10/19/2004

Contact: Zanice Bond de Perez, Hall Center for the Humanities (785) 864-7884

KU-Haskell project to present workshop on building communities of color

LAWRENCE -- A joint project between the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University will present a free workshop Nov. 4 and 5 to encourage scholarship that focuses on social action, collaboration and community-building with African-Americans and First Nations peoples.

Specific topics at the "Role of Research in Building Communities" workshop include historical and contemporary conceptions of identity; oral memory, folklore and literature; curricular research; and interdisciplinary approaches for working in communities of color.

The workshop is presented by "Shifting Borders of Race and Identity: A Research and Teaching Project on the Native American and African American Experience," which is supported by the Ford Foundation and designed to bring scholars across disciplines to the borderlands between indigenous and African American studies. Pre-registration is required. For more information, contact (785) 864-7884 or raceid@ku.edu.

The workshop will take place Nov. 4 at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union and Nov. 5 at the Haskell Cultural Center at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence.

Historian James F. Brooks, director of the School of American Research Press in Santa Fe, N.M., will give the keynote address Nov. 4. He is the author of the prize-winning book "Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands." He is under contract with Harvard University Press for his book "Nations, Tribes, and Colours: Borderland Peoples and a History for the Twenty-First Century."

Other speakers include Cynthia Chavez, associate curator of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.; and Valerie J. Phillips, assistant professor of law and co-director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Tulsa College of Law in Oklahoma.