Race and Social Justice Studies

As our nation continues to wrestle with the racial tensions brought on by conflicts between communities of color and law enforcement, this initiative aims to provide a forum and channel for a variety of faculty proposals to better understand and engage in this activism and the underlying issues involved. On the scholarly plane, they provide an important avenue for exploring how analytics of race and class may best be intertwined. In close alliance with our carceral studies initiative, faculty involved with this initiative such as Tracey Walters and Zebulon Miletsky have already joined with other SBU faculty such as Abena Asare and Kathleen Wilson to support social activist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and NAACP that mobilize communities and engage in activism targeted toward police brutality and prison reform, at Stony Brook and beyond. As we seek to nourish and build on this outreach, we also aim to foster development and awareness of curricular innovations tackling these issues, such as the new major concentration on Social Justice and Human Rights in Africana Studies. Throughout, we aim toward honest and open conversations about racial disparities, student activism, and social consciousness, including the ways class has figured, and can or should figure, into all these.