Acknowledging History
Posted on February 17, 2023 at: 11:32 am
UD Anti-Racism Initiative hosts symposium on UD’s history as a land-grant university and its impact on Indigenous communities.
Posted on UDaily, February 9, 2023.
News
Indigenous Programming Committee Visits With Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Posted on November 16, 2021 at: 12:34 pm
The UD Anti-Racism Initiative’s Indigenous Programming committee organized a visit with the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. As a chronicler of white supremacy and Native American history, Roxanne spent much of the day with our students and colleagues. She was a guest speaker in Dr. McKay Jenkins’s Environmental Humanities class; then at an informal “coffee hour” with faculty and members of the Lenape and Nanticoke tribes; and lastly in a major lecture that was attended by some 270 people from UD and the surrounding community.
Passcode: UMSREC04!
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.
Anne S. Cross and Julia Hamer-Light UDARI Graduate Student Awards Update
Posted on at: 11:40 am
With the support of the University of Delaware’s Anti-Racism Initiative (UDARI), we were able to organize a series of programs in the Department of Art History in the spring of 2021 that centered the goal of developing anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-oppressive methods of pedagogy. The award of $2,000.00 allowed us to invite leading scholars, from Art History and beyond, to engage with graduate students and faculty on these issues. This series of programs provided the graduate students in Art History with critical training in new approaches to pedagogy and antiracism practices in both academic spaces and the art museum. We then drew upon the lessons offered by our guest speakers in a pedagogical workshop with Dr. Adam Foley, Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Delaware. These events represented a first step toward addressing an identified need for better pedagogical training for graduate students in Art History, and were the culmination of a year-long, graduate student-led antiracism effort in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware.
Kisha Porcher and Jessica Edwards, UDARI Faculty Fellow Project Update
Posted on at: 11:22 am
Black Racial Literacy Project Update, June 2021
Description of Project:
The racial discrimination Black faculty face in majority white places of work fall into two categories: institutional and personal. Institutional racism is a system of inherent institutional structures, processes, and policies that lead to the disparities between Black faculty and their colleagues. Personal racism stems from direct experiences with racism and discrimination at the individual level (Griffin et al., 2011; Porcher, 2020). Researchers (Cole et al., 2017; Porcher, 2020) argue that to mitigate the institutional and personal racism that Black faculty experience, it is important for us to have interpersonal connections and space within white dominated spaces as well as direct conversations about race and racism (Edwards, 2016; Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). With focus on anti-racism initiatives, Black faculty are expected to process the traumas of racism they experience among their white colleagues, who may have inflicted harm upon them. Or in many instances, Black faculty are expected to support in leading these initiatives without specific emotional, physical, and psychological support for themselves. Additional support is needed for Black faculty due to issues of racism, tokenism, and hostile campus environments (Porcher, 2020).