Directors' Signature Research Projects
With an eye toward translating excellent scholarship into impact and outcomes, directors’ projects 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.
Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat
Institute Codirector Gregory Pardlo, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–Camden
"We are not asking for seats at the table. We are building tables." —Gregory Pardlo
This radical experiment in reimagining the traditional writing workshop invites writers of all disciplines, genres, and backgrounds who are committed to anti-racist writing practices to apply. Intent on creating an open forum of mutual accountability, the retreat features 10 days of presentations and talk-backs, writing worktables, and an opportunity for auditors to learn also from the experience. The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice seeks to create spaces for scholars and creative writers to be in conversation as both an aspect of their work and for the mutual exchange of knowledge within and throughout the university and its surrounding communities.
The 2022 Retreat took place from July 11–July 21, 2022. Click here to learn more.
Image credit: Krista Franklin
Scarlet and Black Research Center
Institute Director Erica Armstrong Dunbar, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
As an arm of the institute, the Scarlet and Black Research Center convenes researchers and practitioners across the humanities to examine the global dimensions of anti-Black racism. An outgrowth of the Scarlet and Black Research Project led by historians Deborah Gray White and Marissa Fuentes, this intellectual journey began with a deep dive into the historical connections between slavery and the university. Led by the institute's Rutgers–New Brunswick campus director Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the center now serves as an intellectual hub, bringing together faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate, and undergraduate students in faculty seminars, community lectures, and the work-shopping of humanities based projects. The center's Scarlet and Black Digital Archive documents Black history in New Jersey and fosters collaboration among digital humanities practitioners.
The Inclusion Project
Institute Director Elise Boddie, School of Arts and Sciences–Newark, Rutgers Law School, Rutgers University–Newark
The Inclusion Project (TIP), founded in 2017 by the institute's Rutgers–Newark director Elise Boddie, works to promote racial equity and inclusion in educational law and public policy in New Jersey through outreach, community engagement, and dialogue. TIP seeks to advance a vision of racial justice that can be adopted through legislation, public policy, and/or community practice. The project's primary focus is on racial equity and inclusion in K–12 education in New Jersey, with a particular emphasis on advancing opportunity for Black and Latinx students in the state’s severely segregated public schools. TIP carries out its work in partnership with affected communities, including youth, faith leaders, statewide civil rights organizations, and other social justice, civic, and educational advocacy organizations.
Quilting Water Public Arts Project
A Directors' Signature Research Project: Institute Codirector 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.
