2022 TRAC Grant Awardees

Freedom and Slavery Working Group

The Freedom and Slavery Working Group will use a TRAC grant to continue our multi-disciplinary project investigating slavery and its legacies in the present, while integrating our research with curriculum across academic units. We focus on racism, anti-black oppression and the liberatory practices of people of African descent, from historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives. We accomplish this work through regular events where scholars present their research in conversation with themes being taught in our undergraduate classes. Students will attend these activities as part of their course work. Events will also be open to all faculty, students, and community members outside of our classes. Anti-racism is foundational to our teaching and scholarship. We teach courses in African and African American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, History, LALS, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In the 2022-2023 academic year these courses will include Freedom in the Atlantic World, Freedom and Slavery in African and African Diasporic Literature, and Harlem Century. Our activities will include a panel discussion on race in Latin America, as well as book talks on Women-led slave revolts, and Black Radicalism in Canada.

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TRAC in Biological Sciences

The courses in the department will be evaluated regarding their content on race and equity. Goal is to implement transformative change in the biological science curriculum in the inclusion of race and social justice in every course.

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Understanding Anti-Racism from the Perspective of Economics

We propose to launch a series of workshops to provide anti-racism training and awareness particularly of stereotypes commonly utilized in economics. Economics as a discipline has begun more earnestly in the last five years to grapple with the profound negative consequences of racism and racist practices and their pervasiveness within our field. While more research in economics has begun focusing on race, Cihak, Machilas, and Sahay (2020) note in the top ten economics journals over the past ten years, only 0.2 percent of the articles discussed issues of race, racial inequality, or racism. Other related topics such as the income distribution (2.0 percent), poverty (1.4 percent) or gender (0.8 percent) were also severely under-represented. But even in comparison to these topics, race is under-represented by a factor of 50 to 100.

Asian American Studies Working Group Stage 2

Asian American Studies Working Group Stage 2 would be a continuation of last year’s Asian American Working Group. Because we had to spend some of the year allotting for time for the working group members to gain skills and reading knowledge concerning the field, we are positioning stage two as a more robust period of full syllabus construction. Finally, we will also be workshopping governance documents that will be submitted to the Dean’s Council within the next academic calendar year.

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Exploring Race and Racism in Britain today

The administration and a number of adjunct faculty in London are very keen to support the delivery of the Addressing Racism: Educating for Justice Strategy of the University and in particular to ensure that all students studying in London study and engage with issues of race and racism from a British perspective. We are seeking a grant of $10,000 to support the development of part of a new, core, one credit anchor course from fall 2023 for all study abroad students in London concerning the study of race and racism from a British perspective. The course would be multidisciplinary and race and racism would be one of the themes alongside sustainability (and possibly others). The grant sought is to engage a scholar to develop learning outcomes relating to race and racism and teaching resources/experiential learning activities for use when this course is delivered.

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Teaching Race In Business Courses

The project’s objective is to outline an initiative to build both GSB and Columbia University Teachers College faculty’s confidence and ability to discuss race in their classrooms. Additionally, this initiative will give faculty tools to incorporate race in their respective disciplines. This proposal will design activities to be incorporated into a future Institutional Change Grant. To build faculty’s confidence and ability to discuss race in classrooms, we will create a space where faculty can openly air their concerns and needs. Uncovering the specific needs of faculty will be done by: Focus groups Meetings Surveys Literature review The first step not only identifies the faculty’s needs but also creates an awareness of racial challenges in the classroom. It shapes activities geared toward addressing faculty concerns, allowing them to feel comfortable while embracing the subject of race in their classrooms. Second, we will create a blueprint for executing several sessions, both plenary and breakout sessions. This deliverable will include: Understanding faculty needs and preferred activities Identifying participating business disciplines Selecting racial topics Researching plenary speakers and discipline-focused facilitators.

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Preparing Antiracist School and District Leaders: Advancing Knowledge and Practice in the Field

This project will build on current work redesigning core curriculum and assessments to better prepare antiracist leaders in the master’s and Ed.D. programs in the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy (ELAP) by extending this to four additional courses and assessing the effects of these efforts on the dispositions and practice of educational leaders in these programs. We will hold a two-day retreat, which will bring together faculty, students, and alumni who are committed to antiracism. With support from an expert in antiracist leadership from another university, we will work collaboratively to redesign these courses to better prepare antiracist leaders and plan for assessing the progress of candidates’ development as antiracist leaders in the master’s and Ed.D. programs over the course of their learning in each program. This curriculum and assessment design work will focus on supporting antiracist leadership development in three key areas: 1) developing one’s racial awareness, 2) practicing culturally responsive instructional leadership, and 3) leading equity-focused continuous improvement.

