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Michelle Alexander Wins NAACP Award
Michelle Alexander, Associate Professor at the Moritz College of Law, won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Non-Fiction on March 4, for her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which was written during her joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute. The NAACP Image Awards, produced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is the nation’s preeminent multi-cultural awards show celebrating the outstanding achievements and performances of people of color in the arts (television, recording, literature, motion picture, and writing and directing), as well as those individuals or groups who promote social justice through their creative endeavors. From Ray Charles to Michael Jackson to Oprah Winfrey, the Image Awards have honored some of the greatest and most accomplished African Americans in entertainment. More information.
EVENTS
Corporate Power: The Legacy of Santa Clara
“Corporate Power: The Legacy of Santa Clara” will explore various perspectives on the doctrine of corporate personhood. The event, sponsored by The Kirwan Institute, will be held on April 20 at noon at the Saxbe Auditorium, Moritz College of Law, 55 W. 12th Avenue. The event ties in to the upcoming 125th anniversary of Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific RR on May 10th, which became the precedent for the doctrine of corporate personhood. That doctrine grants corporations equal protection under the 14th Amendment and many other constitutional rights, resulting in corporations exerting never-intended political power.
Event speakers and topics include: Corporate power and elections: Jennifer Brunner, attorney at Brunner Quinn and former Ohio Secretary of State; Santa Clara and the 14th Amendment: professor john powell, Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law and executive director of the Kirwan Institute; Corporate power and taxation: Wendy Patton, senior associate, Policy Matters Ohio; and Corporate power and privatization: Stephen Menendian, attorney/senior legal research associate, at the Kirwan Institute.
The event is free and open to the public. See flyer.
bell hooks to discuss “Race is Gendered” May 6
bell hooks, the internationally recognized author and scholar, will return for a second session in residence as visiting distinguished professor of women’s studies at Ohio State, from May 2 to May 11, 2011. The campus community is invited to her discussion entitled "Race is Gendered", moderated by the Kirwan Institute’s Wendy Smooth, assistant professor of Women’s Studies. The event will be held on Friday, May 6 from 10:00-11:30 at the Frank W. Hale Black Cultural Center, 153 W. 12th Ave. Her visit, the second during her year as scholar-in-residence, is sponsored by the Department of Women’s Studies, with the Kirwan Institute among the co-sponsors. Reservations are required for this free event. To register, send an email to kirwaninstitute@osu.edu.
May 16 Webinar To Explore Systems Thinking and Racial Justice
Professor john powell, Kirwan Institute executive director, will lead a webinar on systems thinking on May 16 from 2 to 3 p.m. EST. Hosted by Leadership Learning Community, the webinar will explore how systems thinking and a structural lens can inform work for racial justice and deepen an understanding of racial disparities. The webinar will examine how the interaction of structures and institutions creates both opportunity and deprivation, and also fuels ideas and language about race, identity and the self. Follow the links for more information and registration.
Transforming Race 2012: Visions of Change
Hold the date for Kirwan’s 2012 Conference, Transforming Race 2012: Visions of Change, to be held March 15-17, 2012 at the fabulous Hyatt Hotel on Capitol Square in downtown Columbus. This time around, we will invite speakers and attendees to look ahead – to take seriously the challenge of envisioning and forging the path to the United States and world we want to live in and help shape for our children and their peers. Lewis Carroll cautioned that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. So we will take a long moment to deliberate, discuss, and argue with specificity about where we want to go, what road(s) will help take us there, and, in light of those reflections, what course corrections might be necessary right now. Please save the dates and keep checking the conference website for registration, call for papers, and other details! Sponsorships are currently available; see additional sponsorship information.
PROJECTS
Kirwan Maps Opportunity Gaps for Jacksonville Children
The Kirwan Institute recently completed an opportunity mapping and analysis to help the Jacksonville Children’s Commission in Florida show the geographic distribution of opportunity in the metropolitan Jacksonville area. The mapping, funded by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, will help the Commission target its efforts to support families “to maximize their children’s potential to be healthy, safe, educated and contributing members of the community,” in line with the organization’s mission. For more information, see: News Release and Report.
Kirwan Staffers Co-Author Study Assessing Gaps in Broadband Coverage
A recent study by two Kirwan Institute co-authors shows the correlation between broadband availability, income and race in Los Angeles, Chicago and South Carolina. “Does Place Really Matter? Broadband Availability, Race and Income,” notes there is a racial divide in broadband availability in the heavily African American areas of Los Angeles, but no such divide in South Carolina, where the overall population has a relatively low income. The study was co-authored by Kirwan Institute researchers Samir Gambhir and Mikyung Baek, with Ying Li and Nicol Turner-Lee from the Joint Center on Political and Economic Studies. The findings were presented at TechNet, a national meeting of government officials and leading broadband scholars in Washington D.C. on March 22. Read the full report.
Rooting Intergroup Relations for Social Justice:
A Curricular “Mapping” of the Field
For about a year, the Kirwan Institute has been conducting a “mapping” of existing curricula, facilitation guides, and other materials used for cross-racial relationship building between immigrants and native-born communities of color. We have been seeking materials and interviewing representatives from community organizations, worker centers, unions, and other entities that strive to build relationships across differences of race, ethnicity, and nationality.
In mid-March, the Kirwan Institute hosted a small convening for members of this project’s advisory committee and other project partners at CASA de Maryland’s Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, MD. We reviewed our preliminary results and received feedback from participants that will help sharpen our analysis and guide this project’s next steps.
Ultimately, our analysis and resulting online resource center will provide practitioners with an enriched framework and the concrete tools necessary to bridge divides between marginalized communities of color.
Northwest Area Foundation African American Leadership Forums
The Northwest Area Foundation has been engaged in convening African American leadership forums in the Twin Cities, Portland, Seattle, and Des Moines in order to assess need and develop action steps to improve the economic and social conditions of low-income African Americans. While each forum is currently at a different stage of development, strategic themes to understanding major challenges impacting African American communities in each city are being compiled by working groups, and will be used to develop initiatives designed to improve quality of life in these areas. The process will be built around engagement with local leaders, conducting research and analysis, and creating a framework to both guide action in each area and position the work within a national context. We hope to organize a common agenda which, given the universality of conditions faced by African Americans in these areas, will have national implications, providing a blueprint for action utilizing the Opportunity Communities and Targeted Universalism frameworks informed by national best practices and local expertise. This work is expected to be completed by summer 2012.
Race-Recovery Index Charts Two-Year Impact of Federal Stimulus
In line with the two-year anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on February 17, the Kirwan Institute released its final Race-Recovery Index report in February. The two-year recap report concludes a series of monthly reports which tracked unemployment rates by race and also tracked the number of contracts - and contract dollar value - awarded to non-White-owned businesses. The report suggests that the stimulus was less helpful to people of color than to the population overall. Read the full report.
SSAI Opportunity Mapping
The Kirwan Institute has received a grant from Senior Service America, Inc. (SSAI) to work with Ohio State’s College of Social Work on the project “Employment Opportunities for Rural, Low-Income Older Adults.” This new and unique opportunity mapping initiative has presented welcomed challenges on how to think about opportunity in the context of aging or disabled populations, and what it means to develop “lifelong communities.” As we finalize the list of indicators and complete the data collection and mapping, one of the early lessons from this work has been that although there may be different ways of measuring access to opportunity among particular groups, the same general characteristics apply for all populations; quality housing, transportation, education, employment, and recreational resources are essential for good life outcomes in all communities. |
