By Joan Magruder

A group of UCSB faculty from many disciplines has established a racial studies project aimed at developing new research on race and racism.

The New Racial Studies Project will be led by sociologist Howard Winant and political scientist Christopher Parker.

Many new themes have arisen in the post-civil rights, post-apartheid, and post-colonial era, according to Winant. “A lot has happened since the last big upsurge of interest in race and racism in the 1960s,” he says. “New racial dynamics have immerged: a renewed ethno-religious paranoia about the global East; new interest in various racial diasporas, whiteness studies, immigration, and a host of other issues.”

California is a “majority minority state,” said Winant, yet commitments to outreach activities and affirmative action have eroded. “In this climate, racial studies—both in existing ethnic studies departments and in traditional departments of the humanities and social sciences—deserve and demand new attention.”

Supported by $110,000 from the Ford Foundation, the project includes social scientists and humanists who study race from different vantage points: global, national, local, and experiential.

“This project will help us connect new scholarship on race to the changing social, economic, and global context,” noted Melvin Oliver, dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UCSB. “In so doing, our faculty’s work will engage important public issues and conversations in ways that should help California and other places address the problems and promises of a changing demography of race in America.”

Among the project’s first events are several lectures by distinguished scholars and writers from universities across the country.

“Our new endeavor is at once an educational undertaking, a research initiative, and a movement project,” Winant said.