News

UConn Scholars Consider ‘Historic Firsts’ of 2024 Election

Posted on October 14, 2024October 14, 2024 by BD

It’s rare that any particular event can be confidently predicted to be of major historical significance before it happens, but American presidential elections definitely fit the bill. And while all presidential elections are momentous, each one has unique dynamics and characteristics that influence history in very different ways.

It was with this in mind that three UConn scholars gathered at the Old State House in Hartford on Tuesday, Oct. 8, to analyze the current presidential contest in terms of historical significance – and what makes this election distinct.

One of the most striking differences between this election and every previous presidential campaign is that a major party nominee – Vice President Kamala Harris – is a woman of color. Even more remarkable, the scholars said, is the way she came to win the Democratic Party’s nomination – being endorsed by President Joe Biden after his unprecedented decision to drop out of the race just weeks before the party’s nominating convention in August.

“What I will never forget, especially as a political scientist, is the way she came to be the Democratic nominee,” said Evelyn Simien, professor of Political Science, Director of the Africana Studies Institute, and author of “Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History and author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2017)” and “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Liveright, 2024),” agreed that the circumstances of Harris’ nomination make the 2024 election unique.

“This is probably one of the first times we’ve had a presidential nominee so late in the game who has been able to step up so quickly,” she said.

Another distinctive factor of this election, argued Christopher Vials, professor of English and author of “Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight Against Fascism in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014),” is that “new taboos continue to be broken” in political rhetoric surrounding the race.

Pointing to an interview the pundit Tucker Carlson conducted in September with a far-right podcaster notorious for defending the Third Reich and blaming Winston Churchill for World War II, Vials said, “Tucker Carlson is nodding his head, and then Elon Musk tweets about how that was a fabulous interview. They’re sort of breaking the Hitler taboo now.”

One concern all three scholars shared was the possibility of low voter turnout, especially in states like Connecticut, where the presidential race is not expected to be competitive.

“A lot of people become a little blasé about elections; they think noting changes, they think their vote doesn’t count, and that can open the door to authoritarian outcomes in elections,” Sinha said.

Simien said she reminds her students that the right to vote has only, in historical terms, recently been won by all Americans regardless of race or gender, and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“Younger voters owe a debt to older generations, people who have sacrificed life and limb so that we can have the right to cast a vote in American elections,” she said.

Vials noted the importance of elections for state and local offices, pointing out that decisions made in city hall or Hartford often have immediate, direct consequences in daily life.

“State elections affect your lives a lot; they determine whether social services are going to be provided, whether universities are going to be funded, tax rates, who gets taxed – those are things that affect people’s lives every day, apart from the federal election,” he said.

The forum at the Old State House was sponsored by the UConn Department of Critical and Social Inquiry, Department of English, Africana Studies Institute, Department of History, and the Department of Political Science.

Meet Jason Chang, First Head of Social and Critical Inquiry

Posted on September 4, 2024October 14, 2024 by BD

How long have you been at UConn? How have things changed since you arrived?

I arrived in 2011, and for me, UConn has become more integrated. I’m now much more connected to other departments, colleagues, colleges, and campuses. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a culture change, but my experience at UConn started very much within the Department [of History] and the Institute [of Asian and Asian American Studies]. That was my world for a while, especially as I took on more leadership roles, directing the Institute. There’s an effort to make UConn more integrated among its constituent parts, which I think benefits everyone.
My experience started out small, though it felt big at the time. Now, there are just so many connections—a rich constellation of collaborators, supporters and community partners. That benefits both faculty and students.

Ultimately, it’s about having a public impact, which is where I see the emphasis of the new department: leveraging student experiences and faculty research so that the impact is not just on campus but in communities.

Your department is new to UConn. Can you tell us a bit about it and its purpose?

The new Department of Social and Critical Inquiry brings together four constituent areas: American Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. These four areas have been collaborating for several years to create a department that allows for growth and has the ability to hire and tenure our own faculty, providing stability.

Previously, as programs, institutes, and initiatives, we didn’t have the same security that a department offers. These programs exist because communities and students fought for them, and they fulfill an enduring need at the university. They are central to UConn’s equity mission, not just in representation but in academics and programming.

We are problem-based, solution-based academic units within the humanities, coming from intellectual traditions rooted in human struggle. Analyzing social conditions and critically reexamining assumptions and ideologies are crucial for transformation. Technologies and infrastructure may change, but if ideas and ideologies don’t change, we won’t see societal transformation. That’s why our departmental motto is “ Transformation takes social and critical inquiry.” These are the values our programs deliver through academic offerings and community partnerships.

