A Protest, Ongoing
A Protest, Ongoing
The Origins and Historical Challenges of Columbia University’s Ethnic Studies (CSER)
Overview
A Protest, Ongoing is a thesis project that documents the history of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) at Columbia University and its historical relationship to student activism. Through a compilation of detailed timelines, exhibits, and interviews with various historical players of the ethnic studies struggle, it seeks to build a collective memory to celebrate with the larger Columbia community in hopes of a continued fight for CSER departmentalization and a more inclusive higher education.
Background and Thesis
The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) at Columbia is unique in its origin. A study in race and ethnic studies was not something that the institution opened and offered; it is a discipline created and designed by student demand, a direct consequence of African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Native American student protestors fighting on a united front for a major.
This new kind of relationship between an academic discipline and its students is unparalleled --- where the receiver of education critiques and demands what is being “taught.” And this legacy has made its mark. It is precisely because of this unique history that CSER is able to foster the creative, non-traditional, and anti-hegemonic forms of research and discourse over its programs. A center that was built on the foundations of disruption will continue to disrupt.
"A curriculum is not just a set of books. A curriculum is always a process rather than a product. It is a way of ordering knowledge, of establishing priorities,of recommending certain perspectives and ignoring others."
Temma Kaplan, Director of CORRE
Format
Website + Instagram
I chose to publish my research on a digital platform because I wanted it to primarily speak to the current and prospective students of Columbia. Considering my audience, it was important that the exhibits, the videoclips, and the texts be accessible and engaging to a younger generation. By presenting my project through an online website and a social media account, I am making my project "time-specific," incorporating the very modes of communication we find ourselves using
in the year 2021.
Lee C. Lee, first tenured Asian American scholar at Cornell University in a 1990 panel
"American culture is, in fact, many cultures, and American history is, in fact, many histories."