A new course, EDUC 1215 Race Making and the US University, will be offered to students in the Fall 2020 semester. Join Visiting Assistant Professor Nicole Truesdell for an exploration of race and racism within higher education.
In his groundbreaking book “Ebony and Ivy” author Craig Steven Wilder takes a historical approach to uncover the intricate relationship between slavery, race, and the founding of the earliest universities in the US. Wilder’s work examines the ways many universities foundations are rooted in, and helped justify, both the continuation of the slave trade and land grabbing/forced dispossession of Indigenous populations already occupying spaces universities would build upon. Knowing that the foundations of many universities in the US are rooted in ties to the TransAtlantic slave trade and/or land dispossession from Indigenous People, we cannot be surprised when the remnants of this racist past show up in the present day within the walls of colleges and universities. The question(s) becomes – do we truly understand the embedded nature of race and racism within higher education? What are the consequences of the simultaneous development of race (as an ideological and socio-political construct rooted in biological determinism) and the university (as an institution, location of knowledge production and citizenship making) in the present? How do we take this knowledge and repurpose it for more equitable desires? These (and more) are the questions this class will grapple with, using a combination of readings, class discussions, group work, and collective imagining.
Class will be a combination of asynchronistic and synchronistic lectures, assignments, and discussions.
Course Objectives:
- Learn how to understand and engage theory as a guiding lens to recognize and analyze social, political, and economic processes of the world.
- Effectively know how to code switch verbally and in written form, from academic to non-academic language (and vice versa).
- Learn how to put theory into practice (praxis based work) as a way to create others ways of knowing and being for the greater good.
- Produce a final product that can be disseminated to a wider audience that helps increase collective consciousness on a specific topic related to the course and that is socially relevant to today.
- Have confidence in yourself as a scholar and practitioner of knowledge.
Dr. Nicole Truesdell is a recovering academic who has been in higher education for the past 20 years as either a student, faculty member, or administrator - normally holding at least two of these positions at once. In these roles she has created programs, an office, and an institute that all focus on space making for populations marginalized within society. She has also worked with a United Kingdom based community organization, Black SouthWest Network, for the past 10 years as a grant writer, researcher, facilitator, and strategic consultant. Dr. Truesdell is a trained socio-cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on racialized citizenship, decolonial Black feminist praxis, and critical university studies in the US and UK.