Are there common misconceptions about studies in your areas? If so, what are they?

These areas of study have been attacked for bringing diverse and unconventional theories and ways of understanding the world, because they confront power structures and the status quo. These are enduring intellectual and scholarly traditions that come from justice movements, and they rarely receive the same institutional security as other departments or areas of study.

When defenders of white supremacy and misogyny, for instance, place a target on programs that build knowledge that has been erased or challenges the dominant paradigm, we see institutions dismantling these programs. However, UConn is showing an investment in these areas because of their necessity. This is not just something echoed by students or faculty; it’s valued by communities and endorsed by the Connecticut legislature. As a public institution, if we are committed to equity and inclusion, we must practice it in this way.

A central part of your work is community engagement. Why is that important?

In academics, we often talk about community engagement, but it’s not always well defined. What I’ve tried to emphasize is community partnerships. When we partner with communities, we achieve better knowledge, better education, and better outcomes. This department is really focused on that. It’s about trust-building and creating relationships with people, understanding their needs, and finding ways we can help meet those needs. Partnership is essential for transformation because community organizations are experts in the problems they face and vital to advancing any solution.

If we look at the university through a business model lens, we often treat students as the clients. But the broader community, the taxpayers of Connecticut, are also clients we serve – such as through the Curriculum Lab, Activist Residencies, and the Tribal Education Initiative. People don’t have to enroll in classes to benefit from UConn. We are partners in bottom-up change, educating the next generation of leaders.

Is it a goal to have an undergraduate major in social and critical inquiry?

Eventually, we want that. It’s worth pointing out, though, that our department is designed to be very different from others. As a department head, I’m accountable to a general council of the area directors, so we work together collaboratively. They tell me what they need to succeed, and I ensure coherence and provide administrative support to allow them to expand and grow.

Regarding degree programs, it’s important for each area to have autonomy over their programs within the department. We’ve already done some of that work, like the Social Justice Organizing major, which isn’t attached to any specific program, but we serve a lot of the classes for it. I’ve been the capstone instructor for that program for about five years. One of our top priorities is the development of a SCI curriculum with a major and graduate programs.

Your classes are also in high demand for students who are not majors or minors. Can you talk about why?

Ethnic studies and social and critical inquiry courses help students better understand the world and themselves. When students get that, they are better able to connect with the world, understand their own agency, and find enduring purpose. Students want to understand the world they live in. Students look to our courses to fill all kinds of requirements in other majors for this reason. Our units have produced very popular pop-up courses that grew from student demand and the community. These courses are the first introduction to our programs, but these pop-up courses are just scratching the surface of what our faculty can provide and are vital to students building personal connections with their academic programs.

It’s rare for students to see themselves and their communities represented in the curriculum, and that’s an important experience. SCI courses help them make an emotional, cultural, and personal connection to their education, which is crucial for understanding why it’s relevant to them.

Where do you see the department going in the next five years under your leadership?

I envision our department offering a transformative educational experience that connects students to communities and addresses important societal problems in Connecticut and beyond. I want our students to be equipped with the vision and tools needed to tackle the challenges they face. I see our faculty engaging in collaborative and innovative research that redefines scholarly productivity, demonstrating that community engagement and partnerships are not just supplements but are central to delivering public impact and conducting rigorous interdisciplinary research.

In five years, I would like to see us have Minority Serving Institution (MSI) grants at every campus. We already have Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (ANAPISI) status at Hartford and Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) status at Waterbury, but I want Storrs to have ANAPISI status, Avery Point to be a tribal-serving institution, and Stamford to be recognized as an MSI. These federally funded programs would support the belonging, performance improvement, retention, and graduation of students by aligning academic programs and support services with their diverse identities, ensuring they feel connected and empowered to shape their university experience.

What is your favorite place on campus?

I have several favorite places, and they are all spaces where UConn students have protested, stood up for themselves, envisioned a better world, and made meaningful contributions to the university. These spaces are special because students put everything on the line for their education and the benefit of everyone. If it weren’t for those actions, we wouldn’t have Asian American Studies. We wouldn’t have Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. We wouldn’t have Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Places like in front of the Student Union, where [UConn Professor Emeritus of Hydrology and Water Resources] Paul Bock did a hunger strike, which helped create Asian American Studies. And then, more recently, the student protests at the Dove Tower, and student protests for Black studies at Wilbur Cross and women’s studies at Gulley Hall. All these spaces, to me, are sacred spaces at UConn.

