The Racial Justice Grand Challenge Initiative is an interdisciplinary research effort that explores the legacies of racial slavery and its connections to our modern world and institutions.
The project is part of the College of Arts and Science Grand Challenge Initiative, which tackles the most pressing and complex issues of our time through collaborative, innovative research and discovery.
Upcoming Event
Caribbean Studies Symposium
Thursday March 28th 8:30 am – 3:30 pm
Friday March 29th 8:30 am – 1 pm
Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center Auditorium
About the Project
The Racial Justice Grand Challenge Initiative convenes scholars across the humanities and social sciences to study Black life. That Black people often have vexed relationships to the places they inhabit has been a common understanding at least since W. E. B. Du Bois first theorized double consciousness at the turn of the 20th century. That vexation has only intensified in Africa and its diaspora whether one looks at the legacies of colonialism, post-independence, or the worsening climate catastrophe and its resultant forced migrations.
Our collective approach to the question of justice is to try to think beyond categories such as citizenship or state-mediated rights to better grapple with historical dislocations within and among Black people in the United States, the African diaspora, and the African continent. Thinking across space and place, languages, and historical periods, and drawing together colleagues from English, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, and the arts, will help us contend with histories not only of bondage but freedom under constraint. This multi- and interdisciplinary approach will enable us to see beyond death towards ways of living often unintelligible to ruling orders of power and knowledge. It will help us consider the broader significance of the social and cultural formations at the heart of our inquiries. What ideas of justice, freedom, and democracy, what imaginings of reckoning and repair, emerge when scholars foreground Black life in its abundance?
The project engages scholars, activists, musicians, and artists, working across disciplines, media, genres, and sites to explore this and related questions.
