“Another Tufts is Possible” Forum Series
Kareem Khubchandani (Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies)
The ATIP Series will assemble students, faculty, and staff across Tufts 6 Schools (AS&E, SMFA, Medical, Dental, Friedman, Cummings) in facilitated forum discussions, workshops, and visionary planning activities to imagine together the kind of institution in which we will all thrive in the future. The work of ATIP will generate maps for a more just and equitable future at Tufts, and the pathways to get there.
Anthropology Speaker Series: Global Racism, State Violence, and Activism
Amahl Bishara (Anthropology; Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora) and Sarah Luna (Anthropology)
This is a speakers series featuring anthropologists studying race and racism, grounded in the United States but extending to other places around the world. We intend for this series to support students in our courses and in the broader Tufts community, to seed a deeper collaboration between the two of us as professors, and to seed student writing on issues of global racism, state violence, and activism.
“Black Matters: On Black Breath”
Kimberly Bain (English)
A podcast series and multimedia exhibit addressing the intersection of Blackness and breathing.
Building Transformative Justice at Tufts
Daanika Gordon (Sociology; Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora) and Lily Mengesha (Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies; Studies in Race, Colonialiasm, and Diaspora)
Building Transformative Justice at Tufts is a multi-year research and teaching project focused on researching methods of repair, harm reduction and justice for historically oppressed and minoritized groups within the settler-colonial nation that is the United States. In developing practices towards healing from structural and interpersonal violence, Transformative Justice models reject alienation and punishment as forms of justice in favor of creative and imaginative ways to achieve collective liberation. The goal of this project is to develop a pilot Transformative Justice program institutionalized at Tufts by 2023. We envision a three phased process of research and teaching that would culminate in a co-taught undergraduate course in AY 2021-2022, and an institutionalized program the following year.
Civic Education Consortium: Building our World Through Civic Humanities, Critical Thinking, and Community Engagement
Kris Manjapra (History; Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora)
We will partner with two civic organization in the South, Project South in Atlanta, Georgia, and Southern Echo, in Jackson, Mississippi, to develop an 8-month-long online civic education curriculum for the public. This is a practice-based Humanities curriculum focused on the theme of “The Social Determinants of Health”. The innovative Civic Humanities toolkit we will use includes: small-scale local oral history work, community history curation, critical law practice, multimedia remixing, interpretation of popular-culture texts and ephemera, autogeography and autoethnography, and embodied art expression.
“Downtown Crossing”
David Valdes (English)
Downtown Crossing (DTX) will be a video highlighting the outgrowth of two years of work researching and interviewing Boston’s undocumented immigrant populations and their advocates during a time of increasing and continual attempts to limit immigrant rights.
Stable Ground: Eviction Defense Terminals
Anthony Romero (SMFA)
This is a collaborative project that responds to the coming wave of mass evictions as a result of COVID-19 economic instability and Boston’s ongoing housing crisis by providing residents who are experiencing housing insecurity with the technological access and legal knowledge to defend themselves against eviction. Each Eviction Defense Terminal is designed to be mobile, easy to use, and is equipped with a laptop, printer, list of resources, and access to the legal tools, community building, and support necessary to defend against eviction.
“Unworking”
Alexander Blanchette (Anthropology)
Unworking attempts to remake Studs Terkel’s book of oral histories and interviews,Working, for altered political and economic times. Unlike the original book, it focuses less on what people find meaningful about their working lives and instead centers on how they have tried to escape a lifetime and identity defined by labor and productivity. The project will result in a website, podcast, and eventually a book. With 16 academic collaborators —and plans to incorporate upwards of 40 interviewers to conduct hundreds of interviews —it also seeks to model forms of collective intellectual engagement and methods in the critical humanities.