The Dartmouth Consortium in the Studies of Race, Migration, and Sexuality (RMS) is an interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative aimed at deepening social and cultural analyses of worlds and works shaped by the colonial and transnational forces of race, migration, and sexuality.
As the moral imagination of our times, each of the three key terms is at the center of a complex humanitarian and human rights struggle that is precipitated by global inequality, climate change, and military conflict. Set in tandem with the rise of protest movements emblematized by #occupy, #blacklivesmatter, #metoo in the U.S., and the Umbrella and Arab Spring movements across Hong Kong, North Africa, and the Middle East in the last decade, the ethics of formal, political citizenship as well as the transnational terms of cultural citizenship are profoundly contested in the making of more inclusive and just societies.
RMS is devoted to understanding these contestations and upheavals by engaging and advancing intellectual work related to Critical Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies in the transmigratory context of the Americas, Africas, and Asias. Looking beyond the discrete and static categories of multiplicity – multinational, multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic or multigender – we seek a constellative and comparative understanding through other morphemes such as trans-, inter-, and post-, that activate critiques in cognate fields of study less considered, less visible, and less privileged.
Our Consortium encourages and emphasizes a range of practices anchored in the intellectual study of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class and embodiment, and citizenship and migration across a broad spectrum of interlocking experiences, histories, and practices.
From global border crises and calamitous climate changes to seismic cultural shifts, the urgency of addressing world issues is compounded by the complexity of understanding them on different scales. Further, it requires approaches that can comprehend impacts at once distinctive and related through the colonial and capitalist technologies of the U.S. empire, global China, and other regional actors in neoliberal, intercultural and postcolonial modernities.
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/rms/about/
