About
Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series, 2024–2025
Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures
Established in 1994, the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars aim to support comparative research on historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. Named in honor of Mellon’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, the Mellon Sawyer Seminars bring together faculty, scholars, international visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and students from a variety of fields, including the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. Mellon support aims to engage scholars in comparative inquiry that would otherwise be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centers, departments, or programs. Sawyer Seminars are, in effect, temporary research centers. This year, the Mellon Foundation awarded Rutgers University —Newark $225,000 to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled “Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures.” The seminar series is organized by Mayte Green-Mercado, lead principal investigator, Associate Professor of History, and Newark campus director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ), and Lauren Shallish, co-principal investigator, Associate Professor of Disability Studies in Education, Associate Chair of the Department of Urban Education, and affiliated faculty in the Africana and American Studies departments.
Based at Rutgers-Newark, this seminar will bring together scholars, students, and community organizers to reflect on four interconnected themes of transitional justice, environmental justice, racial justice, and disability justice to illuminate shared histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflects not only the scholarly interests of our faculty and students but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community. Throughout the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters, “Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures,” will comprise a series of panels and workshops that draw on the expertise and research and demonstration projects of Rutgers-Newark faculty and graduate students, local, national, and global scholars, and bring together community activists, scholars and local artists who focus on thematic threads of disability justice, transition justice, racial justice and reparations, and environmental and climate justice. These seminars will invite participants to consider the ways that this subjectivity can be harnessed in the form of new and decolonized forms of storytelling as a tool for repair. The seminars will explore how narratives can be a form of reparations and a tool for it. The seminar will meet for one academic year with participants from the humanities, social sciences, arts, and professional schools present in several seminars.
