Race in All Its Formations

Research Cluster Academic Year
2005
Research Cluster Project Director(s)
Karen Leong, Asian Pacific American Studies, History, Women's Studies
Description

Participants in "Race in All Its Formations" will meet monthy for provocative discussion about how racial formations in the United States inform and have been informed by discourses about science, health, policy, history, culture, and globalization. United States continues to be understood as a black and white binary. In addition to gaining a common grounding in racial theory, this research cluster will also explore the location of Hispanic and Chicanos, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians within the matrix of racial formations, and how attention to how these experiences challenge fixed notions of blackness and make visible the process of whiteness as a racial formation globally and in the United States. Ideas for topics include immigration and golbalization, the geography of race, what is at stake in the transnationalism, the contruction of whiteness historically and politically, the role of science, the political status of American Indians and Pacific Islanders, environmental justice, the role of religion, nationalisms, and so on. Particiants will address how this shapes their own research methodologies, and will collaborate in developing a transdisciplinary model of critical race methodology to present in the spring.