Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging in Art + Design
Dedicated to the development of the creative, intellectual, and ethical lives of all members of our community, the Northeastern University Department of Art + Design strives to understand, resist, and dismantle the harmful legacies of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, settler colonialism, and economic exploitation. While by no means exhaustive, this guide aims to provide direction to a variety of resources in support of these goals. The Department of Art + Design's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Committee has created this resource so that you may explore, cite and recommend additions.
Books + Articles
A Field Guide to White Supremacy by
Drawing explicit lines, across time and a broad spectrum of violent acts, to provide the definitive field guide for understanding and opposing white supremacy in America Hate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness--and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past--joined not only by common perpetrators, but by the vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States. Gathering together a cohort of researchers and writers, A Field Guide to White Supremacy provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. This book illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence. The Field Guide is meant as an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, illuminating common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Covering immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the authors reveal white supremacy as a motivating force in manifold parts of American life. The book also offers a sampling of some of the most recent scholarship in this area in order to spark broader conversations between journalists and their readers, teachers and their students, and activists and their communities. A Field Guide to White Supremacy will be an indispensable resource in paving the way for politics of alliance in resistance and renewal.
ISBN: 9780520382534Publication Date: 2021-10-26
Mediocre by
From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, an "illuminating" (New York Times Book Review) history of white male identity. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments? Through the last 150 years of American history -- from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics -- Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.
ISBN: 9781580059503Publication Date: 2020-12-01
How To Be An Antiracist by
"The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society."
ISBN: 9780525509295Publication Date: 2019
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by
Hallmark critical race theory themes -- Legal storytelling and narrative analysis -- Looking inward -- Power and the shape of knowledge -- Critiques and responses to criticism -- Critical race theory today.
ISBN: 9789381406779Publication Date: 2017
The Inconvenient Indian by
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada-U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. Suffused with wit, anger, perception, and wisdom, The Inconvenient Indian is at once an engaging chronicle and a devastating subversion of history, insightfully distilling what it means to be "Indian" in North America. It is a critical and personal meditation that sees Native American history not as a straight line but rather as a circle in which the same absurd, tragic dynamics are played out over and over again. At the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between Indians and Whites, King writes, is land: "The issue has always been land." With that insight, the history inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America--broken treaties, forced removals, genocidal violence, and racist stereotypes--sharpens into focus. Both timeless and timely, The Inconvenient Indian ultimately rejects the pessimism and cynicism with which Natives and Whites regard one another to chart a new and just way forward for Indians and non-Indians alike.
ISBN: 9780816689767Publication Date: 2013-09-05
Design Justice by
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? "Design justice" is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people-specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)-and invites readers to "build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability." Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.
ISBN: 9780262043458Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Me and White Supremacy : Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by
Updated and expanded from the original workbook (downloaded by nearly 100,000 people), this critical text helps you take the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources, giving you the language to understand racism, and to dismantle your own biases, whether you are using the book on your own, with a book club, or looking to start family activism in your own home.
ISBN: 172820982XPublication Date: 2020
Podcasts + Videos
- In The Dark Podcast Season 2: The Case of Curtis Flowers From American Public Media Reports. "In this season, we investigate the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, who was tried six times for the same crime. Flowers spent more than 20 years fighting for his life while a white prosecutor spent that same time trying just as hard to execute him."
- Nice White Parents Podcast From the makers of Serial and The New York Times: “Nice White Parents” looks at the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.
Artists + Designers
- Great Women Animators Ongoing international directory of historical and contemporary female* animators
- 35+ Revolutionary Films There is power in exploring the ways that past generations have confronted rising tides of fascism and crisis. For 100 years, communists, socialists, anarchists, anti-colonialists, and other revolutionaries have made films that attempt to intervene in their moment, to not just tell stories, but lift up silenced voices and imagine better futures. Together, they form an underground history of the 20th and 21st centuries. The films in this list were made by radical and visionary artists; many of them wanted to both overthrow capitalism and transform cinema.
- Groundbreaking Black Documentaries These films illustrate both the undeniable threat of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and the incomparable strength of Blackness.
Design Specific Resources
Inclusive Pedagogy
Teaching Interculturally : A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Iintercultural Development by
How can I simultaneously support students' critical engagement with course content and develop their intercultural awareness? Most faculty have multiple diversities present in any given classroom or academic program-- whether from an influx of international students or an increase of students from low-income, first generation, and/or racial/ethnic minority populations-- and are concerned about how to maintain a rigorous curriculum and ensure that all their students succeed, given disparate backgrounds and varying degrees of prior knowledge. This book provides faculty and instructors with a theoretical foundation, practical tools, and an iterative and reflective process for designing and implementing an intercultural pedagogy. The authors bring to bear the expertise of their various disciplinary backgrounds to offer a responsive, integrative framework to develop and continually refine a pedagogy that both promotes deep disciplinary learning and supports intercultural outcomes for all students. The authors offer a framework that is flexible enough to be responsive to the experience, environment, and particulars of a given teaching and learning situation. The text incorporates narrative text by the authors, as well as first-person reflections, classroom activities, and annotated assignments that illustrate the dynamic process of intention, experiment/implement, critique, and refinement that characterize pedagogy and intercultural interaction. The authors bring to bear the expertise of their various disciplinary backgrounds, a deep knowledge of effective pedagogical practice, and their experience and grounding in intercultural practice: Amy in composition/writing studies, Mary Katherine in international education with rich experience as a faculty development trainer, and Bob and Catherine, respectively, an historian and a family scientist. This book is intended both for individual reading as well as for collective study in learning communities.
ISBN: 1620363801Publication Date: 2017-08-11
How Internalized White Supremacy Manifests for My BIPOC Students in Art School by Publication Date: 2021-04-03
Anti-Racist Pedagogy: From Faculty’s Self-Reflection to Organizing Within and Beyond the Classroom by Publication Date: 2018-07-04
Teaching to Transgress by
"After reading Teaching to TransgressI am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself. "To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.
ISBN: 9780415908085Publication Date: 1994-09-12
Multicultural Education and Social Justice by
Multicultural citizenship education courses worldwide show promise in their ability to influence attitudes and beliefs supportive of social justice. However, many of these courses assume behavior change results from these attitudes changes. Quantitative analyses of pretest and posttest questionnaire data compare the impact of these unique curricular strategies on students' social action. The results reveal that these curricular strategies produce limited influence on social justice action. I suggest a social influence model of behavior change as a possibility for making multicultural education more effective at influencing behaviors for social justice action, thus reducing current and future social inequality.
Publication Date: 2009
