Director's
Statement
Current
Mission:
In the 2002-03 Academic Year, the UCSB Center for Black
Studies embarked upon an ambitious new millennial research
agenda and wide-ranging structural reorganization. To meet
the urgent and rapidly changing demands of our evolving
global economy, new information technologies (IT) and redefined
guidelines for higher education in post Affirmative-Action
California, the Center has charted a new course that addresses
these daunting issues and what they augur for the field
of Black Studies. Among the significant changes undertaken
to meet these challenges, the Center has: defined a new
research focus on media literacy, race and technology matters;
restructured its Scholars-in-Residence program; begun an
aggressive grant-writing effort; and rededicated resources
to community outreach projects and initiatives.
Our initiatives for 2003-04 began with the exploration and
establishment of several academic and research projects.
The Center launched the well-received “Food
for Thought” colloquium series featuring
the current research and scholarship of UCSB faculty (permanent
and visiting), independent scholars and students undertaking
work in Black Studies. A Black History Month
event was organized around the legal research and activism
of lawyer and Center Visiting Scholar Adjoa Aiyetoro. The
very successful event included a screening and scholarly
panel discussion of the controversial 2001 film Barbershop.
(See photos.) The Center inaugurated the first Annual
Dr. Shirley Kennedy Lecture in honor of our late,
beloved colleague’s longstanding support for and service
to the Center. Following the Advisory Committee’s
recommendation, the Center restructured our faculty development
program that historically supported two dissertation fellowships
per year. In its place the Center instituted a Visiting
Researcher Fellowship program designed to attract established
and senior scholars, researchers, artists and activists
engaged in innovative and far-reaching work in the fields
of Black and African Diaspora Studies that is compatible
with the Center’s current race and technology
research focus. These timely and integral changes
represent the Center’s efforts to position itself
at the forefront of Black Studies in this new millennium.
Also in 2002-03, the Center officially launched its new
Race and Technology (RT) research initiative that encompasses
scholarship and pedagogy rooted in film and media studies,
new media technologies and science studies, and contemporary
African Diaspora research. With support from the College
of Letters and Sciences, the Executive Vice Chancellor and
the Provost, the Center received a substantial grant for
our new journal project, Screening
Noir. Finally the Center’s conference
room was renovated to better accommodate and reflect
the space as the primary gathering venue for the Center’s
public activities and events. The Center has begun the process
for renaming this space the “Shirley Kennedy Conference
Room.”
Clearly, these changes convey the Center’s effort
to adapt to contemporary socio-cultural realities and geopolitical
developments that profoundly affect peoples of African descent.
Through our new research focus on race and digital media
technologies the Center aims to update our strategies in
the struggle to protect the hard-fought gains in the realm
of social justice, economic and political parity waged by
the Civil Rights Movement. As African Americans’ (and
other minority groups’) opportunities for equal participation
in U.S. civil society are systematically eroded and rescinded
in the wake of California’s spate of anti-Affirmative
Action propositions and legislation, the Center’s
historic mission to foster multi-racial understanding, cooperation
and educational diversity is more vital than ever. Indeed,
the number of alarming post-Civil Rights era “reforms”
portend a very discomfiting reality and uncertain future
for the field of Black Studies itself. For more than three
decades the field has produced a critical mass of highly
qualified and influential black professors and other professionals,
generated a new paradigm of scholarship, historical knowledge,
and trailblazing research across disciplinary lines. However,
this stellar past and celebrated track record now rests
on an unstable foundation. Organized efforts in California
(and other parts of the U.S.) to downsize educational programs
and out-source educational opportunities available to African
American citizens and other minority communities must be
met with equal organizational efforts to retain and extend
these basic rights. The Center for Black Studies at UCSB
strives to meet these new demands through the production
and cultivation of cutting-edge Black Studies research and
scholarship, active participation in efforts to recruit,
retain and promote black faculty, students and staff.
The horrors of September 11, 2001 have made it impossible
to ignore the necessity for higher education in the U.S.
to be a more racially and culturally diverse and reflective
of today’s new global societies and economic structures.
In addition to the global popularity and circulation of
African American popular music culture (especially hip-hop),
film and TV personalities, professional athletes, politicians,
military leaders, etc., the international appeal of the
Black Studies discipline is at an all time high. For example,
in 2002-03 the Center hosted a self-funded German ABD fellow,
and we established relations with an ABD fellow from Tunisia;
both were studying black women’s literature. With
the overwhelmingly positive responses to the Center’s
new research and programmatic changes, we anticipate even
more local and global interest.
Initial
Goals and Purposes
Since its founding in 1970, The Center for Black Studies
has been an integral unit of UCSB’s Office
of Research (OR). Presently, the Center does not administer
external research grants; however, the procurement of external
funding is an essential element in the Center’s new
agenda. At the core of the Center’s past and contemporary
mandate are innovative steps to promote, encourage and develop
research, scholarship and other academic initiatives relevant
to Black Studies across disciplinary and generational lines.
