The DEIA Faculty Fellowship Program at Lawrence University seeks to empower faculty, staff, and students to significantly contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at Lawrence, the community, and the world. The aim is to attract a diverse faculty at Lawrence that helps to produce advocates and activists for social and epistemic justice.  To achieve this goal, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion partners with programs and departments across campus to offer fully funded visiting professorships that hold concurrent appointments in the Office of DEI as Faculty Fellows. 

Goals of the DEIA Faculty Fellowships Program are to:

  1. Broaden the diversity of Lawrence University’s faculty.
  2. Widen and deepen faculty awareness of the complexity of the equity, access, anti-racism, and inclusion issues.
  3. Create opportunities for faculty members to aid and provide input to advance DEI issues at Lawrence University, the community, and the world.
  4. Increase, over time, an understanding among all faculty members of the nature and character of diversity and inclusion at LU.
  5. Provide faculty with the requisite tools and strategies to decolonize syllabi, teaching, learning, and research, making them value every living being, and provide a voice for those who have been silenced by history or caged by a colonial and imperial mentality.

Duties include initiatives, workshops, and projects such as:

  1. Teaching courses in their area of subject matter expertise through a DEIA lens.

Allowing students exposure and access to a diverse group of subject matter experts and DEIA professionals with varying theoretically and methodically orientations and experiences to foster a richer educational environment that allows for deeper learning, engagement, and commitment to social, racial, economic and epistemic justice.    

  1. Creating inclusion curricular, classroom and syllabi:

To enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion at Lawrence, and train change leaders, the decolonization of the syllabus/curriculum is an imperative. Faculty will discuss how to decolonize their course syllabuses/curriculum with respect to content, pedagogy, assessment etc. The challenges, obstacles, and benefits of decolonized syllabuses is critically examined. In addition, using research literature, faculty discuss systemic racism in education/classroom (e.g., education as a tool for the maintenance of inequality; capture of public education by private interests; the new imperialism of data and growth of datafication, etc.), and provide solutions to end it. Faculty pedagogical practices focus on consciousness-raising, dialogue, and collaboration between teacher and student to achieve greater humanization for all.

  1. Lectures, Brown bags, and Colloquium

The lecture series, brown bag discussions and colloquium are intended to spark complicated conversations on shifting the geography and biography of knowledge, bringing identity into epistemology-who generates knowledge and from where?

Renown scholars/educationists present lectures in winter and spring about Decolonizing Research and Decolonizing Higher Education. Faculty are exposed to indigenous research methodologies. Decolonizing methodologies challenge the Eurocentric research methods that undermine the local knowledge and experiences of the marginalized groups. Faculty are encouraged to exercise critical reflexivity, enable reciprocity and respect for self-determination, embrace “Other” ways of knowing, and embody a transformative praxis.

Decolonizing higher education is identifying ways in which the university structurally reproduces colonial hierarchies; confronting, challenging, and rejecting the status quo; and reimagining them and putting alternatives into practice for the benefit of our academic integrity and our social viability. The benefits, obstacles, and challenges of decolonizing higher education are discussed and how decolonization is carried out different context.

In addition, DEIA Faculty Fellows will lead discussions in decoloniality as an epistemological movement, indigenous knowledge systems, cognitive justice, and decolonial education to understand the role played by educational institutions in the colonial and imperial project. The colonized had their own indigenous knowledge systems, ways of knowing and thinking which the colonizers obliterated (what de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide), ignored, or suppressed.

  1. Workshops and Professional Development

The DEIA Faculty Fellows will facilitate workshops and professional development on microaggressions, white privilege, developing an anti-racist agenda and mindset, cultural competence, building an Anti-Racist workplace/classroom, preventing racial discrimination and harassment in the work environment, and any other relevant topics to faculty and students. The cumulative effect of these workshops is to produce change agents who are committed to a more multi-perspectival and pluriversal understanding of human experience and ultimately a new humanity, and are grounded in education for liberation, not oppression, alienation, or subjugation.

Application details will be announced in October when applications open.