Critical Diversities and/in the Academy: Thought and Practice

“Critical Diversities and/in the Academy: Thought and Practice” was a speaker series and colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center during the spring 2014 semester. The series was directly inspired by various collectives at the Graduate Center and across CUNY working on issues of critical diversity, among them the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color project, the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY, the Revolutionary Students Coordinating Committee, and the organizers and supporters of “The War Here and Abroad: CUNY and U.S. Empire” panel and discussion. The series also responded to the notable recent upswing in scholarly attention to issues of critical diversity in higher education, such as 2013’s Critical Ethnic Studies Association conference “Decolonizing Future Intellectual Legacies and Activist Practices,” the 2013 Georgetown report “Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege,” and Sara Ahmed’s 2012 book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. The guiding questions were two-fold: How can we meet the critical need for diversities in higher education, and how does this need impact the work we do as scholars and practitioners/activists?

Please see videos of the four talks—by Eve Dunbar, Akemi Nishida, Edwin Mayorga, and Eve Tuck—and email skennedy@gradcenter.cuny.edu if you’d like to participate in future iterations of this series, either as a co-organizer or a speaker. Thank you.

Principal sponsor: Diversity Projects Development Fund, University Advisory Council on Diversity, CUNY. Secondary sponsor: Doctoral Students Council, CUNY Graduate Center.