Nathan Thayer, UDARI Graduate Student Awards Update
Posted on July 22, 2021 at: 11:42 am
Project Title: Care-Full Work: Black Lives Matter, allyship, and the academy
This year I received funding from UDARI to support my dissertation research which uses feminist ethics of care as a lens to view the actions and forms of support put to work to implement antiracist politics and goals. This project is three-pronged, looking at newspaper coverage of care and violence at the racial justice protests that unfurled across the US following the murder of George Floyd; interrogating the experiences and strategies employed by university faculty, staff, and students engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion work at UD; and, the experiences of students taking a university senior level course centered on race, racism, and antiracism at UD. Due to complications from CoVid-19, data collection on this project was delayed and the findings are still yet to come. However, through the support of UDARI I have been able to develop a course on geographies of antiracism that is heavily focused on student self reflection, as well as student led research projects on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campus. The course will be offered in Fall of 2021 (GEOG 467). Further, I have been able to access a database containing nearly 8000 newspaper articles detailing racial justice protests from 2017 to the present, including dates, locations, numbers of attendees (not in all instances), and reports of violence committed at protests. I have begun working my way through the data to organize it further. Over the next few months I will begin interviewing DEI involved campus community members for the second component of the project, and will be prepared to start analysis on the newspaper coverage. Additionally, I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on the care-full classroom UDARI sub-committee, which gave me space to further my understandings of caring practices in the classroom which will further inform the third component of my research. I am deeply thankful for the support UDARI has given me on this project.