
The College of Social Sciences and Humanities has long been committed to fostering a community of belonging for our students, faculty, and staff. Belonging, as well as questions of race, racism and anti-racism, are part of all our programs, all our research centers, our three areas of strategic focus—and are always work in progress. At the same time, we focus on how modes of constructing social hierarchies, including race, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and others, intersect with one another.
Our Experiential Liberal Arts model, with its strong focus on teaching and researching social justice and encouraging engagement beyond the classroom and the university, provides particular opportunities for attracting and retaining faculty, students, and staff from historically underrepresented groups.
Our focus on community engagement and experiential learning—from co-op to experiential PhD semesters—is important in this context, as are our efforts to integrate Digital and Public Humanities for the representation of historically underrepresented voices, and our efforts to bring social science and humanities approaches to public policy work, including work on social disparities.
To learn more about ongoing work and initiatives, we invite you to read about the racial literacy popup course and event series, racial justice cluster searches, Anti-Racism and Culture and other pages in CSSH topics, social justice research, and op-eds for a broader public.
- View our statement on CSSH’s Race and Social Justice Initiatives, August 2022
- Read our departments’ reports on Diversity and Inclusion
- View the members of the CSSH Advisory Council on Civic Sustainability
- View the demographic composition of faculty, staff, and students
- Find university resources on diversity and inclusion
- View our Diverse Vendor Directory – Make informed decisions when spending CSSH funds and your own dollars, and give diverse businesses an opportunity to provide service to our community.
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Reflecting on a Semester of Racial Literacy
Learn MoreOur mission
- We seek to foster critical engagement with questions of identity, oppression, privilege, and inequality in our classrooms and beyond;
- We are committed to confronting the barriers to full inclusion of historically excluded underrepresented groups in all aspects of the community deepening the cultural understandings of every member.
- We work together create a community where all members value and respect differences, share a sense of belonging, and fully participate;
- We continue our ongoing work in recruiting and retaining an excellent and diverse community of students, staff and faculty;
- We provide training to support inclusive practices in our teaching, research, service and community engagement.




