CLEAR Hosts 2023-2024 Faculty Fellow Symposium Series

The Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) worked with each of its faculty fellows to organize a symposium or discussion with other scholars in their respective field of research to deepen the levels of understandings and to explore strategies to expand their scholarship.

On November 9, 2023, CLEAR Faculty Fellow, Adam Hosein, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Director of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program, and Affiliate Professor of Law at Northeastern University held a working session. Hosein, was joined by Maggie Blackhawk, Professor of Law at NYU School of Law; Jocelyn Simonson, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship at Brooklyn Law School; and Zinaida Miller, CLEAR Faculty Fellow and Professor of Law and International Affairs at Northeastern’s School of Law and College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

This discussion provided Hosein the opportunity to present his progress on his fellowship project, Racial Discrimination and Social Power, and to converse with other renowned experts on its themes.

Continuing his exploration of the interplay between racial discrimination and social power, Hosein’s project proposes an alternative theory of discrimination that, he argued, could more fully account for structural racism, animate legal doctrine and moral theories of equality. Conceptualizing alternatives to the current hegemonic disparate treatment model could, Hosien said, lead to the transference of decision-making and rearranged power relations. He considered applications of this theoretical shift in policy arenas such as criminal justice, immigration, and education.

Hosein will present the final results of his project at CLEAR’s Faculty Fellow Community Presentations on June 3.
>> Register here.

On April 12, 2024, CLEAR Faculty Fellow Kris Manjapra, Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies at Northeastern University, held an international symposium titled Museums, Race and Reparative Justice: Reckoning with Africana Ancestral Entities.

Manjapra was joined by Samwel Nangiria, Masai Leader and Director of Human Rights Defenders in Tanzania; Rachel Watkins, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, American University; Laura Van Broekhoven, Director of Pitt Rivers Museum, Professor of Museum Studies, Ethics and Material Culture; Tanya Marsh, Professor of Law, Senior Associate Dean, Wake Forest University; Michael Blakey, NEH Professor of Anthropology, Africana and American Studies, William & Mary; Lesley Rankin-Hill, Professor Emerita, The University of Oklahoma; Larissa Foerster, Head of the Department of Cultural Goods from Colonial Contexts, German Lost Art Foundation; and Paul Wolff Mitchell, Postdoctoral Fellow, The University of Amsterdam.

The experts joined in Manjapra’s discussion about the cultural mobilizations, institutional shifts, legal battles and reparative futures resulting from the “call” of ancestral entities held by museums. Manjapra, his esteemed guests and the almost 100 attendees, considered the ways in which cultural practices by descendant communities and interventions by scholars and activists can disrupt the pattern of racial sequestration and amnesia, long-used by museums with colonial-era inheritances, to govern over the domain of the dead.

Sections from the day’s symposium can be viewed here and here.

Manjapra will present the final results of his project at CLEAR’s Faculty Fellow Community Presentations on June 3.
>> Register here

On April 22, 2024, CLEAR Faculty Fellow Caleb Gayle, Associate Professor of Journalism and Africana Studies at Northeastern University, held a symposium titled Preserving Black Exodus: The Story of Black Westward Expansion and the Hope of a Black Utopia.

He was joined on campus by Senator Kevin Matthews (D-OK) and Karen Ekuban, CEO of Cartek Properties LLC, and virtually by Ashley Adams, Associate Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Elinor Kilgore Snyder Endowed Professor at Northeastern University’s Mills College campus.

Gayle, an award-winning journalist and author of We Refuse to Forget, presented his research concerning Black Utopia building throughout the Old West, advertised by Black builders, like Edward McCabe and Benjamin Pap Singleton, as a “Promised Land for Black People.”

Gayle and his guest speakers spoke about the challenges Black towns continue to face in preserving their memories, as well as the legal, political, and cultural roadblocks standing in the way of their preservation, and the tools they have used to overcome them.

Gayle will present the final results of his project at CLEAR’s Faculty Fellow Community Presentation June 13.
>> Register here.

On May 9, 2024, CLEAR Faculty Fellow Zinaida Miller, Professor of Law and International Affairs, and Faculty Co-Director for the Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy at Northeastern University, led an interdisciplinary symposium on the role of race within the practice of international and transitional justice, titled Time, Law and Justice: Past and Presents of Colonialism, Racism and Inequality.

Miller was joined by Matiangai Sirleaf, Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law; M. Brinton Lykes, Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology, and Co-Director for the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College; and Lisa Laplante, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International Law and Policy, New England Law.

The panel discussed the role of race, as a social construct, within transitional justice, and the ways in which transitional justice may be applicable within the U.S. Sirleaf suggested that the appearance of “stability” in many Western countries, may be “masking the way that liberal, progressive states are still subordinating people of color, and masking racist violence.”

Laplante showcased for the group of about 70 gathered both in-person and online, the student-led mapping project she leads at New England Law, titled Transitional Justice in the USA. This tool tracks the development of initiatives occurring the local, state and federal levels to create transitional justice mechanisms to address current and historical racial injustices.

Lykes discussed the lessons that can be taken from Indigenous women in Guatemala and their embodiment of race and sex within the context of transitional justice, land ownership and rights.

The presentation can be viewed here.

Miller will present the final results of her project at CLEAR’s Faculty Fellow Community Presentation June 13.
>> Register here.