The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the deadly consequences of racial disparities in health. More than spotlighting racial health inequity, however, the pandemic exposed anew the depths of staggering racial inequality nationwide. In every sector from education to the labor market, housing to healthcare, the provision to meet basic human needs and take steps to ensure wellness were racially unequal. These are national problems but as one of the most diverse states in the country, New Jersey holds several unwelcome distinctions for long-standing inequities in critical systems that have profound implications for vulnerability to poor health outcomes.  

What would we learn from bringing humanists, social scientists, and biomedical researchers to the table to explore, unpack, and disrupt structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes? What would a just racial future require to remediate the imprints of the past in the structures of our present? This research project, supported by a $725,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, brings together cross-disciplinary groups of experts to explore and unpack structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes, centering humanistic and social scientific approaches.  

RWJF approached ISGRJ explicitly due to our reputation as an Institute founded on Humanities research, and also due to our location in the state university of New Jersey. The Foundation continues to draw on the expertise of Director Stephens and other Rutgers humanists, such as Shakespearean and early modern scholar Patricia Akhimie, to bring their humanistic scholarly perspectives on race and health to conversations among RWJF leaders, program officers, and grantees.  

The Black Bodies Black Health project has produced a report for RWJF that answers these questions, and a book chapter describing a research process that included workshops on the meaning of “race” and “disruption,” with the aim of creating a shared vocabulary among an interdisciplinary group of seed grantees from the diverse fields of the environmental sciences, history, labor relations, medicine, nursing, philosophy, psychology, and social work.

Led by Stephens, Branch, and a steering committee of faculty experts in queer studies, public health, family medicine, community health, the sociology of health, and the psychology of implicit bias, the research team held a 3-day conference with external scholars on August 17-19, 2021, focusing on racial health disparities and achieving health equity. The conference culminated in a Presidential Keynote by sitting Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway entitled "Mapping Value: The Material Consequences of Structural Racism."

The project will culminate in June 2023 with an event for stakeholders to discuss the findings from this research, as it has implications for physician education in race and health equity, the role of the carceral state and environmental racism, the physiological impact of racism on black bodies, and the efficacy of the United States health care delivery system, in communities ranging across the state, nation, and world. ISGRJ’s goal with this research project is not only to treat race and health equity as a wicked problem that benefits from interdisciplinary conversations with a strong humanistic core, but also, to strategize ways of communicating that research to a broader public, reaching key agents in communities and institutional settings within the health care industry. 

Learn more about the Black Bodies, Black Health Project here.

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive and transform Descriptive Bibliography—the systematic description of print materials as physical objects—for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies. The goal is to create a digital database whose capacities can reveal the dynamic social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and beyond.

McGill and Goldsby believe that the digital environment is ideally suited for bibliographic information: unlike codex bibliographies, a digital bibliographic database can be queryable, expandable, revisable, and re-organizable (no longer ordered only by the lives of authors); it can include images of covers, illustrations, and vital bibliographic details; it can also be crowd-sourced and publicly accessible. By tapping the explanatory potential of digital technologies (specifically, the revolutionary metadata approach called “Linked Data”), the goal of this project is to build an electronic database whose networking capacities can reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture, in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora. 

Dr. Tajah Ebram Appointed as First Black Studies Librarian and Lead for the Black Bibliography Project

The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, Rutgers University Libraries and the Black Bibliography Project  are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Tajah Ebram as the first Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University.  In addition to supporting faculty and students working in Black studies, Dr. Ebram will serve as the Rutgers lead for the Black Bibliography Project, which seeks to revitalize the practice of bibliography for African American literary and cultural studies. She will be based in Alexander Library, collaborating across the campus and with BBP colleagues at Yale University.

Read more about Dr. Ebram's appointment here.

Learn more about the The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) here.

UISFL is a Department of Education grant that provides funding to plan, develop, and carry out programs to strengthen and improve undergraduate instruction in international studies and foreign languages.

Professors Mayte Green-Mercado and Amir Moosavi were awarded this grant to develop the Arabic Language Initiative (ALI) at Rutgers University-Newark which aims at expanding Arabic Language instruction, courses on Middle Eastern history, politics, society, and culture, as well as study abroad and service-learning opportunities for Rutgers-Newark undergraduate students. The Arabic Language Initiative will also launch a lecture series devoted to exploring questions of human displacement and transitional justice.