Mellon Foundation Awards $100,000 to UConn Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Posted on March 27, 2024October 14, 2024 by BD

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting the arts and humanities, has awarded $100,000 to UConn’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program as part of its “Affirming Multivocal Humanities” initiative.

WGSS Director Sherry Zane and Associate Director Ariana Codr co-wrote the grant proposal that netted the program its first major external grant.

“One of Higher Learning’s core aims is to elevate humanities knowledge that informs more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience and lays the foundation for more just and equitable futures,” wrote Phillip Brian Harper, program director for Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation, in the call for grant submissions. “The study of race, gender, and sexuality is crucial to this objective, particularly at this pivotal moment in the history of the United States. Indeed, research and teaching in these fields epitomizes the essential exercise of academic freedom within the US higher education system.”

“We are incredibly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for putting together this call,” says Codr. “The Foundation understands that we’re facing a political, social, and economic moment where this kind of work is being devalued, if not actively attacked. It is crucial that programs like WGSS at UConn be maintained and supported if this basic principle of higher education is to be upheld.”

UConn WGSS, formally established in 1974 as UConn Women’s Studies, is an interdisciplinary program housing faculty from various schools and colleges. Over 40 students are currently majoring in WGSS, while upwards of 150 students have declared minors (placing the program in the top 11 minors offered at the university).

But the program’s reach extends beyond these metrics. Hundreds of UConn students annually enroll in WGSS classes to meet general education requirements, round out courseloads, or satisfy lifelong curiosities about systems of oppression and theories of resistance.

“Even though we are a small program, we do a great service to the university by teaching students how to build a supportive and critical scholarly community that advances our understanding of the construction and reproduction of inequity, as well as resistance to it,” says Zane.

“WGSS students are incredibly dedicated,” says Codr. “They find something in our program that I think is sometimes hard to find elsewhere – a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of hope for change. It’s really nice to have a place where this is recognized.”

WGSS course offerings are diverse, ranging from “Gender and Globalization” to “Black Feminist Politics” to “LGBTQ+ Literature.” The program comprises 14 core faculty members and over 50 affiliated faculty.

Academically, it finds a home amongst other justice-oriented programs that sprang up on university campuses in the late twentieth century, like Africana studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and Latinx studies. At UConn as elsewhere, these offerings were brought about by student protest and demand.

Zane says she is particularly excited to use the funding to expand programming in disability studies. This field is currently gaining academic awareness in much the same way as gender, critical race, and ethnic studies did in the 1960s and 70s.

“We are lucky to have two amazing feminist disability scholars in our program — Laura Mauldin and Brenda Brueggemann — who are working on creating a disability studies minor,” Zane says. “Disability is a feminist issue, and our students recognize disability as part of the human experience, not the exception to it.”

More big things are in store for WGSS too, Zane says, like the development of an MA “Plus One” program (which would allow undergraduate students to earn a master’s degree by taking an additional year of courses after receiving their BA), a possible graduate studies partnership with Spelman college, and a WGSS 50th anniversary celebration this coming March (which, in keeping with the program’s tradition, will feature speaker panels and collaborative discussions).

The no-strings-attached funding from the Mellon Foundation will help the program realize all these goals.

“It reaffirms that there is a community of people, both inside academia and outside, who believe in the importance of this work,” says Codr.

Above all, the funding will help the program support more students, as its course offerings and enrollment numbers continue to expand in student-led directions.

Those students “are the beating heart, and they just bring so much,” Codr says. “That’s why we do it.”

A Look Back, A Look Forward With WGSS

Posted on March 19, 2024October 14, 2024 by BD

For the uninitiated: WGSS, the acronym for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UConn, is affectionately pronounced “wigs” by the students. Housed in Beach Hall, where a cozy lounge offers students a place to connect and recharge, the program is beloved by hundreds of students majoring or minoring in WGSS, as well as its faculty.

Thursday, March 21, and Friday, March 22, will see a celebration marking 50 years since the program’s inception in 1974 — the first formal women’s studies program in the state.

And, true to form, this celebration will foreground complex thought, conversation, and coalition-building.

Scholars from institutions across the country will speak on panels addressing the significance of WGSS for the social and political issues facing the world today.

Alexis De Veaux, a multi-award-winning writer, activist, scholar, and biographer of Audre Lorde, will open the celebration. Later in the day, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, the Anna Julia Cooper professor of women’s studies at Spelman College, and M. Jacqui Alexander, professor emeritus of the University of Toronto’s women and gender studies department, will deliver the keynote conversation.

The event will be titled “The Uses of Anger: WGSS at 50,” in a nod to another significant event in UConn WGSS history.

