New Series Explores The Framing of Race

Think/Create/Engage, a new annual series designed to showcase the exploration of complex topical issues using the tools and resources made available by the synergy of a liberal arts college, a conservatory, and an art museum, will launch on campus January 2016. Think/Create/Engage, which will serve as a communications clearinghouse for courses and programming across campus in a calendar year focused on one theme, is centrally committed to the ethics of communication, especially the importance of listening in conversations about controversial issues. The series is directed by a steering committee of faculty, staff, and students.

Think/Create/Engage takes as its premise that liberal education and conservatory training involve the attainment of skills, knowledge, and dispositions critical to meeting important social, political, economic, artistic, and technical challenges. Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music offer a unique space for learning how to ask difficult questions, develop useful and important responses, foster the creative capacity to imagine differently, and transform the world in which we live.

In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, demands for immigration reform and other activism last year on campus and around the nation, the Think/Create/Engage steering committee selected The Framing of Race as the series’ 2016 theme. The Framing of Race references the historical, political, economic, cultural, and social processes that have produced white supremacy and the violent enslavement, genocide, and oppression of diverse groups of marginalized peoples.

The Think/Create/Engage steering committee invites students faculty, and staff to identify and or develop courses, speakers, creative work, workshops, performances, and other events that address the complexities of race, racialization, and racism, as well as anti-racism work and histories and strategies of empowerment, to be included in the 2016 series. The committee also welcomes proposals for one or two large campuswide events on the theme The Framing of Race. These events are not intended to exhaust campus programming on The Framing of Race topic, but rather to inspire additional events across campus that reflect a range of entry points into and perspectives on this theme.

Submit information about upcoming programming and proposals for speakers to framing@oberlin.edu no later than January 20, 2016. For further information about the Think/Create/Engage series or its 2016 theme, The Framing of Race, contact 2015–2016 Think/Create/Engage steering committee cochairs Wendy Kozol, professor and director of comparative American studies, at wendy.kozol@oberlin.edu, and Jan Miyake, associate professor of music theory at jan.miyake@oberlin.edu.