The Anti-Racism Collaborative (ARC) functions from the premise that racism is a social reality and that intellectual inquiry into racism has legitimacy and validity. The ARC is both a visionary initiative and one that designs and implements practical interventions in the quest to support scholars who produce anti-racism scholarship. Accordingly, the ARC should function as a site for professional growth and development for scholars and scholarship devoted to anti-racism.
Given the NCID’s positionality at U-M and in alignment with its mission and values, the ARC will embrace interdisciplinarity, foster collaboration, encourage connections between scholars along the developmental spectrum of the academy, and strive to transform higher education by supporting and amplifying anti-racism scholars and their scholarship.
In the next two years the ARC will promote the production of anti-racism scholarship that articulates how racism operates in the contemporary world (especially as that world reflects dimensions of identity fluidity unique to modern times). Central to this agenda is supporting the production of scholarship that embraces and fosters understanding of intersectionality as fundamental to how different people may experience and respond to racial phenomena. This agenda also includes articulating strategies for social interventions that assist in the eradication of racism in contemporary life. While it is important to understand impacts, processes, and change at the individual or interpersonal level as it relates to racism, we understand anti-racism scholarship to explicitly (1) recognize how racism operates within and is reinforced by systems, institutions, policy, social forces, and throughout history, and (2) highlight the connection between anti-racism scholarship and continued efforts to challenge or dismantle systemic racism.
The ARC will achieve these ends through the following strategies:
- Providing grants that support research and scholarly productivity;
- Providing informational and professional developmental opportunities for scholars to improve their research and scholarly productivity;
- Developing approaches and processes that advance the dissemination of anti-racism scholarship, including safeguarding against the threats, resistance, and challenges to this scholarship; and
- Building community by providing opportunities for networking, collaboration, and fellowship among an interdisciplinary and intergenerational group of scholars and practitioners.