Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture Project Funded

Jan. 10, 2022 | Karen Tongson, professor of gender and sexuality studies, English and American studies and ethnicity

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has granted us $500,000 to support intersectional studies at the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. The grant will extend across 42 months to support several initiatives to bolster intersectional work, including:

• Upscaling our multi-platform network for podcasting, public events, community engagement and alternate publication styles and formats
• Establishing graduate student assistance positions and fellowships involving collaborations with podcast networks, regional organizations, and media/publications defined by intersectional commitments
• Building a mutual aid-based mentorship model across faculty ranks, roles, and organizations

The consortium, which coalesced as a faculty-led initiative just before the pandemic struck in 2020, is housed in USC Dornsife’s Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and includes faculty from the College and other USC schools who have actively brought scholarly research on popular culture to the broader public, as well as forms of creative practice and social justice work to the university.

Our goal is to provide scholars and practitioners with tools to address structural change and transformation in their fields and at their respective institutions and organizations. Toward that end, we plan to foster skill-sharing and material resource-sharing, while trading forms of expertise, from liberatory pedagogies, to digital and audio publication and production, to advice on navigating institutions, and forging community-based systems of support. We will also continue to center audio production and podcasts in our research and pedagogy plans.

More information about these plans can be found on our website.