Dear Friends,

Welcome to the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University (RESI). As we begin our second full year of operation since our re-launching, I am pleased to report that we have accomplished quite a bit, including funding two groups of research fellows, hosting our first conference, and completing our first year-long colloquium series.

Our mission here at RESI is to encourage and support both faculty and graduate student research that considers the historical and contemporary salience of race and ethnicity in human societies. We aim to bring together scholars who share a desire to understand how analytic and folk conceptions of racial and ethnic difference have shaped various aspects of the human experience. Although RESI is currently housed in the department of Sociology, which has the largest concentration of faculty studying race and ethnicity on Texas A&Ms campus, we feel that an interdisciplinary approach to studying race and ethnicity provides us with the best means for understanding their significance. With this commitment in mind, RESI Fellows who were funded during the 2007-2008 year will be presenting their works-in-progress during a Speakers’ Series in the spring semester.  These scholars represent the disciplines of Sociology, Psychology, and English.

Our research theme for this year is "Shifting Terrains: Inequalities in the 21st Century." The theme stems from the idea that while much of the mainstream press and popular discourse have declared that we are in a “post-racial” society, a variety of systematic research from many disciplines tells a different story that instead focuses upon the shifts in the discourse of race and ethnicity, while finding that much of the practices of race and ethnicity remain essentially the same.  Even as the biological underpinnings of race and ethnicity have been successfully challenged at the level of academic and scientific research, cultural pathology arguments (which are often rooted in restatements of older biological arguments) that justify social inequalities have never been as successfully challenged.  As a society we tout the vast social, legal, and cultural changes wrought by the social movements that bore significant fruit between 40 and 30 years ago (e.g., the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978), and current new demographic and social trends (multi-raciality, states with majority minority populations, youth movements towards new perspectives on race, culture and politics, etc.).  At the same time, discrimination is often discussed in terms of unfortunate, isolated incidents, rather than in terms of systemic and systematic patterns.  In the arena of media, we have a dovetailing of these two strains of cultural discourse – media is where the newest of the new occurs, and where the oldest representations are also often repeated, reformulated, deconstructed, and challenged.  Thus, the proposed RESI Symposium for Spring 2009 – Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media – will address these issues under the framework of exploring Media (both meanings and practices in mediated arenas, and media, information, and communication technology).

Texas A&M is fortunate to have faculty members in a variety of disciplines whose work is informed by a desire to understand how race and ethnicity in their various formations, have shaped our world. It is our hope that RESI will continue bring them together and encourage scholarly discussion through our workshops, working groups, colloquia and conferences. To this end, we would like to extend an invitation to all interested faculty to affiliate with RESI. However, we wish to emphasize that our mission of encouraging research in the field of racial and ethnic studies must not begin and end with Texas A&M University. Our ultimate goal is to develop and sustain a research community that includes faculty and graduate students at colleges and universities in the region in hopes that we might better examine the issues we face as an increasingly diverse society. We have attracted interest from our colleagues at other Texas campuses and we welcome them to attend our events in this and coming years.  To this end, RESI has recently added an online Forum, and will be launching an Online Working Papers series in Spring 2009, in conjunction with the Symposium, and with our hosting of the Law & Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network #12: Critical Research on Race and the Law.

As always, we welcome your input and your participation in the months to come. Continue visiting our website in the coming months, as we will post information about upcoming events that are of interest to those in the field.

~Sarah N. Gatson
Interim Director, 2008-2009