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Race and Teaching U.S. History

The Race and Teaching the History of the United States project builds on and moves beyond our work as a reading group from 2021-2022, in which we identified, discussed, and purchased undergraduate-accessible books selected by our historians of colonial, nineteenth-century, and twentieth-century U.S. history. TRAC members this year will first conduct a syllabus and lesson-plan workshop for Understanding Historical Change: United States (UHC: U.S.) instructors before the Fall 2022 semester. Fordham-based and invited speakers will then give six lectures that will be part of the UHC: U.S. syllabi in Fall 2022 and Spring 2023. External speakers and the faculty members of the TRAC group will also offer specialized syllabus workshops for colleagues, including the graduate students and lecturers who teach a number of the UHC courses. Finally, the project dedicates funds toward the continued purchase of monographs and primary source compendiums, which will build on our Race and U.S. History Resource Library. This resource will be open to instructors from History and other disciplines and interdisciplinary programs.

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MLL Vocab Diversity Initiative 3.0

This continuation of our initiative with two components: The Anti-Racist Pedagogy Seminar and the multilingual anti-racism roundtables & workshops. Students in MLAL 3110 (The Anti-Racist Seminar) will work this year on developing a shared archive (eventually an open-access one) for anti-racist language pedagogy materials for teaching following up on the recommendations from the students in the seminar last year which identified the weakness of foreign language textbooks with respect to anti-racism, inclusion, and colonial legacies. Whereas the MLL Vocab Diversity 2.0 had students who focused on the evaluation of teaching materials, interviews with faculty members, and class observations with respect to anti-racist pedagogy, the MLL Vocab Diversity 3.0 will continue some of this but will focus primarily this year on the student perspective. Seminar students will prepare surveys and conduct interviews with students in Modern Languages language classes (1001-1502) assessing the student perspective and experience.

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This is My Moment / Este es mi momento: A Bilingual Creative Writing Project.

“This is My Moment / Este es mi momento” consists of a series of workshops that address antiracism, first-person experiences with race, and creative writing in Spanish. There will be six one-session creative writing workshops for students and two small group workshops for faculty in the academic year. This project addresses pedagogical needs for MLL, LALSI and the Creative Writing program. Advanced Spanish classes (SPAN 2001) will require students to participate in two workshops as part of their curriculum each semester. Students will share their experiences in class discussions. The Creative Writing Program and LALSI will function as co-sponsors of this project by promoting workshops among their students. An MLL faculty member will convert each workshop into a single-day lesson plan as a document to be archived and shared with other faculty members on a Blackboard page, including the workshops’ recordings. Faculty can later adapt or incorporate this material into their classes. This project will impact students completing their language requirement in Spanish who are majoring in different disciplines across the university and students pursuing a minor/major in Spanish, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Creative Writing.

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Transforming Music's Curriculum: The Core/Introductory Experience

We propose a new course + adaptable course modules to help transform the Music Program’s contribution to the Core, esp. in the density + centrality of its treatment of race. The framework + modules (guided readings, assignments, assessments, scores) focus on “Music in North America” to recenter traditional narratives away from the Euro-centric approach of our current “Intro to Western Music.” The modules begin instead with First Nations’ musics and subsequently explore the consequences of migration + diaspora, esp. the fundamental contributions of Afro-diasporic cultures. “Legacy” pieces of the Western canon can occasionally be retained as intersecting significantly with larger themes of race/ethnicity, but the balance shifts decisively to non- elite, non-notated traditions. We focus on the US but also include Mexico, the Caribbean, + Canada. By de-centering “Western” classical music as just one strand in N. American musical practice, we present students with a broader + more culturally sensitive musical history. Modules will be field-tested in Music’s AY 22 course offerings with materials finalized at the end of Spring 23 and made available to all Dept. instructors to adapt either into existing courses or as stand-alone courses.

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Civic Media Workshops: Integrating Civic Media for Racial Justice into Student Learning Experiences

The goal of this project is to provide workshops on community-engaged media production exploring themes of race and anti-racism. The growing role of media in activism presents opportunities to engage students in creative forms of co-creation with communities that have stories to tell, and challenges they want to address. In collaboration with the Communication and Media Studies (CMS) department, the New Media and Digital Design program (NMDD), and the Center for Community Engaged Learning, the project will invite civic media artists/activists to conduct five workshops for faculty and students where they will learn: (1) a specific media modality/tool used to produce media addressing issues of race (e.g., video), and (2) practices for co- creation of media with communities. Artists and activists with expertise in a range of different visual, audio, and interactive media to address issues of race will be invited to facilitate these workshops. The workshops will be integrated in four CMS, NMDD, and community-engaged courses. Additionally, the project’s website will document the workshops as well as guides to integrate workshops in classrooms. This project aims to make the case for a Civic Media Lab at Fordham University.

