Dear Friends,

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

Our research theme for this year is "See How We Are: Representations of Race/ Ethnicity and the Politics of Difference." The theme stems from the idea that race and ethnicity generate not only complex notions of identity among social actors, but also complex systems of meaning that pervade a society's interactions, structures, and institutions. Therefore, it is important to consider the ways in which they intertwine with dynamics of class, gender and sexuality as well as how they are constructed in various realms of public space and levels of public discourse namely the social structural, the representational, and the micro-interactional. By doing so, we gain greater insight into the distribution of power and resources; the conscious or unconscious use of symbols, language, and images to convey meanings about difference; and the systematic application cultural codes as a means of managing everyday interactions with those deemed "the other." With this theme in mind, our speakers for this year, who represent disciplines as diverse as History, English, Film & Media Studies, Political Science, and Sociology will address topics such as: the use of racial and ethnic categories in making sense of the changing face of our population; the development and use of new cultural repertoires of race in periods of social change; the challenges faced by key institutions in culturally diverse societies; and the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender with politics and the law. This promises to be an exciting year!

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. In any society, understandings of difference tend to be present on multiple levelsthe structural, the representational, and the interactional. While we may acknowledge that race and ethnic differences are the products of human interaction, and are constructed differently across time and place, we cannot deny that they are meaningful social categories with deep implications for the lives of social actors. The effects of these concepts of difference (whether they are rooted in notions of culture or biology) on local and national culture, on class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, immigration, family, economic development, educational access, and political participation, cannot be ignored, as recent events have shown all too clearly. Gaining a broader understanding of how they operate requires us to not only continue to critically examine the racial paradigms and discourses of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean.

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, I would like to extend an invitation to all interested faculty to affiliate with RESI. However, I 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.

As always, I 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.

Contigo,
--JOJ

Joseph O. Jewell, Ph.D.
Interim Director