ISGRJ Signature Initiatives
With an eye toward translating excellent scholarship into impact and outcomes, our signature initiatives strive to include and engage a broader public arena, promote global racial justice while interrogating the structures that govern the knowledge we produce, offer mentorship and community to enhance the systemic experience of academia for faculty who study race, racism and inequality, and create spaces for scholars to be in conversation with communities for the purpose of mutual sharing of knowledge.
The Quilting Water Public Arts Project
A Directors' Signature Research Project: Institute Director Patrick Rosal, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Camden
Quilting Water is a five-year international public art initiative. In its local form, the project explores the relationship residents of Camden, New Jersey, have to the increasingly vulnerable public resource of water. A community of Black quilters from Camden will be commissioned to make quilts in conversation with photos and oral histories from their own city. The institute will publish a book of the photos, excerpts of the interviews, and images of the quilts, as well as text about water and the intersections of race and environmental justice.
The Black Ecologies Lab
Led by its co-convenors, Dr. J.T. Roane (Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Africana Studies and Geography, at Rutgers University-New Brunswick) and Dr. Teona Williams (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and ISGRJ Named Term Chair), The Black Ecologies Signature Lab at the ISGRJ draws together threads in order to generate scholarship, artistry, and other resources that aid in infusing public and scholarly discourse as well as our broader cultural imaginaries with the insights generated through the analytical insights, methods, and theories related to Black Ecologies and its closely allied fields, including Black Geographies.
The lab provides a suite of digital projects, speaker series and workshops, community engagement events, teaching and undergraduate program development, and publications to foment Rutgers as a major center for Black ecological studies for faculty, students, and community.
The Race and Gender Equity (RAGE Lab)
The Race and Gender Equity (RAGE Lab), founded in 2023, by its Director and Principal Investigator Dr. Brittney Cooper (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick), is a multi-modal research incubator committed to producing Black feminist research on the social thriving of Black women and girls and making that research accessible to broad public audiences.
Just Takes
"Just Takes" is our newly-launched and uniquely branded Op-Ed/thought piece/writing initiative at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.
We encourage our affiliated-faculty and Rutgers Researchers on Race to submit pieces of writing of 500 words or less pitched to orient their research towards a more public audience and/or as relevant for a current issue in the broad area of global racial justice.
To read our first round of fascinating pieces from colleagues covering such topics as reparations, the significance of water, childhood as a political battleground, urban racial and economic segregation, and the intersectionalities of structural gendered racism in child protective services, or if you're interested in submitting an entry, please click below.
