularly interested in the shaping of processes of categorization and in the continuity and discontinuity of concepts of group classification across/in different contexts and specific situations.
 Possible topics include:
* entanglements between race and “ethnicity”, “caste”, “populations” etc.
* context-specific and language-related differences and similarities between racialized concepts, wordings, meanings, and their historical dis/continuities
* travelling concepts, translations, euphemisms, modernizations, and equivocations
* processes of racialization in various scientific disciplines
* race after race, post-racial racializations, racializations in antiracism
* effects of notions like “colourblindness”, “race-consciousness”, “race realism”, “social constructivism”
* different bureaucratic-administrative regulations of race, e.g. in the law, in affirmative action, surveys, censuses etc.
* attempts to grasp diversity/variation in a non-racialized manner