The University of Wyoming’s Black Studies Center (UWBSC) will be introduced to the community in October through the hosting of a four part webinar series. The State of Black Studies After 50 Years: A Critical Analysis will examine components of the Black Studies field in education, as well as provide an introduction for the UWBSC’s mission and goals.
In reference to his father who was also a historian, Dr. Fredrick Douglass Dixon, a professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and founding director of the UWBSC said, “now it’s time for me to add to the legacy by making sure that when we think about the University of Wyoming and its composition, what it looks like, and marrying that with today’s social climate.”
One of the goals, according to the UWBSC, is to create an institutional platform dedicated to providing “efforts and resources to support culturally responsive teaching, rural community-focused engagement, and evidence-based research related to Black Studies.”
According to the UWBSC, center plans already span 3 years and cover goals about community engagement to research conducted with the help of graduate students. There will be multiple programs introduced under the Community of Scholars Initiative, the overarching guide of the mission and goals of the center.
“I think it’s very important that I make sure that it’s inclusive, that it also sets the bar for Black Studies in rural areas,” Dixon said. “That it also lives up to, and even pushes, real issues that we face in higher ed.. For us to now see the word ‘diversity’ become very important, enough to where we go on college campuses now and there’s someone directly speaking to diversity in a professional sense, programmatic sense and a social sense.”
This directly corresponds with the University of Wyoming Mission Statement. According to Dixon, it’s time to have a center devoted to Black Studies on the UW campus.
“A wise man once said, ‘There’s nothing like an idea that time has come,’” Dixon said, “and when that time has come some things seem to appear out of nowhere but that’s not exactly how it is. It’s just that some forces, that some folks don’t give enough understanding to, that the time is now.”
According to UWBSC, two of the many programs that will be introduced are quarterly Black Studies Center Workshops “that will encompass a wide variety of practical and theoretical subjects” and the Community Engagement Project. The project aims to connect students to volunteer opportunities in the Laramie community.
