Candice Lowe-Swift, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Erendira Rueda, Associate Professor of Sociology, received an Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges award for “Beyond Inclusion and Belonging: Telling Future Histories of Classrooms from 2050,” a multi-institutional workshop open to participants from all 25 member liberal arts schools.

“Future-history” storytelling has long been embraced by science fiction writers. More recently, Afro-futurists and climate change activists have drawn on this methodology to release thinking from the constraints of the present and effectively imagine worlds that are more aligned with the values of embracing and encouraging radical diversity and mattering in classrooms.

“The question that animates “Beyond Inclusion and Belonging” is: What is required of us to make our learning spaces ones where marginalized students feel fully alive in their learning experience? This workshop brings together educators and students to write “future-history” stories that can act as guides for pedagogies that nourish the presence and potential of diverse bodies, knowledges, and histories that come together on liberal arts campuses.”

“In 2006, the Mellon Foundation awarded the Mellon 23, a group of twenty-three liberal arts colleges, a Faculty Career Enhancement Program grant. In 2013 the group was renamed the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges to acknowledge the commitment of most of the member colleges to continue their collaborative work after the completion of the Mellon 23 grant”. Its members now include 25 liberal arts schools across the United States.