Pelourinho Plaza, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Photo by Wikipedia user Sitenl (Samory Santos), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Editor’s note: During the January 2021 Intersession, as part of Geneseo’s project of becoming an antiracist college, nearly a dozen faculty taught courses that either focused centrally on issues of racial justice or incorporated those issues via dedicated modules and interwoven content. Professor Medeiros’s post is the first in a series in which faculty reflect on their objectives and experience in these courses.
Contemporary cultural anthropologists such as myself must grapple with the problematic and racist legacy of our discipline’s founders who were complicit in the creation of race as a category and the normalization of racism. For me, overcoming this legacy has meant creating lessons and entire courses that contribute to antiracism efforts in our society and on our campus. In the course Race, Racism and the Black Experience in the Americas, students are introduced to the ways in which race is socially and culturally constructed not just in the United States but in countries across the Americas. They learn that although the construction of race is not universal, white privilege and the marginalization of people who are racially marked as “Black” exists in sociocultural contexts throughout North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean.
The Center for Digital Learning and the SUNY Geneseo Student Association are excited to invite members of the campus community — students, faculty, and staff — to a conversation about student workload in online courses.
The Zoom event, which requires registration, will be held Thursday, March 18, 1:45 — 2:45 p.m. Participation is limited to the first 150 registrants.
The documentary Coded Bias follows MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini as she explores why facial recognition technology fails to see dark-skinned faces, how biases of various kinds find their way into computer algorithms, and what citizens can do to fight algorithmic injustice.
Editor’s note: The CDL is proud to launch a series of occasional perspectives offered by our student affiliates. As part of their work in the center, CDL student affiliates are encouraged to explore matters related to digital learning that interest them, and to develop and express their own research-informed opinions on these matters.
The spring and fall semesters of 2020 presented many challenges to students and faculty, and we were resilient: we changed in response to the mounting challenges, and kept changing. We adapted to modes of digital learning that have become familiar to us since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus last spring, like video-conferencing on Zoom or Google Meet and interacting with courses primarily through Canvas. Now that we are more or less acclimated to digital learning during the pandemic, we have a moment to pause and ask questions. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say we need this moment to pause and ask questions before we proceed further along the path of digital pedagogy, lest we be faced with an unexpected turn, the inevitable fork in the path we must be prepared for.
It’s time for another CDL newsletter! This month’s newsletter falls within Black History Month, which will be the CDL’s primary focus for the duration of the month.
This month, you can expect the CDL to be promoting the many Black History Month events planned and organized by the Antiracism and DEI subcommittee of the President’s Commission on Diversity and Community at Geneseo.
Pelourinho Plaza, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Photo by Wikipedia user Sitenl (Samory Santos), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Media kit still from the film 
Photo by Flickr user 