Title: Black Participation in Social Movements Subject of New Ignatius Seminar
Corey Fields, the sociology department’s Idol Family Term Chair, will lead a new Georgetown College Ignatius Seminar this fall on black participation in post-civil rights social movements.
The College’s three-credit Ignatius Seminars, one of several options for its first-year students, are designed to introduce students to the depth and diversity of Georgetown’s intellectual community. The seminars are named for St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus in the 16th century.
Students are able to take seminars with the president, the provost and the College dean of the university, as well as with numerous professors.
“My seminar will look not only at how blackness informs organizational movements and examine how such movements draw on historical tactics from the civil rights movement, but also how they engage contemporary black people to get them to participate more,” Fields explains.
The Blackness as an Organizing Strategy: Black Participation in Post-Civil Rights Social Movements seminar also will look at the effect later social movements’ success may have had on political organizing by African Americans.
Fields is particularly interested in what he calls “unusual overlapping identities,” which he says includes black Republicans.
“There’s a perception of black Republicans having weak or nonexistent black identities and I haven’t found that to be the case at all,” the professor explains.
Fields is the author of Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans (University of California Press, 2016) and is now looking at the ways in which race gets incorporated into the institutional missions and business practices of companies.