Blumenbach’s Racial Classification Deconstructing the Timeless Call for Human Differentiation

Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Victoria started her academic career within the field of critical social policy, and this period formed part of her broader interest to the historical roots of ongoing institutional violence against diverse disfranchised groups. In 2008, Victoria transferred to the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and began to elaborate on the issue of institutional violence against the Roma and people with disabilities in the Czech lands. It has led her to deepening the approaches towards race science and racial thinking as agents and structures of nation-building and inclined to revise the spatial, temporal and ideological borders in the taken-for-granted approaches toward the role of researchers and academic institutions in the most extremal forms of transgression.