The Sawyer Seminar Presents "Racial Justice, Reparations, and the University" - Day 1
During the 2024-2025 academic year, the seminars will bring together scholars, students, and community organizers to reflect on four interconnected themes of disability justice, transitional justice, environmental justice, and racial justice with the aim of illuminating common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflects not only the scholarly interests of our faculty and students, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University – Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.
Wednesday, February 5, 2025:
11:30 – 12:30 PM: Introductory Remarks and Keynote
Dr. Mayte Green Mercado, Associate Professor of History, and the Newark Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice
Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin, Author of In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower, Trinity College Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies
12:30 – 1:00 PM: Book signing with Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin,
1:00 – 2:00 PM: Lunch
2:00 – 4:30 PM: Panel The Renewal Project: Reckoning with University-Driven Displacement and Dispossession
Dr. Rachelle Berry, Assistant Profession Department of Geography, Planning & Environment, University of Georgia
Dr. Jerry Shannon, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator, Department of Geography, Planning &Environment University of Georgia
Hattie Thomas Whitehead, The Linnentown Project, Financial and Public Chair
Sherri Arguello, Museum of Memory’s Displaced Aurarians
Nolbert, Chavez, Board of Regents 7th Congressional District, Democrat, Museum of Memory’s Displaced Aurarians
Liz Ševčenko, Co-Director, Humanities Action Lab, Rutgers Newark, Moderator
4:30 – 5:00 PM: Closing remarks
Cost: Free and open to the public.
Accommodations: Please submit accommodation requests to sawyerseminar@newark.rutgers.edu by Friday, April 18, 2025.
Overview: Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past.
