AY 2017 - 2018 Research Working Groups

AY 2017 - 2018 CRG Research Working Groups

Indigenous Americas

The Indigenous Americas Working Group is an interdisciplinary workshop for scholars in various disciplines to engage current scholarship in Native American and Indigenous Studies, workshop their own works-in-progress, host NAIS scholars on campus, and generate important conversations about contemporary art and politics in NAIS. While grounded in the histories and geographies of the hemispheric Americas and the complex terrain of tribal and settler-colonial national formations, the group is also interested in transnational circuits of indigenous mobility and comparative global...

Black/Girlhood Imaginary

As a Black feminist collective of doctoral students, we critically engage theoretical frameworks and qualitative analytics in order to conceptualize our framework of the Black/Girlhood Imaginary. In order to continue to investigate this imaginary—this rupture birthed out of Black feminism (Collins, 1990)—we will use this working group as an opportunity to work through our framework and to hear from others about our points of intersection.

As a working group, we seek to wrestle with our understanding of Black girlhood and open a conversation between the fields of education,...

Social Movements

The CRG Social Movements Working Group (SMWG) is an interdisciplinary space for graduate students and faculty members who teach, research, and/or write about various types of social movements (immigrant rights, climate change, LGBTQ, etc.) and aspects of them (protests, coalitions, discourses, time and space, etc.). The working group is open to scholars who utilize multiple types of data (e.g. interviews, field notes, surveys, archives) and social science research designs (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods).


Radical Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Composition

The Radical Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Compositionworking group asks the questions:

How can our classrooms be places for radical change-making?

How, as teachers, can we intervene in the systemic hierarchies and oppression that play out in our classroom environments and beyond?

How can the methods we use for teaching, the systems we use for assessment, and the presence we hold in and out of the classroom work toward building more just futures?



Critical Trauma

We are a group of graduate students and community practitioners who conceptualize trauma as a symptom/proximal manifestation of exposure to structural and interpersonal oppression e.g. colonialism, capitalism/economic racism, patriarchy, etc, and acknowledge individual and community-level capacities to heal from oppression. As a working group, we wish to create a safe space to share our own ideas, work-in-progress, and theoretical frameworks in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the larger implications of trauma on groups of people. We will explore how systemic forms of...

Black American History Seminar

The primary purpose of the Black American History Seminar is to provide a space to talk about and engage with African American history. Regular meetings will provide opportunities to network with those who study African American history, those who are working on projects related to African American history, and those who want to learn more about African American history. Our group will meet regularly to discuss new books and articles, as well as emerging trends in various subfields of African American history from the colonial period up to the present. Geographically, our focus will be on...

Color of New Media

This working group seeks to add new voices, and new lenses, to the new media studies “conversation,” in order to diversify and broaden the scope of that conversation. The overarching goals of this group are: to share resources on issues of race/ethnicity/nation and new media; to foster the creation of new scholarship on these issues; and to nurture fellowship and social networking among scholars, particularly scholars of color, working in the field of new media studies. As a group, the Color of New Media has always been interested in sharing and popularizing scholarship by or about...