New Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at UChicago
The University of Chicago recently announced the creation of the new interdisciplinary Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI). Part of the Division of the Social Sciences, RDI will be “a home for ambitious scholarship on concepts that have helped shape the modern world and continue to reverberate in contemporary thought, culture and policy” (UChicago News).
3CT enthusiastically welcomes this news, and we look forward to collaborating with the new department, which we expect will complement and energize the activities of 3CT. The formation of RDI responds to pressing intellectual needs, both in this university and in the academe writ large, to theorize the contemporary in inclusive ways and from a multiplicity of situated perspectives.
3CT fellow Adom Getachew was a co-chair of the department formation committee, and in an essay for Inside Higher Ed, she and fellow co-chair Leora Auslander write, “Faculty and students had called for such a department and debated various models over decades. We found new energy to pursue this goal when we, like many of our colleagues across the country, were galvanized in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings across the country. We joined a group of colleagues in launching the #MoreThanDiversity campaign, which sought to expand conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Chicago. Some of the faculty involved in the campaign formed a committee to explore possible models for a department dedicated to the study of race and related topics, following established faculty-led processes for developing a new department.”