The department organizes an annual summer school on racial politics, attended by graduates in the DMV area.
Beginning in 2023, the department began to organize an annual summer school addressing the study of race within political science, inviting scholars whose innovative research has reframed our understanding of the relationship between race and the study of politics. In the late nineteenth century, the original Hopkins Seminary of History and Politics played a meaningful role in formulating political science as an independent area of study. As recent disciplinary histories have demonstrated, questions of racial hierarchy, reconstruction, and mores were never far from the minds of the men, many hailing from the immediately postbellum South, who assembled in Baltimore under the tutelage of Herbert Baxter Adams.
The question that today confronts scholars of political science is not whether racist concepts have influenced the development of the discipline but, instead, how to think differently in ways that eliminate racism’s remaining effects. Such is the task the Summer School presents for itself, working better to understand the roles race plays in politics, and racism in political science, by treating race as central rather than marginal to our understanding of political life, and, in doing so, addressing all subfields. Through the summer school, we are working to train a cadre of young scholars who will be equipped with the empirical knowledge and conceptual-methodological sensitivity necessary to confront the ongoing influence of race in domestic and international political life.
Summer School 2024
The second Hopkins graduate summer school on racial politics was held on the Homewood campus in June 2024. The keynote address was given by Prof Deva Woodly (Brown University). This year’s summer school had a focus on race in comparative context, with seminars run by Consuelo Amat, Clive Gabay, Frederick C. Harris, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Keisha-Khan Perry, Desirée Poets, Robbie Shilliam, Lester Spence, and Inés Valdez.
Topics covered included:
- The politics of care and Black Lives Matter
- Analyzing race in authoritarian contexts
- Race and dependency theory
- Race in the SWANA region
- Race and settler colonialism in Brazil
- Black politics in the US
- Impacting policy through Black radical organizing
Summer School 2023
The inaugural Hopkins graduate summer school on racial politics was held on the Homewood campus in June 2023 and lasted a week. The keynote address was given by Prof Tiffany Willoughby Herard, and seminars were run by Profs Jessica Blatt, Shatema Threadcraft, Lilliana Mason, Robbie Shilliam, Lester Spence, and Minkah Makalani.
Topics covered included:
- The history of Political Science as a discipline
- Black Feminist praxis and politics
- Political psychology of racist attitudes
- Methods of political science
- Black studies as a political intervention
- Theorizing black organizing and urban politics