“The Uses of Anger” Then and Now

In 1981, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) chose UConn as the host site for its annual conference, bringing together scholars from across the then-emerging discipline of women’s and gender studies. The NWSA organized the conference around the theme of “Women Respond to Racism” and invited Audre Lorde, along with Adrienne Rich, to be the keynote speaker.

Behind the podium at Jorgensen Auditorium, Lorde delivered her famous speech “The Uses of Anger.” In it, she argued for the resignification of anger as an appropriate and human response to racism — and as a source of energy for altering the societal conditions that produce it.

“Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification,” Lorde said.

In 2023, sitting in the lounge beneath a painting of Lorde, a WGSS organizing committee brainstormed a theme for the upcoming celebration. Associate professor in residence and WGSS interim director Sherry Zane, WGSS and English assistant professor Briona Simone Jones, and professor of political science and WGSS affiliate Jane Gordon concluded that learning from “The Uses of Anger,” looking back and looking forward, would make a generative focus.

It was an especially apt choice given Jones’s research specialization — she has worked extensively with Lorde’s oeuvre throughout her career, as a scholar of Black Lesbian thought.

“We wanted to conceive a conference around this particular essay to really scrutinize all of our efforts and be honest about whether we see Audre’s teachings as sort of litanies, or as instruction for how to achieve liberation in the here and now, or if it’s just sort of a conceptual piece of writing and we don’t feel as though we have to be committed to her practices,” Jones says.

Jones’s point is especially relevant given the context of Lorde’s original speech. The NWSA conference had been criticized for refusing to waive fees for low-income attendees, meaning attendance was essentially restricted to middle- and upper-class women. The conference was also predominantly white.

Additionally, while white women could choose from various affinity groups (Jewish women, lesbian women, etc.), Black women and women of color at the conference were all grouped together. The conference organizers encouraged them to all “sit together under a tree and talk about race together,” Zane says. Among them were Lorde, Guy-Sheftall, and bell hooks.

Lorde’s powerful speech was in part motivated by anger over the conference’s treatment of women of color. Speaking to the NWSA, she was acutely aware of how the discipline of women’s studies “has historically been violent against women of color, and Black women specifically,” as Jones notes. In the essay, Lorde emphasized the importance of building coalitions for radical change based on honesty and love for one another.

Imagining Anew

With this history in mind, the organizing committee composed of Gordon, Jones, Elva Orozco Mendoza, and Zane, believe that the WGSS 50th anniversary should ask, “How does Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies, as a discipline, continue to perpetuate those issues – and how can we revive and reVision our praxis?”

WGSS 50’s “Looking Back” panel will include attendees from the 1981 NWSA conference, including Judith Plaskow, professor emerita of religious studies at Manhattan College; Chela Sandoval, associate professor of Chicana Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Holly Smith, archivist at Spelman College.

In the “Looking Forward” panel, Zane says, intergenerational and transdisciplinary scholars V Varun Chaudhry, PJ Di Pietro, Evren Savci, endawnis Spears, and Jaimee Swift will consider how the discipline can continue to evolve.

“We want to bear witness to that past, so we can move toward a new vision, not just for WGSS program, but for the BIPOC students, faculty, and staff who work and live here,” Zane says. “Transformation is our future, and we’re open to all of the possibilities that brings.”

For the organizing committee, planning the 50th anniversary celebration has offered an opportunity to reflect critically about Lorde’s legacy and how future generations of UConn WGSS scholars can continue to strengthen that legacy.

In the future, Jones says, “I’m hoping that we won’t need these separate disciplines” — like WGSS, Africana Studies, and other social justice-oriented programs — “that the disciplines will actually be able to coalesce around differences. We had to create our own separate disciplines because we were excised from knowledge systems that were dominant.”

She would also like to see “the university not be heralded as the ultimate place where learning is done.”

“We can imagine something anew,” Jones says.

The two-day events are listed on the WGSS website and include several powerhouse speakers; a co-curated art exhibit by graduate and undergraduate students Nikki Blumenfeld, Ruba Bouzan, Urvi Kaul, Anh Le, Alejandra Leos, Georgia Poirot, and Christina Young, and Professors Orozco Mendoza, Gordon, and Zane at the Benton Museum of Art; a career roundtable with WGSS alumni; and a concert on Friday featuring American-Peruvian two-spirit, transgender poet, musician, model, and painter Bobby Sanchez.

Zane invites everyone to continue the celebration through the weekend: the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) program is hosting IndigiPalooza events, culminating on Sunday with a powwow, also listed on the WGSS @ 50 website.