The Benevolent Street Collaboratory, founded in the fall of 2022, is a small working group of graduate students, focused specifically on the interdisciplinary study of race and race relations, who are drawn from across the humanities and social sciences at Brown University. Current members include students from Africana Studies, American Studies, History, and Modern Culture and Media.
The premise of the collaboratory is: (1) to foster the feeling of cohort-ness, with faculty direction, for students working in this broader area beyond an admitted year or a single graduate program; (2) to encourage the workshopping of rough, speculative, and risky research in a constructive and confidential environment; (3) to connect current students at Brown with already-established scholars working in the critical study of race and race-relations, and to enjoin those senior scholars in that process of review, critique, and improvement; and (4) to create, over time, new connections and collaborations that reach outside of the physical space and face-to-face environs of our campus, linking current graduate students at Brown with a community of scholars that is national, and devoted to the careful, constructive, and confidential support of new and important work on race, difference, and power.
MPG 