RaceB4Race: Sustaining, Building, Innovating
Focusing on curricular development, field diversification, academic mentorship, and public humanities work around race in premodern humanities fields.
The future of RaceB4Race is you.
RaceB4Race started in 2019 as a small research symposium by and for BIPOC scholars working in premodern critical race studies. Now, RaceB4Race is a wide reaching community of scholars, students, researchers, theater practitioners, curators, librarians, artists, and activists who are looking to the past to imagine different, more inclusive futures.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, RaceB4Race: Sustaining, Building, Innovating expands our work by focusing on curricular development, field diversification, academic mentorship, and public humanities work around race in premodern humanities fields.
Our initiatives
Curricular development
RaceB4Race will develop, pilot, and disseminate a useful range of higher education curricula and pedagogy for educators at all stages of their careers. Working in collaboration with scholars of premodern critical race studies in a variety of fields, these resources will feature a full spectrum disciplinary, temporal, and geographic expertise. All of our created teaching materials will be freely available.
Social media content creation
Research shows that many members of Gen Z value and prioritize non-hierarchical teaching and learning models, especially through social media. Predoctoral fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduate students will create peer-to-peer social media content that reveals and explores premodern globalism and the earliest constructions of racial formations.
Mentorship network
Our horizontal community of care will be an alternative to the traditional mentoring structure. Participants will engage in semester-long interdisciplinary and cross-institutional reading and research groups. The community of care will address many inflection points in a scholar's career: isolation in their field or institution, under-advisement about what it takes to turn research into a book, and navigating the institutional demands of the tenure track.
Social Media Fellows
Because of the public nature of our work, RaceB4Race scholars and students will be trained in digital, personal, and institutional safety. In addition, this training will be open to RaceB4Race community members who have been or are planning to become vocal in their online sharing of RaceB4Race-produced materials, public appearances, and other platforms that bring broader attention to more complete and accurate narratives about the past and its modern uses.
Public intellectual development
RaceB4Race will support the development of premodern critical race scholars as public intellectuals through year-long virtual workshops. Literary agents, editors, radio and television producers, etc. will work with the cohort as a group and individually to coach scholars on the steps involved in becoming an acknowledged, public expert.
First and Second Book Institutes
There is a glaring need to support early and mid- career premodern critical race scholars through the process of publishing their first and second books, both critical junctures in an academic career. The RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes will provide early and mid- career scholars with the opportunity to focus on their monograph projects with a group of invested scholars and an expert institute leader.
Interested in participating?
This page will be updated with new information regarding open calls, job opportunities, and accessing resources created within these projects. Please contact raceb4race@asu.edu with any questions.