Hampshire College Faculty Participate in Five College Working Group “Race, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism in Global Perspective”

For the academic year 2021–22, the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has organized a seminar of faculty fellows who will be developing independent research within a closely-knit scholarly environment. The project organizers are Iyko Day, Elizabeth C. Small associate professor in the Department of English and Chair of Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College, and Adam Dahl, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Some of the questions the IHGMS fellows will be exploring include:

• How do technologies and ideologies of colonial rule travel across boundaries of nation and empire?
• What are the intellectual risks of relying on overly rigid distinctions between settler colonialism and other imperial forms such as franchise colonialism?
• What is the role of colonial dispossession in shaping structural logics of capital accumulation?
• How central is the binary of “native” and “settler” to the study of empire, and what forms of racialization do such binaries obscure?
• In what ways do decolonial imaginaries and modes of social relation (to human and more than human others) offer alternatives to colonial logics of accumulation and property?

Hampshire College has the most participating faculty members of the four non-host institutions in the seminar. They meet with the working group four times each semester, read key primary and secondary source documents, and interact with outside scholars and guest speakers. They will have opportunities to present their works in progress and will receive a stipend to conduct their research.

Jennifer Bajorek, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies, Hampshire College
Project Description: Artists and activists visualizing contemporary migration with a focus on the representation of African and Black sites and subjects.

Robert B. Caldwell, Jr., Visiting Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Hampshire College
Project Description: Thematic-historical maps of American Indian homelands, languages, and culture areas.

Susana Loza, Associate Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Media Studies, Hampshire College
Project Description: The settler colonial and gothic traces in contemporary horror television and film.

Read more about the Five College Working Group “Race, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism in Global Perspective"