We know there is structural racism. We know it is a serious problem. But how can journalists address structural problems? The purpose of this round table is to find good examples, address relevant questions and bring people together. Martin Modlinger from Germany will open by sharing the experience of his massive FOI project. He simply asked: We know structural racism is a serious problem, what does the national government, the provincial governments and the police do about it? It is a long term and slow project, it is investigative, and it can be replicated. Martin filed FOI requests with 570 authorities on various levels in Germany using the FOI platform Frag den Staat (Ask the State, www.fragdenstaat.de). By the time of writing this programme text, he the first answers are coming in. They stretch from answers in the style of "racism is forbidden, thus we have no statistics" to answers equalling structural racism with xenophobia. To open the session, Martin will explain which documents he expected and requested, his search terminology, strategy and first findings.
Investigating structural racism is likely to vary from country to country due to different history and legislation. Nevertheless we believe that collaboration makes sense and would like to invite to this round table people who are addressing the question in their respective countries. The purpose is to share methods, experiences and ideas and potentially to collaborate on research in the future. For this round table, we have invited journalists from all over Europe who want to connect to collaborate on this topic. The purpose is to inspire each other and make contacts.
We have established a forum thread if you want to link to interesting work or indeed interesting challenges to address
https://discussion.dataharvest.eu/t/investigating-structural-racism/118
