Thursday, September 21 - Friday, September 22, 2023
Indiana Memorial Union, Dogwood Room
The Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) celebrated its 10th anniversary in the fall of 2023—ten years of rich, invigorating, and intellectually grounded scholarship on race and ethnicity at Indiana University Bloomington! We are so grateful and proud of the work we have done by strengthening research on race and ethnicity, building interdisciplinary networks, and building communities among faculty and students on our campus.
Amidst the cacophony of voices that tell us to normalize the terror all around us and the unsustainability of our existing norms and social institutions, CRRES has provided a space of refuge and truth-telling for scholars committed to engaging with the world—both in its present form, and the one we want to build. Our faculty affiliates and post-doctoral fellows demonstrated the excellence of our research by winning competitive awards and fellowships, such as the Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Lily Foundation Award, Mellon Foundation Platform Indiana Studies Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, among many others. While we have used our networks to amplify our research excellence, our monthly Coffee Hours allowed us to gather to make more informal connections. Letting our guards down, we have allowed ourselves to take off our performative cloaks and take delight in small things like nail stickers, favorite recipes, binge-worthy shows, hiking trails, as well as mourn through countless microaggressions we face as people of color in a predominantly white institution.
Scholars who benefited from the mentoring and professional development we provided through our postdoctoral fellowship program are continuing to enrich the scholarship of race and ethnicity at IUB and across the nation through research projects like Candace Miller’s study of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on Black and white business owners in Indianapolis and Detroit; Vanessa Cruz Nichols’s reassessment of the notion that threat is a sufficient mobilizing catalyst for political action among Latinxs; Nicole Ivy’s cultural history of the gynecological clinic as a site of slavery’s propagative power to destroy Black women’s bodies; Dorainne Green’s psychological study of how threats to social identity shape cognitive, psychological, behavioral and physiological outcomes and produce multiple disparities; Chinbo Chong’s study on Asian American and Latines’ formation of political identities and their impact on mobilizing electorates; and Aleshia Barajas’ ethnographic study of quotidian border-crossings along the US-Mexico border. Through their creative genius and commitment to rigorous inquiry, they are illuminating the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of white supremacy, while also generating new ideas that are helping us build a world without oppression and hierarchies.
Through our Undergraduate Research Program (URP), we have challenged our undergraduate students to refuse the notion that a college degree is only a ticket to a job placement in the future. Instead, our URP students committed themselves to becoming life-long learners. Their desire to interrogate the world as it is and work toward transformation has produced stellar projects, such as Rebekah Amaya’s study of the politics of memory of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Ann Kovoor’s analysis of Chinese American media coverage of anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mofe Koya’s research on Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry and personal correspondence, and Kemal Perdana’s research on the reasons why white women benefit from diversity initiatives more than Black men within software engineering hiring processes.
Please join us as we celebrate our accomplishments and look ahead to the endless possibilities that lie ahead! See our schedule of events for the anniversary below. A keynote speech will be given by one of the founding members of CRRES, Dr. Quincy Stewart, on 09/21 (Thursday); lightning talks by our former post-docs and reflections by former directors on 09/22 (Friday). Don't miss this opportunity to connect with former and current directors and postdocs, along with faculty and graduate affiliates to reflect on our history and the journey that continues to shape the future of CRRES.
