and student speakers has been popular among both students and faculty of colour. The university has also hosted annually the Diaspora Conference for black high school students. A group of racialized researchers and their allies obtained an internal grant to foster a collaborative research group on questions of race and racism (Ku et al 2020). They formed an informal group Researchers, Advocates and Activists of Colour for Equity and Solidarity (RAACES). A more sustained and organized effort is necessary to build on the energy to bring together existing knowledge, and to develop and mobilize race scholarship that is better grounded in this unique experience in order to more directly benefit the university and the community. To this end, the project will hold two workshops and a conference to nurture and promote scholarship on antiracism by racialized faculty and to offer opportunities for training students to develop their own voice and use their experiences of racialization as a source of knowledge. We will also contribute to promoting antiracism infrastructure in the municipality by lending our conference strategically to Windsor’s Diversity Committee to visibilize its presence and highlight its importance and significance in the city for interrupting racism when it happens.
Goal and Objectives:
The overarching goal of this project is to foster a collaborative research community and knowledge exchange and transfer and mutual support and critique among differently positioned race scholars from various disciplines, faculties and programs (Education, English, History, Philosophy, Law, Social Work,
Sociology, Indigenous Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies). The proposed project has four main objectives: 1) nurture and support emerging and mature scholars and students to produce knowledge informed by race scholarship by participating in this project to produce a publishable manuscript; 2) build a network of antiracism community within the university and among students and in the larger municipality by collaborating with Windsor’s Diversity Committee to gain greater visibility and relevance for anti-racism programming and planning; 3) make visible and consolidate the University and Windsor Essex as the unique site of critical race scholarship and antiracist practices; 4) build the capacity for responding to racism through scholarship, discourse, dialogue, identifying and naming racism, and facilitating community and institutional investments and knowledge exchange.
Project Details:
To meet these objectives, the project scaffolds the publishing process through two workshops and a conference to develop a rigorously peer-critiqued collection of interdisciplinary writing and research by antiracist scholars at the University of Windsor. To accomplish this, we will hold:
Pre-Conference Workshop (April 2021). This workshop of 17 scholars provides a space to incubate ideas, foster development and engagement with each other’s scholarship with the specific aim of incorporating critical race perspectives into our work. The pre-conference workshop is intended create a generative space to exchange ideas, hone research questions and exchange ideas and research.
Importantly, this milieu is envisioned as a space to generate difficult conversations about race, settlement and colonization within the University and beyond. Simultaneously, this is a space to gather, network and build solidarity. A recommended list of interdisciplinary readings compiled by the doctoral student with the help of the research team will be shared to prepare for the pre-conference workshop to assist researchers to explore how they can incorporate a critical race analysis into their research to produce and inform antiracist scholarship that will focus on the problem of settler colonial and capitalist