March 31, 2023 | New England Humanities Consortium

Ruha Benjamin

February 23, 2023February 23, 2023News

Virtual & In-person Lecture | March 9th, 2023 | 6:00pm

Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just DataLab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Ruha earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, MA, and Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’sInstitute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology & Society Program. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation 2020 Freedom Scholar Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Live stream here.

Sponsored by the Colby Colleges’ Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab with co-sponsorship from the African-American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, Science, Technology, and Society, Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

2023 Symposium | Faculty of Color Working Group

February 20, 2023February 20, 2023News

Virtual Symposium | May 12–13, 2023

In the fall of 2018, BIPOC faculty from the New England region formed the Faculty of Color Working Group (FOCWG) to advocate for our collective success and wellbeing. Given the challenges facing BIPOC scholars and educators in the academy, we came to acknowledge the urgent need to build our own community systems of support. The first of three annual symposia was held shortly after, in spring of 2019, with generous support from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New England Humanities Consortium, and University of Connecticut. We now invite applications for this year’s virtual symposium on Friday, May 12, 2023. The following day, on Saturday, May 13, symposium goers will have a special in-person opportunity to break bread in community at one of three regional hubs (locations TBD).

This year’s theme, “The Corporate University and Shrinking BIPOC Supports: Where Do We Go from Here?”, seeks to apprehend the challenges of withering institutional interest in fighting injustice and committing resources. Priorities are revealed in the dissonance between mass campus equity statements and habitual administrative practices of soft funding, inadequate outcomes and accountability, underfunding, and rudder-less initiatives. In another vein, equity-minded funding agencies shift their priorities as exemplified by the Ford Foundation’s new emphasis away from support for BIPOC scholars toward non-academic economic and racial justice movement-building. Our conversations will be led by stellar thinkers and advocates, such as keynote Dr. Lorgia García Peña (Tufts) and presenters Drs. Davarian Baldwin (Trinity College), Sandy Grande (UConn), and Touba Ghadessi (Wheaton College). The symposium offers a space to exchange, debate, and build energy within and across institutions. We hope to identify tools and pathways to sculpt the work environments that so often negate and diminish our contributions. Speakers will take up such concerns as the impacts of neoliberal environments on gender non-conforming faculty of color; how to navigate and transform campus climates that are unapologetically guided by employee economic precarity; racism, sexism, xeno, homo, and trans-phobias; unchecked supremacies; institutional legacies of indigenous land theft; and disempowered Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs whose role in radical organizational change must be assessed using data, rather than assumed. Learn more here.