CRG Research Working Groups

CRG Research Working Groups

Collaborative and Community-Engaged Research

To ethically and effectively examine race, gender, and other marginalizations, it becomes necessary to seek out radical subaltern approaches that challenge the power relations and epistemologies inherent in these research processes. This research group intends to reverse this narrative and practice by supporting a diverse group of researchers and practitioners who are trying to explore the liberatory potential of alternative methodologies. Through shared readings and discussion, we intend to learn about the history, theories, methodologies, and methods of collaborative and community-based...

Towards the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research and Practice

Racism, not race, causes health disparities. This truth, powerfully realized in Dorothy Roberts' Fatal Invention, guides our work. Our working group’s founding members are medical students and masters students, two of us women of color and three of us members of the Freedom School, united by a common goal: to place justice and anti-racism at the center of our practice of medicine. We have studied and inquired further via medical schools and the Freedom School about how the misuse of race and racism in medicine targets our own communities and women of color.

Therefore, we...

Borderland Practice: Citizenship, Race, Gender & Critical Praxis

Borderland Practice, a CRG graduate working group that aims to create an interdisciplinary space to examine the intersections of race, class, gender, and citizenship within health, social service, and practice settings; and foster meaningful collaborations with community-based organizations that support immigrant and migrant communities.

We draw inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa’s writings, in particular Borderland/La Frontera:

“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow...

Muslim Identities and Cultures

This working group studies Muslim identities and cultures from multiple standpoints including but not limited to: race, gender, queer (of color) theory, nationalism, critical cultural geography, etc.

Decolonizing the Spatial Turn: Feminist of Color Geographies

Decolonizing the Spatial Turn: Feminist of Color Geographies working group will explore: How do women and queer of color scholar-activists conceive of key spatial concepts such as land, territory, the state, the urban, the body, and the intimate? How do they make sense of the spatialities of white supremacy, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy? In what way do their geographical imaginations open up new political orders and world-views? We will engage Black, Indigenous, and transnational feminist scholars as well as activist groups such as the Audre Lorde Project...

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...

Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice

The Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice working group seeks to:

1) continue cultivating a community and healing space for women of color and individuals dedicated to exploring the intersections of critical theory, intersectional identities, and health justice for all

2) integrate critical race theory and social justice into medical education and public health practic

3) educate and engage in other forms of healing (non-Western and indigenous) that are prevalent among communities of color and/or marginalized communities...

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,...

Intersectional Ecologies: Spatial Practices, Pedagogies, Imaginations

The “Intersectional Ecologies” working group aims to investigate the intersections between race, gender, and alternative ecological futures. Positioned at the crossroad between academic research and spatial practice, the group studies the role of Western technical rationality in producing and maintaining racist, heteropatriarchal, and ecocidal forms of oppression. Within “sustainable” development, narratives of “resilience,” and growth paradigms, practices of hygienism, eco-modernism, and green neocolonialism have offered technological fixes to environmental destruction while...

Language Revitalization

The Language Revitalization Working Group (LRWG), co-hosted by the Linguistics and Ethnic Studies departments, focuses on discussing theories, methodologies, and applications of language revitalization (LR) in a variety of world contexts. This working group was originally initiated by the members of the Spring 2019 LING251 class on Indigenous Language Revitalization which was listed in Linguistics, core to the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization, co-taught by faculty from Linguistics, Ethnic Studies, and Education, and attended by students from Linguistics;...