Over the decades the Center’s interdisciplinary research
focus has served and been served by faculty conducting research
in Black studies from a diverse range of departments at
UCSB including Art Studio, Black Studies, Education, English,
Film Studies, History, Religious Studies, Sociology and
Women’s Studies. Additionally, the Center continues
to build upon its long-standing collaborations with the
Multicultural Center, the Women’s Center, the Education
Program for Culture Awareness (EPCA) and Arts and Lectures,
among others.
It is important to recall that historically the Center for
Black Studies and the Center
for Chicano Studies were founded at UCSB in the early
1970s in response to student activism and demands for “more
relevant,” “socially engaged,” and multi-cultural
educational offerings beyond canonical “Eurocentric”
texts and approaches. Then as now, the Center for Black
Studies was charged with advancing the diversification of
the educational life and culture at the University of California
through the production and nurturing of black faculty, the
development and institutionalization of black studies, and
the wide dissemination of black studies research and scholarship.
Another key component of the Center’s charter was
the establishment of an active and interactive public mission
and community outreach program designed to keep the Center
engaged with the day to day activities, initiatives and
overall well-being of Santa Barbara county’s black
and non-university communities. These tenets have been observed
faithfully by the Center and its successive roster of directors
and staff.
From
the beginning, the Center’s Faculty Development Program
(dissertation fellowships) has been an extremely successful
mechanism for the production of outstanding junior faculty
members to staff college and university faculties throughout
the U.S. in the field of Black Studies. In this capacity,
the Center has hosted 2-3 ABD fellows annually as resident
scholars and provided each with research and office support,
mentoring, teaching opportunities and career development
and assistance. This successful program, however, is undergoing
a transformation. On the recommendation of the Advisory
Committee, the Center has instituted a welcome change that
redefines the Faculty Development Program. The ABD Fellows
will no longer be hosted by the Center. Instead, ABD fellows
will now be housed in the Department
of Black Studies, which is consistent with the more
cost-effective structure in the Chicano Studies Department
wherein ABD Fellows are housed within in the Department
and not in the Center. After thirty years, this arrangement
enables the Center for Black Studies to benefit from the
experience of more senior scholars and researchers who can
assist the Center to expand the research portion of its
tripartite mission. Also, working with senior scholars is
expected to assist the Center’s efforts at external
grant procurement in the coming years. AY 2003-04 will inaugurate
our new Visiting
Researcher Program that offers fellowships to scholars,
artists and researchers who have obtained terminal degrees
and achieved significant accomplishments in their respective
specialties of Black Studies.
As the Center geared up to implement the new Visiting Scholar
program, relinquishing the ABD program was bitter-sweet
as the Center hosted its last ABD cohort. The 2002-03 ABD’s
in residence at the Center were Jermaine Archer (M.A., UC
Riverside), Angie C. Beatty (M.A., U of Michigan), Ingrid
Thaler, self-funded (University of Philipps-University Marburg
Institute for English and American Studies, in Germany).
The ABD fellows dissertation topics are as follows: Archer:
“Sentiments of Africa: Slave Narratives of Antebellum
America;” Beatty: “Priming ‘Bitch’
Schemas with Violence and Gender- Oppositional Female Rap
Lyrics: Effects of Tolerance for Aggression Against Women;”
Thaler: ”White Genres and Black Traditions: Reworking
of Time in Speculative Fictions by Octavia E. Butler, Jewel
Gomez and Nalo Hopkinson.” Each fellow gained important
teaching experience via classes taught in the department
of Black Studies and the English Department. Through their
participation in the 2002
Race and Digital Space 2.0 Conference at USC, Archer
and Thaler gained invaluable experience with conference
support activities and panel hosting duties.
 |
ABD's
Jermaine Archer, Ingrid Thaler, and Angie Beatty with
Director Anna Everett. |
In
addition to the three ABD fellows, the Center hosted law
professor and Visiting Scholar Adjoa Aiyetoro. Professor
Adjoa Aiyetoro, activist counsel and reparations expert
was invited to the Center to write an anthology proposal
and a follow-up Report both of which were based on the 2002
conference on slavery mandated by the California State Legislature
and funded by the University of California Office of the
President. The anthology project will draw upon papers and
presentations from the conference entitled “The
Legacy of Slavery: Unequal Exchange—A Colloquium on
the Socio-Economic Legacy of Slavery.” Prof. Aiyetoro
completed the Report on the slavery conference and submitted
it to the Office of the President. Prof. Aiyetoro also taught
a course on slavery and reparations for the Black Studies
department and she was a panelist and respondent for the
Black History Month Barbershop event. Additionally, Prof.
Aiyetoro delivered the keynote address for UCSB’s
2003 Black Graduation ceremony.
--------------------
Not
only has the Center contributed significantly to the University’s
instructional and research mission through course offerings
dealing with issues of race and cultural diversity taught
by the ABDs and the Visiting Scholar, scholarly colloquia,
Black History Month programming, and undergraduate research
opportunities, but the Center also co-sponsored and co-organized
the second international conference on race and technology
in collaboration with the University of Southern California,
and MIT. The conference, Race
and Digital Space 2.0, was a major contribution to ongoing
public debates about information technology access for individuals
and groups at local, state, national and international levels.
