Welcome to a brand new schoolyear – 2024-2025 – and warm hugs to our new and returning students, our faculty and staff, and you, the members of our set of collectives in AES! As the lead positive thinker and doer in our department, I always try to embrace whatever comes our way, whether they’re opportunities that are waiting for us to take on, or a couple of bumps on the road needing our engagement. The theme of our recent departmental retreat surely embodies this ethos: celebrate, rebuild, and enable. And it is in this spirit that we start this autumn quarter with joy, vitality, and readiness in continuing with our journey all the way to next year and the years ahead!
Speaking of years ahead, next year, 2025, we will be celebrating our 40th birthday, being one of the first in the nation to institutionalize an American ethnic studies department in 1985, when discrete programs that were previously in existence, such as African American Studies, Chicano Studies, and Asian American Studies, were consolidated into one academic unit with its own faculty and staff. It is a big milestone for us, for we have grown since then into a solid department with a robust set of undergraduate majors and students, with a Diversity Minor program under its watch, and with the impending graduate program about to take-off soon. Just last year, we were successful in our search for another scholar who will join our collective, Lupe Flores, a social-cultural anthropologist who obtained his degree from the prestigious Rice University and who works on Chicanx/Latinx Studies, border and migration control, the digital security state, cultural production and representation, and multi-sited ethnographies. Dr. Flores will finish his resident scholarship this year at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but in the meantime, a warm welcome to you, Lupe!
This schoolyear, we’re activating a series of events funded by our recently-acquired grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities project. Stay tuned for our announcements of exciting community-facing events that will be held at the Wing Luke Museum, the Sea Mar Museum of Chicano/a/Latino/a Culture, and the Northwest African American Museum. We will celebrate our communities, recognize the achievements of our faculty and staff, and enable meaningful conversations with each other about our work and everything else we do in partnership with the communities we care about.
The work of shepherding a department is a daily grind, but more than that, it is a kind of work that keeps me grounded, optimistic, and excited to be working alongside a super achieving faculty, a diligent and caring staff, a terrific set of inspired and conscientious students, a set of supportive deans, and an energetic treasure trove of community members and institutions. If you’re ever on campus, please feel free to visit us to partake in our productive struggles in keeping alive our quest for social transformation. This is our legacy from those students and advocates who helped establish American ethnic studies in the 1970s and 80s, and it is one that we will always share with you.
Rick Bonus
Chair, American Ethnic Studies