Toward a Universe of Scholarship on Race and Social Justice
First and foremost, Sonoma State University is a university and is home to world class faculty with an extraordinary breadth and depth of scholarship on the politics and realities of race in America, In the last five years alone, books including Megan Burke’s unflinching and revelatory When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (2019), Steve Estes’s Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement (2015), Mike Ezra’s collection The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (2015), my own Penguin Portable African American Women Writers (2017), Greg Sarris’s How a Mountain Was Made (2017), Dean Laura Alamillo’s collection Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children’s Literature, and Kim Hester-Williams’s celebrated Racial Ecologies (2018) have been published and praised. Our faculty are continuing to produce knowledge that strengthens and deepens our grasp of the past to prepare students to create world more just and balanced and strengthened. With books reaching back more than a decade, Sonoma State faculty have made social and racial justice the centerpiece of their scholarly focus.