Conversations on Race Conference — by Jocie Kopfman
In early November, a group of Upper School students went to the University of Rochester’s “Conversations on Race” conference. We attended two sections: a workshop about publicly-engaged scholarship (see description below) and the key note lecture given by Dr. Derald Wing Sue whose research is dedicated to racial microaggressions. Dr. Sue shared his latest research in his new book Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence.
Click here to listen to any of the workshops at the conference
Workshop Description:
As a group, we will begin by exploring key questions related to our topic. What do we mean when we talk about “publicly engaged scholarship”? Who is the “public” and what is the role of the university? How do we work these boundaries? How are we defining engagement? Who “owns” the data, who are we writing for, and in what genres and formats? And, why do we do the work we do?
Sharing lessons learned from our work as co-researchers, co-authors, and co-implementers on a long-term ethnographic community project, we will lead workshop participants through cooperative group activities to tap into the ways multiple perspectives can be explored and embraced in collaborative research. This begins by being aware of what we each bring to our work and our research sites. We will then share some of the practices that we have found sustain our collaboration and help us to create the space to do our work, including becoming attuned to each other’s perspectives and practices, working with dissensus and breaking bread, building on distributed expertise, and moving toward alternative forms of dissemination.
