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Community college faculty fellows enhance their curriculum on racism, dispossession, and migration with a year-long professional development fellowship from Migrations. 

Our faculty fellows are based in community colleges around New York State. Meet our 2023 fellow and our 2022 group of faculty fellows.

About the Fellowship

As a community college faculty fellow collaborating with the Migrations initiative, you'll receive $1,000 to advance curricular projects that advance interdisciplinary pedagogy that centers the connections between racism, dispossession, and migration. The opportunity is open to community college faculty of any discipline at two-year institutions in upstate New York. 

This work will facilitate the understanding of historical and contemporary relationships between the displacement of people, including through the dispossession of Indigenous lands and rights, and racism, xenophobia, opposition to immigration, and anti-immigrant violence. 

Selected fellows will be matched with partners, such as corresponding scholars and/or content resources.

We will also support work that highlights multispecies migration and the natural and built environments through which they pass. Applicants are also encouraged to directly address the role of racism, dispossession, and migration in higher education.

Projects may include:

  • The development of a new course
  • A new unit for an existing course
  • A service learning component to an existing course that supports a reflective pedagogy and integrates collaboration with local community members, including migrants, refugees, and communities of color (including Black people, native peoples, Latinx people, Asian Americans, and other diasporas), where possible
  • Original proposals or ideas, which you can discuss with the initiative before applying

Sample Ideas for Modules

Anthropology
  • A module that focuses on Indigenous movement through archeology, art, and history, and seeks to understand borders and migration as rooted in histories of dispossession and racism. Examine settler colonialism in the Northeast and the dispossession of Haudenosaunee people. Consider showing a recording of our event: Indigenous Movement: Dispossession, Return, and Imposed Borders.
  • What and who are climate change refugees? Displacement is typically approached in anthropology as an exceptional experience that is associated with refugees and forced migrations. Examine the increasing large-scale migration and cross-border mass movements of people fleeing from weather-related disasters. What is the global response to these movements? How do climate change refugees differ from refugees who flee because of war, violence, conflict or persecution?
Biology
  • A discussion of race as a social construct not a biological attribute. Consider how our society uses race as a way to sort people into groups based on appearance that is assumed to be indicative of deeper biological or cultural connections. While these socially defined racial groups do differ in outcomes, this is due to systemic difference in lived experience and institutional racism rather than biology.
  • Consider the use of the term "ancestry" to describe human diversity. This conversation may include how the popular classifications of race are based chiefly on skin color, but that other relevant features including height, eyes, and hair are determined by only a minute portion of the genome. Furthermore, as a species we are estimated to share 99.9 percent of our DNA with each other. A module could include discussion of how this 0.1 percent difference of variation has been sufficient justification for all manner of discriminations and atrocities. How are these notions used to further racist and ethnocentric arguments, including white nationalism and anti-Semitism?
Criminology
  • Migration profoundly shapes our past, present, and future, informing contours of who belongs and whether decisions to move are worthy, moral, or immoral. You could ask students to engage in conversations about a deceptively simple question: How do citizenship and borders define and regulate our lives? How do they affect the ways in which we perceive who is legal and illegal, and who belongs or does not belong in "our" country.
History
  • Examine immigration as a major theme in U.S. history and culture. You could discuss immigration in different periods of U.S. history, and in different locations, from Boston and New York to San Diego, San Francisco, and Honolulu.
  • Discuss the over 4 million people that have migrated to the United States as refugees since World War II. You could examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a "haven for the oppressed." You can pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum seekers and the changing definitions of who "merits" protection in the U.S.
Government/Political Science
  • What should be the role of governments in addressing racism and xenophobia? You can look at what is being done here in the U.S., in other countries, and the role of the United Nations and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
  • What is the difference between structural racism and systemic racism? You can examine the U.S. housing system, as resulted in government-sponsored displacement, exclusion, and segregation that has exacerbated racial inequality in the United States.
Miscellaneous 
  • Integration of our podcast, Migrations: A World on the Move, into your class. With each episode, postdoc Eleanor Paynter speaks with experts who highlight how multidisciplinary, multispecies perspectives on migration help us understand key global issues.

How to Apply

We aren't accepting applications at this time. Follow us on Twitter for updates about the next cycle of applications. 

Interested in professional development on demand? Watch Migration as Practice: Pedagogy Workshop and other past events on our YouTube channel.