{"id":2192,"date":"2022-09-26T13:43:32","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T17:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/ric\/?p=2192"},"modified":"2023-11-21T10:39:18","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T15:39:18","slug":"students-faculty-imagine-new-academic-program-at-jhu-a-department-of-reparations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/ric\/2022\/09\/26\/students-faculty-imagine-new-academic-program-at-jhu-a-department-of-reparations\/","title":{"rendered":"Students, Faculty Imagine New Academic Program at JHU, a Department of Reparations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Sheharyar Imran<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wake of the 2020 uprisings against the persistence of police brutality, anti-blackness, and the uptick in anti-Asian violence across the world, undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University voiced a vociferous and collective demand: the creation of an academic program that foregrounds questions of white supremacy and racial violence in the United States and beyond, with a particular emphasis on Asian, Black, and Indigenous concerns. These efforts have culminated the formation of the Critical Diasporic Studies (CDS) working group, composed of undergraduates from across JHU as well as faculty members and graduate students affiliated with the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In May 2022, the RIC faculty board voted unanimously to support the proposal for a new undergraduate major, tentatively called Critical Diasporic Studies. On Tuesday, September 13, 2022, RIC hosted a roundtable event<\/a> titled \u201cA Department of Reparations?\u201d to further echo student demands for new curricular initiatives at JHU. Featuring eminent scholars in the fields of racial and ethnic politics and transnational cultural studies, Dr. Adom Getachew<\/a> (Chicago) and Dr. Lisa Lowe<\/a> (Yale), the roundtable sketched the contours of what new directions in the study of racism, diaspora, and indigeneity might look like in our present moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This invigorating discussion focused on how new intellectual approaches to understanding and producing knowledge about racial politics must transcend previously entrenched frameworks in the social sciences and humanities\u2014most of which tend to focus heavily on singular and discrete identity categories and region-specific concerns, growing out of Cold War\u2013era area studies\u2014while also creating meaningful relations with local, often underserved, communities in which elite universities are situated. Dr. Stuart Schrader<\/a>, associate director of RIC, moderated the roundtable, which also included Dr. Nathan Connolly<\/a>, director of RIC and Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor in the Department of History, and Joyce Wang, JHU \u201922 and member of the CDS working group. The room was filled, with an audience of ninety undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators. RIC provided free copies of the most recent books by Getachew and Lowe to students who attended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Getachew and Lowe have been instrumental in establishing new academic programs committed to racial justice at the University of Chicago and Tufts University, respectively. The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity was founded at University of Chicago in Spring 2022. The founding of the department<\/a> was the outcome of student and faculty organizing that began in Fall 2020 but built on more than a decade of discussion and debate<\/a>. At Tufts University, the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora (RCD) officially departmentalized in 2019, and through a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was able to hire new, specialized faculty members<\/a>, with a commitment to renewing the curriculum and diversifying the faculty at the university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, & Migration at Yale University, Lowe stressed that new efforts for the study of racism and anti-racism must necessarily be comparative, transnational, and relational in their outlook, or else they preclude a fuller understanding of the nuances of racial politics across the world. Black freedom in the United States, she argued, has always been intricately connected with anti-colonialism in India and other parts of Asia. Citing W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s Black Reconstruction<\/em>, she argued that the overthrow of slavery and resistance to finance capitalism in the Americas always hinged on transnational solidarity. These efforts combined the intellectual and political projects of oppressed peoples from the world over, none of whom was identical, yet whose histories and fates shared important connections, highlighting the necessity of a global framework for anti-racist thinking. \u201cOur different histories are so linked. But I think in this particular moment, it\u2019s so hard to see that because the racisms are so exacerbated, so targeted. It\u2019s very hard to move out of our individual positionalities and see those links,\u201d she said. Hence, new curricular efforts \u201cshould answer to such questions as: What is the specificity of racial capitalism at this moment? Why is it taking the form of enhanced carcerality? Why does carcerality build on the history of slavery?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Poster