CAS research support program addresses systemic racism, research-based solutions
During the summer of 2020, the world experienced renewed vigor in the fight for civil liberties. In June, CAS Dean Rick Travis published a statement condemning systemic racism and ingrained injustice, calling for innovative ways to promote meaningful conversations around systemic racism. To advance this call, CAS created the Race and Racism Research (RRR) funding program, which sought to fund projects that developed research-based solutions to dismantle racism and end racial injustice.
Giselle Thibaudeau, associate dean of research for CAS, said, “I am very happy and appreciative for these funding opportunities, made possible through the generosity of the College of Arts and Sciences Deans Office and the Arts and Sciences Advisory Board. I am also extremely proud of the efforts, resilience and world-class scholarly output of our faculty and students. I look forward to seeing the impacts of the RRR 2021 awards will have on our units, the university, the disciplines, the nation and the globe.”
The Race and Racism Research 2021 funding program is sponsoring three faculty-lead projects that tackle issues of race and racism and have as goals to identify root causes of racial inequities and to develop research-based solutions to dismantle racism and end racial injustice.
Shawn Lambert, Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures assistant professor, and his co-investigator, Anna Grace Tribble, Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures lecturer, will develop a special topics anthropology Choctaw culture course through an interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars across MSU and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. The project will address the sense of erasure those from the Choctaw community and within the k-12 and university setting experience regarding education on their own histories, heritage and identity.
“The development of this curriculum from solely indigenous perspectives is an attempt to decolonize anthropological curriculum, increase cultural and ethnic diversity at Mississippi State, and incorporate the practice of traditional knowledge into the Choctaw Culture class,” Lambert said.
Department of Sociology Assistant Professor Gabe Miller will investigate the role of racism in LGBT intersectional heath disparities by launching the Survey on Intersectional Health Disparities (SIHD) to collect quantitative information on health outcomes and behaviors, demographics, and experiences with multiple forms of discrimination including racism, homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.
“I'm thankful for the College of Arts and Sciences support of research on race and racism. Without the support of this program, the research I plan to conduct would not be possible at this crucial time. Because the majority of existing data sources do not allow for robust analysis of the ways multiple structures of domination (i.e. racism and homophobia) impact health, a large gap exists in our understanding of intersectional health disparities within LGBTQ+ populations, especially those of color. This funding supports the collection of data to help address this gap and will allow the collection of pilot data to launch future external funding applications where I plan to continue to investigate these questions,” Miller said.
Department of English Assistant Professor Dhanashree Thorat and her co-investigator Jeremy Montgomery, a graduate student in the Department of History, will complete a digital humanities project to document community participation in the 2020 Starkville Black Lives Matter march and local activism. The project will highlight the continuous histories of civil rights activism in Mississippi.
"Our community-based project will lead to the creation of a digital exhibit on the Black Lives Matter march in Starkville,” said Thorat. “Small towns like Starkville are not generally acknowledged in national news reporting on racial justice activism, and Mississippi is often perceived as a state which does not have progressive politics on race and racism. We hope our project will enable community partners to share and shape how the Black Lives Matter march should be remembered,” Thorat said.
The renewed efforts in the fight for civil liberties seen in 2020 lend weight to the importance of these and other CAS faculty research. The Race and Racism funding program aims to fund research that will continue to lead to fair and practical research-based solutions to end racial injustice.
MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences includes more than 5,200 students, 323 full-time faculty members, nine doctoral programs, 15 master’s programs, and 27 undergraduate academic majors offered in 14 departments. MSU is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a “Very High Research Activity” doctoral university, the highest level of research activity in the country. MSU is one of only 120 schools to hold the designation. For more details about the College of Arts and Sciences, visit www.cas.msstate.edu. MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.