2019-20 Faculty Fellowship
2019 will mark the 50-year anniversary of the first College of Ethnic Studies established at San Francisco State University. The University of California, Berkeley instituted its own Department of Ethnic Studies also in 1969. The institution of Ethnic Studies at these universities emerged in response to protests and strikes organized by students, select faculty, and community activists in the Bay Area. Students used “ethnic studies” as a shorthand to link the conditions of people of color in the United States with the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin-America. The social movement demanded curriculum and scholarship that would confront legacies of slavery, war, colonization, and imperial expansion. In 1969, a compromise to meet student demands for a Third World Studies College resulted in the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies. Amidst social and political unrest, the colleges established African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, and Native American Studies.
The field of Ethnic Studies has since expanded and continues to change, from analyzing the ways in which race came to bear on U.S. imperial expansion and settler colonialism, to documenting often overlooked forms of resistance and survival against systems of oppressions and exploitation. The Charles Warren Center invites scholars of Ethnic Studies to think through 50 years of Ethnic Studies and the field’s possible future. We invite scholars whose work confronts questions of inequalities and power through intersecting analytical paradigms of race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship. We are especially interested in proposals that explicitly address issues of methodologies, interdisciplinarity, and the state of the field. The seminar will examine how Ethnic Studies scholarship built frameworks to critically examine racism, colonialism, imperialism, immigration, and slavery. We will discuss how such frameworks remain useful and relevant, but also interrogate limitations and contradictions, and explore new possibilities and directions within the field Ethnic Studies.