Associate Professor of Africana Studies Tiffany Ruby Patterson presented a paper titled "Knowledge, Method, and Race: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Takes on the Same Realities" at the Race and Pedagogy Conference at the University of Puget Sound in September. Research for the paper was funded by the Class of 1963 Faculty Fellowship, a grant that she has used to develop a course at Hamilton titled Knowledge and Method in Global African Studies which will be offered in the Africana Studies Program in the near future. Patterson's paper was based on research for the course.
The paper presented at the conference takes the subject of race and examines how race (and its ideology racism) as a topic, a fact, and an experience emerges in the assignments and discussions of particular disciplines and what pedagogical techniques can be used in the classroom to foster a deeper understanding of how race shapes realities created by disciplines, why race has assumed a prominent position in some disciplines such as history and sociology and why it sometimes appears to be relegated to separate spheres in areas such as philosophy, literature or art. The paper offered examples of how to use material from different disciplines to discuss the same reality.