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Psychological Research and Practice at Fordham: Towards an Antiracist and Intersectional Curriculum

The field of psychology is concerned with the mind and all aspects of human behavior. However, very little of the psychological research and theory taught within the discipline (and our own department) engages systematically with larger contextual issues that are present in the real world, including race, racism, and intersectional social context. This proposal aims to develop suggestions for teaching race across the psychology curricula, including proposing a department-wide reading group, an opportunity to revise course syllabi, and ultimately, a course focused on these issues required for all undergraduate students. Incorporating diverse views into how psychology is taught deepens students’ understanding of these issues, training a more knowledgeable (and antiracist) generation of psychological researchers and practitioners.

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Breaking Down Walls: Interdisciplinary Conversations on Teaching Racial Capitalism and the Carceral State. Fall 2022 - Spring 2023

We propose a two-semester series of activities designed to create opportunities for faculty to share and build upon our existing expertise in teaching topics related to racial capitalism and the carceral state. Faculty members will collaborate to develop, revise, co-teach, and share lesson plans that can be adapted for use in a variety of disciplines. Invited NYC-area experts, advocates, and movement leaders (including people directly impacted the carceral state) will engage in small-group conversations and listening sessions with faculty and serve as advisors. The project will result in an archive and open-access teaching resources including lesson plans (with learning objectives) and other teaching materials, as well as a short report on “lessons learned” about collaborative anti-racist education in the pursuit of justice.

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Rebuilding Introduction to Sociology to be Race Conscious

The aim of “Rebuilding Introduction to Sociology to be Race Conscious” is two-fold. First, the goal is to rebuild/rethink/challenge how we teach Introduction to Sociology courses by elevating contributions of previously marginalized scholars; and secondly, to develop specific teaching modules that instructors can use to add an intersectional, race-conscious approach to various units of Introduction to Sociology courses. These teaching modules would take the form of relatively short lessons that instructors can use while teaching different concepts in sociology (for example, while teaching about economic inequality, there can be a module that relates inequality to race). These modules would contain not only short description of how specific concepts/social issues relate to matters of race but also provide instructors with examples of useful readings to add and discuss, other visual materials (ex: TED Talks, short videos, movies), as well as sample assignments that show how interrelated these concepts are. These modules would be accessible to all faculty members teaching Introduction to Sociology and other relevant courses via Blackboard. Faculty would also be able to assess how well these modules worked in their classes.

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Decolonizing Anthropology Project

The purpose of this grant is to continue to create modules on 'decolonizing anthropology' that can be included in all future Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and Introduction to Archaeology courses at Fordham. Decolonization and other critical perspectives have long been part of anthropology, particularly amongst feminist anthropologists and anthropologists of color and/or from the Global South. However, these critical perspectives are rarely included in the discipline's canon, and even less so in the introductory courses. Grant funding will be used to enable a team of three faculty members to create a series of modules and resources that implement decolonizing anthropology and the politics of knowledge production. Funding will also be used to host guest speaker events. Recordings of the guest speaker events, which have been very successful this year, will be added to another Blackboard module. These events and recordings will serve as resources for all Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and Introduction to Archaeology students. Likewise, the concise modules, accessible on Blackboard to instructors, will allow our students to better assess the discipline’s deep colonial heritage, as well as, its decolonial contributions.

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W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Science: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives

This past year, we led a discussion series in which faculty from many of Fordham's schools engaged in close reading of DuBois' writings on race and explored the science and social context of racial thought of Du Bois’ time, alongside current scientific perspectives on race (participants list below). Participants have had the opportunity to learn more about the history of racial thinking and scientific racism in the United States. The range of fields and interests among group members was striking, including curricular revision in several majors, business ethics, Africa and Cold War politics, and human rights. We have already met for 5 sessions this year (syllabus below). One more discussion is scheduled for next week, followed by a syllabus workshop the following week, so we have not yet formally surveyed the class. But we have been gratified by the commitment and insightful engagement of the faculty. Several group members have told us they feel the seminar has been very useful to them in their work on anti-racist teaching and scholarship, and that they would be interested either in inviting us to their classes or in adding material on Du Bois and the history of scientific racism to their classes.

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ERASED//Geographies of Black Displacement (working title)

This exhibition by New Orleans–based artist Shana M. griffin would take its cue from her 2021 show "DISPLACING Blackness" at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, which used found objects, photographs, wall text, videos, paintings, and ephemera to explore geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, containment, and disposability in land-use planning, housing policies, and urban development. It would be mounted in Fordham’s Ildiko Butler Gallery in May 2023. Should we be awarded funding, griffin would work with Fordham’s CCEL to forge collaborations with artists, activists, and organizations in the areas surrounding both campuses, which may include the Black Gotham Experience project, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, Picture the Homeless, and Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. She would work closely with students in Ruble’s Visual Justice course, as well as with students in the coauthors’ courses, and possibly faculty members Gregory Jost, Westenley Alcenat, and Gregory T. Donovan, whom we would reach out to. Work in the exhibition would reflect these engagements and examine relationships between housing, environmental, and carceral policies as they connect to local geographies and advocacy efforts.