Bringing Racial Justice to the World
Among the promising developments early in the presidency of Jonathan Holloway was his announcement that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation had chosen Rutgers for a five-year, $15 million grant to create the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. The institute brings together Rutgers scholars universitywide to address racism and social inequity and fosters collaborations among these experts in the humanities—from law and language, to philosophy and art, to history and gender studies. The institute is an intellectual clearinghouse where shared explorations will produce knowledge, ideas, and solutions to entrenched problems of social injustice worldwide.
“It all comes back to how we are thinking about ourselves and others,” says Michelle Stephens, the institute’s founding director and a professor of English and Latino and Caribbean studies at the School of Arts and Sciences. “The need to redefine the concept of being human and move toward global racial justice begins by understanding and addressing the ways we resist recognizing people who live under different circumstances than our own.”
Well-regarded scholars are serving as campus directors for the institute. At Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a history professor at the School of Arts and Sciences and the national director of the Association of Black Women Historians. At Rutgers University–Newark, Elise Boddie is a professor at Rutgers Law School who researches laws and policies that perpetuate racial inequality. At Rutgers University–Camden, the directorship is shared by two professors of creative writing in the Department of English: Gregory Pardlo CCAS’99, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Digest, and Patrick Rosal, writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist.
The leadership team oversees research projects in areas such as policy reform, K–12 education, social justice work, public health, and criminal justice as they help inspire a new generation gravitating toward social justice and inclusiveness.