“Beyond Plans and Promises: Active Leadership for the Future,” is the theme for this year’s Plan 2008 Diversity Forum, which will be held at the Memorial Union, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008. This year’s forum will examine aspects of institutional racism and explore both institutional and individual actions that will be critical for helping the University realize its long-term commitment. A cultural focus will be the 12,000-year history of indigenous peoples and nations in the Great Lakes, including our own campus.
Register online here. View a tentative agenda here. To request interpreters, captioning, or disability-related accommodations, please contact Paula Gates at gates@bascom.wisc.edu or 608-265-5228 as soon as possible.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva received his BA in sociology and economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras campus, in 1984. He received his MA in 1987 and his PhD in 1993 in the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He worked at The University of Michigan (1993–98) and Texas A&M University (1998–2005) and is currently a professor of sociology at Duke University with affiliations to the following units: African and African America Studies, Latin American Studies, Latino Studies, and the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies.
Professor Bonilla-Silva gained visibility in the social sciences with his 1997 American Sociological Review article, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” where he challenged social analysts to analyze racial matters from a structural perspective rather than from the sterile prejudice perspective. His research has appeared in journals such as Sociological Inquiry, Racial and Ethnic Studies, Race and Society, Discourse and Society, Journal of Latin American Studies, Contemporary Sociology, Critical Sociology, and Research in Politics and Society, among others.
Bonilla-Silva has authored four books, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (co-winner of the 2002 Oliver Cox Award given by the American Sociological Association); Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2004 Choice Award); and White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (with Ashley Doane). Most recently he finished a book (with Tukufu Zuberi) titled White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Social Science.
Professor Bonilla-Silva is currently working on three book projects: Anything but Racism: How Social Scientists Minimize the Significance of Racism (Routledge); The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life; and on a viewpoint textbook project on race and ethnic relations (with David G. Embrick).
His most recent presentations have been on the connections between the discourses of citizenship, democracy, and human rights, the Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the United States, and on the meaning and significance of the political ascendancy of Barack Obama.
He is the recipient of 2007 Lewis Coser Award given by the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for Theoretical-Agenda Setting and will deliver a keynote before the Association in August 2008 in Boston.