This Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop is titled “Topics in Classical Intersectionalities” (TiCI) and is dedicated to exploring the interactions and clashes between social issues and the field of Classics. Our main aim is to host a forum for graduate students and faculty to discuss topical themes pertaining to Classical philology, art, archaeology, literature, and history. During the course of our meetings, we hope to become familiar with a broad spectrum of foundational theories, in order to make our group widely accessible and to nuance our discussions about social justice in Classical research.
Our group’s name takes its inspiration from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality that sees vectors of social oppression operating in overlapping, interlocking ways. TiCI exists to examine the role our disciplines and the ‘Classical tradition’ play within contemporary social issues, such as racism, sexism, classism, and ableism.
Our planned activities will primarily involve critical discussions of secondary scholarship, recent news articles, and ancient material during monthly meetings. As a group, we plan to generate a collaborative bibliography of resources on social justice and Classics.
In addition to monthly meetings that take a variety of forms, TiCI usually hosts an informal end-of-the-year symposium in April. We select graduate student and faculty papers and presentations in a range of formats that discuss issues raised by each year’s readings and other topics related to our discipline’s role in social justice. In advance of this symposium, we provide feedback on the graduate student papers in written and oral form through a group workshop and other peer editing methods. Thus, we hope to cultivate graduate students’ writing, communication, and research even as we inform and refine our perspectives on current events that affect Classics.
Rackham’s RIW page: (http://www.rackham.umich.edu/academics/rii/interdisciplinary-workshops).