The original conception of the Just Futures grant for Williams College and its partners drew upon the necessity of highlighting and enhancing the courses at participating colleges and universities that center on Indigenous, Afro, and Afro-Indigenous histories and modern-day realities.
Just Futures has awarded 5 Course Enhancement grants to Williams faculty for sustained work to develop a new course or enhance an existing course that engages the initiative’s thematic areas. The call highlighted the desire for proposals that engage with any one or more of the following topics, particularly in ways centered in the American Northeast/New England and/or this region’s wider geographic connections in the Southeast, Caribbean, Africa, Atlantic and Pacific Worlds, and globally:
- Native American/Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, politics, and expressions;
- African-American experiences, histories, cultures, politics, and expressions;
- Afro-Indigenous intersections, experiences, histories, identities, politics, and expressions;
- Coalitions, solidarities, and organizing among these communities/groups;
- Maritime history and coastal studies, with focus on diverse human communities’ interactions with the sea, including the Atlantic slave trade and human trafficking, and practices and expressions of resistance and liberation;
- Critical examinations of settler colonialism and its ongoing impacts and legacies, as well as multiple forms of resistance;
- Critical examinations of racial slavery and its ongoing impacts and legacies, as well as multiple forms of resistance;
- Community-based and decolonial approaches to knowledge formation;
- Public humanities and community-engaged forms of interpretation and expression;
- Relevant communities’ political and social movements for climate justice, sovereignty, Land Back, reparations, Black Liberation, as well as movements which engage in practices of wellbeing as forms of resistance to domination.
The recipients of the grants are as follows:
Margaux Kristjansson, former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies in the American Studies Program
Spring 2022 course: AMST 401: Policing Nations: Indigenous Nations and the Carceral State
Laura Martin, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Faculty Affiliate in History
Fall 2022 Course: ENVI 229/ HIST 264: Environmental History
José Constantine, Associate Professor of Geosciences
Fall 2022 Course: GEOS 103: Global Warming and Environmental Change
Christina Simko, Associate Professor of Sociology
Fall 2022 Course: SOC 230/AMST 233: Memory and Forgetting
Benjamin Twagira, Assistant Professor of History
Fall 2022 Course: GBST 203 / HIST 204 / AFR 227: Colonial Rule and Its Aftermaths in Africa