Faculty-Student Task Force on the Study and Teaching of Race

Mission Statement

The Duke History Department Faculty-Student Task Force on the Study and Teaching of Race sees its mandate as follows:

First and foremost, to base all our activities on a genuine commitment by the department to curricular and structural innovation. With this commitment as a platform we will start to educate ourselves collectively in anti-racism work, while recognizing the broad importance of race, ethnicity and their global analogs as a basis of historical analysis and the teaching of history. In broadest terms, the aim is to foster an intellectual and social environment conducive to the discussion of race, ethnicity, anti-racist work and critical race theory.

To make more prominent extant curricular initiatives on the history of race and racial justice while increasing departmental offerings on the same, beginning at the graduate level and then at the undergraduate level. This includes but is not limited to a revised and regularly offered 790S course, as well as workshops that bolster this course and the professionalization seminars.

To ensure that this 790S course is taught ever year, and that it takes a global perspective on the history of racial formation and structural racism, engages with epistemologies of race making in the US as well as elsewhere in the world, and confronts pressing regional and transregional issues of race as they manifest in the lived experience people. The revised course should serve as a model and springboard for further graduate classes, e.g. on global critical race theory.

To embed the study and teaching of race more firmly and consistently in graduate professionalization seminars, especially 701 (theory) and 703 (pedagogy). This requires changes in structure and format, not simply the inclusion on particular weeks on race.

To continue our conversations on this curricular enhancement with various scholarly and social groups within and outside the department. Based on these conversations, we will compile a library of resources on the history and teaching of race and ethnicity, as well as race theory and anti-racism work. These resources will be available to all instructors for use in shaping their syllabi.

Duke Alumnus on Challenges of Anti-Racism at Duke

https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/be-anti-racist-duke-must-get-root-matter?fbclid=IwAR1WO3dmvedXDewRM2W8zEN0BPgrLv-OpgtTqaW0mwf1bzaB_RhXe4xa2Bs

Events of Interest

This is a bulletin board to help circulate campus-wide events on the study and teaching of race.

Monday, April 19, 5-6:30 pm via zoom

Mapping NC Human Rights History

Monday, April 19, 5-6:30 pm via zoom

*** Please join us for the unveiling of a new online resource for North Carolina students, teachers, community members, and visitors ***

Produced by students in the Spring 2021 Human Rights Capstone Seminar, taught by History Professor Nancy MacLean, this vivid StoryMap project commemorates and conveys a past that is full of pain, yet also of vision, courage, and inspiration, as growing numbers of citizens of our state have come to realize, in the words of Durham’s own Pauli Murray, that “human rights are indivisible.”