Interdisciplinary Seminars in Social Justice
The 2021–2025 Interdisciplinary Seminars in Social Justice focus on the struggle for global, racial, and social justice through such topics as theories of race, slavery, and freedom across time and space and the impact of immigration on American cities.
“Race, In Theory” Fellows Humanities Seminar
A Directors' Signature Research Project: Founding and Executive Director Michelle Stephens, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
The ISGRJ fellows seminar brings interdisciplinary scholars together in meetings with distinctive points of focus. Fellows are encouraged to share research on race and racism from their particular fields, and to participate in a writing worktable experience designed to encourage freedom of thought and expression in a safe and stimulating setting of mutual accountability. In the “Understanding Race” series, fellows participate with peers and an accomplished senior scholar from the Rutgers community in a monthly discussion of a central, theoretical reading on race from a distinctly humanities perspective.
Additional Seminars
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This seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado and co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and hosted at Rutgers-Newark this fall and in the spring of 2025, will explore themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution, to illuminate 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, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.
Learn more here: https://sawyerseminar.newark.rutgers.edu.
Image Credit: Layqa Nuna Yawar. Radical Impermanence. https://layqa.info/Radical-Impermanence -
This interdisciplinary Working Group brings together faculty across departments whose work engages with the problem of slavery, freedom, and the post-emancipation world transhistorically and cross-culturally, from ancient Rome, Asia, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. This working group encourages and acknowledges the value of scholarship that approaches bondage and freedom within particular disciplinary conventions, amid regional or imperial or national contexts, and in specific eras. However, we also hope that this interdisciplinary space will allow participants to cross-pollinate ideas and provide comparative frameworks that will help strengthen the legibility of our work across fields, historical periods, and disciplines.
Led by Yesenia Barragan, ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow, School of Arts and Science, Rutgers–New Brunswick; Nathan Jeremie-Brink, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and Adam McNeil, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers–New Brunswick
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The Mellon Foundation awarded a $225,000 grant to Rutgers University—Newark to support a Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. The 2022-2023 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Natives and Nativists, Migrants and Immigrants in an American City,” draws together prominent scholars, activists, and educators to trace the origins of today’s anti-Asian hate, grapple with its continuing legacies, and envision ways to fight it in the present moment.
The seminar series is organized by Belinda Edmondson, ISGRJ Senior Faculty Fellow and Professor of African American and African Studies, Kornel Chang, Associate Professor in History and American Studies, and Sean Mitchell, associate professor in Sociology and Anthropology, and featured events during the fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters.
Learn more about the Sawyer Seminar and access past events in the series
