My weekend was spent immersed in the world of U10 soccer, as my daughter was taking part in a tournament hosted by our town club. Between six games, field prep and volunteer concession stand duty, there was little time for anything else. This week is also going to be something of an immersive experience, but on issues related to contemporary understandings of race rather than soccer (though the two issues do meet up at times).
Along with my colleague Michael Jeffries, in the American Studies department here at Wellesley, we have organized a short, two-day faculty seminar on “Race in the age of Obama.” In addition to the two of us, the seminar will include faculty from History, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Economics and English. Also, perhaps inspired by Glynn Isaac’s routine of bringing in someone from outside his field team to join them every season at Koobi Fora (as relayed to me by John Speth, one of those outside people and a member of my dissertation committee while at Michigan), we have invited Ta-Nehisi Coates, editor for The Atlantic and author of The Beautiful Struggle to join our group. It should be an interesting group.
I will provide updates later in the week, including a complete reading list for the seminar. My own motivation is to deepen my perspective on the issue. Race is something I regularly teach on but usually from the perspective of human genetic and biological variation–hearing how the topic is approached more broadly in the social sciences and even outside of that arena should be great. My own topic will be on race, genetic ancestry and personal genomics (following some of the threads discussed by the excellent 2008 volume, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age). Regardless, my posting will be light because of the schedule but when I do, I’ll touch more on what comes out of our discussions.