Moreover, the completed Report on the slavery conference
satisfied the State of California’s mandate to study,
document and preserve the official record of U.S. businesses
that profited from the institution of slavery.
Significant Trends and New Research Directions
The Center’s new research focus and concomitant programmatic
shift consists, among other things, of a multi-year, interdisciplinary
initiative designated as “The Race and Technology
Project” (RT). The Center’s RT project is a
work in progress, and as such specific contours are not
fully articulated. Nonetheless, some key aspects of the
project have taken shape including:
1)
the Center’s significant role in organizing and
financially supporting the 2002 “Race
in Digital Space” conference that convened at
the University of Southern California (USC) in October
2002;
2) the 2002 submission of a Rockefeller
grant proposal to support the Center’s RT project.
(That we survived the competitive first-round of cuts,
but not the award itself, encouraged our efforts to seek
other external funding sources.);
3) The Center has selected two visiting
researchers with specialties in new information technologies
and Black culture to help in the establishment and implementation
of the RT Project.
Finally,
the RT project, under the auspices of the Center, has the
potential to make an important intervention into public
debates about the need for and viability of universal access
to IT (especially after September 11) and to reframe important
terms and dimensions of the so-called “digital divide”
(both real and imaginary). To this end, our aim is to position
the Center as a leading-edge research facility devoted to
innovative approaches to the study and practices of race
and new media cultural production, both past and present.
Plans for the center entail the installation of a modest
media lab to serve the IT needs of our constituents; organization
of conferences, workshops, symposia, and colloquia dealing
with race and new information technologies; analysis of
media policy and the publication of research findings, scholarship
and other creative works that proceed from the Center’s
RT projects and initiatives. Through the RT project, the
Center aims to proffer our research and scholarship for
the advancement of socially responsible and equitable lT
legislation and infrastructures that would level the field
for historically excluded and underserved racial, gender,
and economic communities, not only locally but globally
as well.
A valuable indication of national and international interest
in the Center’s new race and technology initiative
came with the unanticipated response to the intentionally
modest announcement of our new Visiting Scholar Fellowship.
We received applications and inquiries from applicants in
Japan, Indonesia, Britain, France and several U.S. states.
In the spring of 2003, the Center received numerous applications
for our Visiting
Researcher Fellowship. For the ensuing 2003-04 Academic
Year, the Center selected its inaugural Visiting Scholars,
digital media artist William
Jones, and computer programmer and information technology/library
sciences researcher Jorge
Coelho. We eagerly anticipate the enormous contribution
these researchers will make to the Center in the coming
term. To support the publications expansion, the College
of Letters and Science awarded the Center major funding
for three years to transform the Screening Noir
newsletter that the director founded in 1994 for the African,
African-American Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies (SCMS) into a refereed journal publication
.
Although the Center’s new RT Project is informed by
the director’s near-decade-long research into the
African diasporic presence in cyberspace, it will continue
to build upon and augment the Center’s impressive
record of prior achievements under previous director Dr.
Claudine Michel. For example, as the Center works to upgrade
its research profile, it will safeguard the excellence of
the Center’s historic and ongoing Visiting Scholar/Researcher
Program, Community and Public Service functions, Academic
Programs, and scholarly publications. In particular, the
Center is committed to maintaining and expanding prior Center
projects such as the Journal
of Haitian Studies; KOSANBA,
the Indigenous Religion Project; and the 30
Years of Ethnic Studies Project, which includes developing
the first UC based Journal of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and
Class. These are remarkable and successful initiatives established
by Dr. Michel. (For detailed descriptions of these projects,
see past annual reports.)
Overall, the Center’s new vision and programmatic
agenda naturally build upon an impressive past while developing
plausible but ambitious augmentations for the future that,
again, extend from the director’s current research,
scholarship and pedagogical interests in the intersection
of race and new media technologies. Moreover, the director
has been working diligently to draw upon a range of resources
available within a number of UCSB organized research units
and other fitting campus-wide academic programs and entities.
More specifically, the plan for placing the Center in the
forefront of race and technology studies during the 2002-03
(AY) remains involved the following:
-
Developing collaborative media-based symposia and co-sponsored
faculty and student events with the Center for Chicano
Studies, Asian American Studies and the new Center for
Film, TV and New Media (organized by Film and Communication
Studies)
-
Establishing closer ties and coordinating Center activities
with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC), the
Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research
(ISBER), the Digital Media Innovation Program (DIMI),
and the Center for Information Technology and Society
(CITS)
- Instituting
a research project devoted the study of race and technology
(the long-term goal here is to establish an Institute
for Race and Technology with external funding that could
have national and international policy implications and
impact)
-
The transformation of the five-year-old SCMS (Society
for Cinema and Media Studies) Screening Noir
newsletter into a self-sustaining, refereed journal that
operates under the auspices of the Center
-
Reestablishment of the Black Faculty and Staff Meetings
that, unfortunately, have been discontinued in recent
years
-
Create an externally funded Student Research Initiative
(SRI) featuring the work of black undergraduate and graduate
students across the disciplines
-
Establishing a small but dedicated Media Center for race
and technology projects
-
Working aggressively on grant procurements for the Center
Annual
Report 2003
