Description
The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) advances scholarship, arts, and public dialogue about the centrality of race and racism in the systems we inhabit.
Since our founding in 1996, we have worked with university partners, students, professors, staff, and community members to establish spaces of growth, compassion, respect, freedom, and joy at the University of Chicago and beyond.
In 2023–2024, our priority programs include the Beyond Prisons Initiative (BPI) and our ongoing Reimagining the University project.
BPI presents an opportunity for UChicago to offer a distinctive and innovative approach to community-centered pedagogy, research, cultural production, and civic engagement that reaches beyond the prison wall and extends into communities most affected by mass incarceration.
Our work to reimagine the 21st-century university engages diverse members of local and national campus communities, including South Side residents, to ask, “What does it mean to practice freedom?” and “What is the role of race and other social structures and statuses in determining whose knowledge, expertise, experience, and access to freedom counts?”
Donations are applied to...
Support for Beyond Prisons Mixed-Enrollment Classes:
Each year, in partnership with the Prison + Neighborhoods Arts/Education Project and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, we offer a mixed-enrollment course for UChicago students and currently incarcerated students to learn side-by-side at Stateville Prison. This course employs a radically inclusive pedagogical approach that urges students to think critically and expansively about social differences, social injustices, and social change. Through rigorous engagement with materials from diverse mediums, this course facilitates a uniquely meaningful and transformational learning experience for all involved.
Support for Reimagining the University:
We curate unique public programs and share resources with faculty, students, staff, artists, and community members who are reimagining the university as a place that is deeply engaged with questions of race, freedom, and social justice.
Why are donations necessary?
At CSRPC, our vision is to bring people together who are working across disciplines, intersecting identities, geographies, and ways of knowing to advance antiracist research and practice.
We are all students and teachers; we work together to create knowledge and nurture spaces of growth, compassion, respect, freedom, and joy.