Supported by a Grant from the Mellon Foundation
“With grant funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice will help leverage Rutgers’ own history and demographic complexity so that it can redefine what excellence looks like amidst long-standing national narratives that have suggested that the very people who make Rutgers distinct lack talent, drive, initiative, impulse control, and intelligence."
—Jonathan Holloway, Rutgers University President and University Professor
Spanning the full breadth of Rutgers University, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice is a vibrant intellectual corridor, bringing together scholars and creatives doing humanistic research in a way that advances their research, increases its public relevance and impact, and allows them to reach and learn from communities and publics beyond the academy.
Image credit: Mahinour Abdou, The Golden Recovery No. 4; Self Portrait—Islamic Stitches
A collection of scholars who believe that the arts and humanities, in dialogue with other fields, can contribute powerful visions of a just society to effect change
Rutgers University is a welcoming place for scholars who are committed to the study of race and related systems of inequity that emerge from their instantiation in systems of governance, culture, commerce, and social control. Learn about support opportunities for early and mid-career scholars.
Rutgers boasts a distinguished roster of faculty whose work focuses on social justice, equity, and systemic racism. The institute serves as a central hub to coordinate, synergize, and amplify their scholarship toward meaningful action. Learn about support and engagement opportunities for senior faculty.
The Institute supports a number of research projects that address persistent inequities in educational settings. Learn about support for seminars, workshops, courses, and projects with educational, social, and public policy impact and that bear on questions of race and representation in the arts, culture, and public humanities.
Under the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and its Cross-Campus Director, Carlos Decena (who is also the Institute's New Brunswick Associate Director), The Office of Undergraduate Intellectual Life was founded to support students across Rutgers University.
The Office will be spearheading mentorship programs and initiatives to support student leadership in diversity, equity, and inclusion across the university.
The Fellows in Racial Justice Learning Community is a new cross-campus program which aims to identify, accompany and mentor generations of life-long intellectual activists in racial justice across Rutgers University.
This fellowship, launched under the ISGRJ Office of Undergraduate Intellectual Life is an unprecedented program spanning Rutgers University—Newark, Rutgers University—New Brunswick and Rutgers University—Camden which brings together undergraduate students who are passionate about social justice activism and who will pursue projects to renew, enrich, and maximize on-going racial justice efforts on campus to impact social change locally and globally.
The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice is a universitywide entity with a central administration in New Brunswick and collaborative centers at Rutgers’ three main locations—in Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden. Grounded by its uniquely diverse campuses across the state of New Jersey and abundance of scholarly disciplines and endeavors, the institute's reach is at once local, regional, and global.
Rutgers University–Newark is a primary anchor institution in New Jersey's largest city and is a leading urban research university that leverages diversity and high-impact scholarship to cultivate the talent essential to transform communities and change the world.
Rutgers University–New Brunswick and the aligned Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences conduct life-changing research and offer a premier education at a leading comprehensive public research university.
Located just minutes from Philadelphia, Rutgers University–Camden delivers groundbreaking work that impacts the world while offering its students an experiential education in an intimate, supportive environment.
In spaces both distinct from and embedded within academic units, faculty from across the campuses, and in collaboration with various constituencies and groups, work together to imagine how their research and scholarship can have a transformative impact in community contexts and in the public sphere.
Image credit: People's Painters Mural
We acknowledge that the land on which we stand is the ancestral territory of the Lenape People. We pay respect to Indigenous people throughout the Lenape diaspora—past, present, and future—and honor those that have been historically and systemically disenfranchised. We also acknowledge that Rutgers University, like New Jersey and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of Indigenous peoples.
