SBP: Conference: Broadening Participation and Building Bridges

Texas State University - San Marcos, San Marcos TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support the conduct of the 2018 Race, Ethnicity, and Place (REP) conference. REP is a biennial meeting that has brought together diverse groups of scholars to facilitate research on race and ethnicity in geography and has provided a critical gathering place of support and collaboration for underrepresented scholars. REP will catalyze new activities focusing on geographic, racial, and ethnic dimensions of social science research. More so than any other conference or community-wide activity in geography, REP explicitly brings together scholars who are members of underrepresented groups as well as scholars whose research involves the study of socioeconomic, cultural, and other dynamics within communities populated by people who are underrepresented in STEM fields. REP also will involve scholars from sociology, anthropology, and other related fields. REP will focus on building collaborative relationships among participating scholars to foster a broader range of activities that engage more students and other early-career professionals in STEM research. As such, REP will provide a test-bed for advancing scholarship on race, ethnicity, and place that requires participants to engage in discussions about different epistemological approaches and issues that can hinder or advance scholarship on this topic. Explicit efforts will be made to engage more scholars from underrepresented groups and to help them form stronger research networks to help enhance and improve their future capabilities. Through explicit attention to building bridges across research approaches and by providing active, ongoing intergenerational mentoring, REP will encourage more effective research on racial and ethnic dimensions of social science research in geography and related fields. Diversifying the involvement of individuals engaged in all types of work and activity remains a major challenge in higher education. To directly address this challenge in geography and related fields, the 2018 REP conference will be held in mid-October at the Mexican American Cultural Center (MAC) in Austin, Texas. The conference will integrate new participants through active recruitment and engagement; by designing strategic panels and keynotes to attract a broader audience, and by offering a post-conference mentoring and professional-development workshop for early-career faculty and advanced graduate students from underrepresented groups. Special emphasis will be given to examining complex issues of race and ethnicity through cross-disciplinary collaborations that integrate a range of theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methodological approaches across multiple scales of analysis. This award will support early career researchers from underrepresented groups to participate in the 2018 REP Conference and thus integrate new generations of scholars into the meetings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.