A group of faculty from many disciplines at UC Santa Barbara has established a racial studies project aimed at developing and supporting new research on race and racism.
Under the leadership of sociologist Howard Winant and political scientist Christopher Parker, the New Racial Studies Project will look at new ways of studying racial issues.
Many new themes have arisen in the post-civil rights, post-apartheid, and post-colonial era, according to Winant.
"A lot has happened since the last big upsurge of interest in race and racism in the 1960s," Winant says. "New racial dynamics have immerged: A renewed ethno-religious paranoia about the global East; new interest in various racial diasporas, whiteness studies, immigration and a host of other issues."
California is a "majority minority state," Winant said. Yet commitments to outreach activities and affirmative action have eroded.
"In this climate, racial studies---both in existing ethnic studies departments and in traditional departments of the humanities and social sciences---deserve and demand new attention."
Supported by an $110,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, participants in the project's work include social scientists and humanists who study race from different vantage points:
global, national, local, and experiential.
"This project will help us connect new scholarship on race to the changing social, economic and global context," noted Melvin Oliver, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UCSB. "In so doing, our faculty's work will engage important public issues and conversations in ways that should help California and other places address the problems and promises of a changing demography of race in America."
Among the project's first series of events are several lectures by distinguished scholars and writers from universities across the country (see http://www.newracialstudies.ucsb.edu/event).
"Our new Racial Studies endeavor is at once an educational undertaking, a research initiative, and a movement project," Winant said.
Major goals of the project are to create a model for what a research and teaching center on racial studies can be; to foster the production of new knowledge and new approaches to contemporary dilemmas of race and racism; to establish intellectual and action-oriented pathways for undergraduate and graduate students; and to promote racially diverse faculty hiring.
The New Racial Studies Project is housed in UCSB's Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research.
NEW RACIAL STUDIES PROJECT LECTURE SERIES
Thursday, January 27, 4 p.m.
MultiCultural Center Theater
"COERCED LABOR:
RACE, GENDER AND CARING"
by Evelyn Nakano Glenn,, professor of women's studies and ethnic studies and founding director of the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.
Tuesday, February 22, 4 p.m.
McCune Conference Room
6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building
"RETHINKING THE INDIGENOUS"
by James Clifford, professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz
Monday, April 21, 4 p.m.
MultiCultural Center Theater
"TRANSNATIONAL BLACK POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF RACIAL REASONING"
by Michael Hanchard, professor of political science and African American Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also Director of the Institute for Diasporic Studies.
Monday, May 9, 4 p.m.
MultiCultural Center Theater
"BACKLASH BLUES:
THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY"
by Vijay Prashad, associate professor of international studies at Trinity College.
He is vice chair of the Executive Board of the Center for Third World Organizing.
Thursday, May 19, 4 p.m.
MultiCultural Center Theater
"TALKING TO STRANGERS:
RACE AND CITIZENSHIP"
by Danielle Allen, dean of humanities and professor of classical languages and literatures, political science, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
For further information visit the project's website at http://www.newracialstudies.ucsb.edu
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