Working Groups

RESI and other research units on campus offer a variety of working groups open to faculty and graduate students across disciplines who are engaged in research related to race and ethnicity. The following groups with their supporting body are listed. For the most up to date information please contact the listed coordinator.

Empire and After
(Glasscock Center for Humanities Research )
Coordinator(s): Shona Jackson Elizabeth Ho

Empire & After is a reading group which offers a place within English for faculty and students to explore broadly the field of postcolonial studies; its core issues and current anxiety about its place within the academy as potentially hegemonic. While our primary texts are literary, we approach the study of this literature from a cultural studies perspective, with an emphasis on the discursive and material production of the text. Literary work is therefore paired with scholarship from a variety of fields including history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology and other areas. Rather than orient our selection and study of this material in terms of chronology, as implied by the prevailing rubric of "postcolonial," we seek instead to call attention to constellations of power. With this in mind, we approach the group through the (methodological) question posed in its title "Empire & After." The "&" is therefore to be read as both a point of entanglement and departure for critical inquiry. The group is open to professors, graduate and undergraduate students and is not limited to those in English.

Schedule
Africana Studies
(Glasscock Center for Humanities Research )
Coordinator(s): Kimberly Brown

Africana Studies Working Group (AFST) is for those interested in the literature, film, history and culture of Africa and its Diaspora. Although this group will not ascribe to Afrocentricism as it has traditionally been defined in the field of Black Studies, it will seek to investigate "black ways of knowing." The evocation of such an essentialist - laded phrase is not just meant as a provocative gesture, but also as an attempt to pay homage to the spirit of Afrocentricism in its goal to seek out alternative methods to those posed by Western ontology or white patriarchy. The elicitation of this phrase in this context is also a way of acknowledging how scholarship by and/or about blacks has historically been devalued within the academy. Therefore, AFST will privilege texts that challenge stereotypical or traditional expectations of the cultural production of peoples of Africa and its Diaspora. Selection of texts will also favor new scholarship on Africana literature, film, history and culture. The Group is not bound to a particular genre, geographic location, or era. Additionally, members of AFST will intermittently join with other Working Groups when they read texts by or about blacks throughout the Diaspora – or texts that deal with race or racism. This latter aim is meant to facilitate more interaction between Working Groups and to lessen competition for interested faculty and students. A future goal of the Group will be to include a "Working Papers" component that would not only involve faculty and students from TAMU, but faculty from other universities who are willing to share and discuss their works-in-progress with our Group.

Schedule
South Asia Studies Working Group
(Glasscock Center for Humanities Research )
Coordinator(s): Nandini Bhattacharya

The South Asia Studies Working Group focuses on the interplay and confrontation between dynamics of liberalization, globalization and nationalism in the South Asian region. Precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods of South Asian history will be studied using area, cultural, and women's studies as well as other disciplinary perspectives on the politics and cultures of South Asia as a region.

New Modern British Studies Working Group
(Glasscock Center for Humanities Research )
Coordinator(s): Mary Ann O'Farrell

The New Modern British Studies Working Group is an informal group of faculty members and graduate students working in British, Irish, and Postcolonial literary, historical, and cultural studies from the eighteenth century to the present. The group's activities have included a co-sponsored public lecture and a public symposium, and a planned works-in-progress colloquium series featuring visitors from other colleges and universities in the region. The group has also planned a lecture series for 2003-2004 featuring seminars specifically designed to help graduate students consider changes in pedagogy, technology, and archival research in the field as they prepare for dissertation research and the job market.

Hispanic Studies Working Group
(Glasscock Center for Humanities Research )
Coordinator(s): Jose Villalobos

The Hispanic Studies Working Group was initiated in order to fill a need for cultural programming and intellectual discussion on matters pertaining to Hispanic studies. The group will conduct meetings, host speakers, and work toward conducting mini-conferences.

Critical Research on Race and the Law Collaborative Research Network
(Law & Society Association )
Coordinator(s): Sarah N. Gatson Wendy Leo Moore

The CRN on Critical Research on Race and the Law is "critical" in at least two different senses. The name suggests an urgency in terms of expanding the socio-legal studies research agenda to more prominently include race and racial inequality. The name also is meant to draw upon some of the most exciting work in the legal academy over the past two decades under the Critical Race Theory and LatCrit rubrics. Similarly, law and society scholars are drawing increasingly upon studies of race and ethnicity from diverse disciplines that incorporate cultural studies and/or critical theory. Scholars in history, sociology, and anthropology (just to name some of the fields well-represented in law and society) are doing innovative studies that center race, racial inequality, and systems of racial classification of great interest to scholars interested in law and legal institutions. We hope the CRN on Critical Research on Race and the Law will serve as a space in which scholars interested in race and the law can engage each others' research projects and more generally network with each other. Such a space could be especially important, I think, for younger scholars and/or scholars new to the organization.

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