Welcome Remarks

Paula Moya
May 19, 2005

It is my genuine pleasure to welcome you all here today, to the "Realism in the World" conference, sponsored jointly by the "How Do Identities Matter?" network and the Junior Scholars Caucus of the Future of Minority Studies National Research Project. We are very grateful to the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and to the Stanford Humanities Center, for sponsoring the Identities network, and for funding our conference today.

I would like to take a few minutes to provide the context within which this meeting is taking place before turning the floor over to my co-organizer, Ulka Anjaria. The Future of Minority Studies project began in the summer of 2000 out of an impulse, really, of a few of us to continue to work together around issues of minority identity, education and social transformation. Michael Hames-Garcia and I had just finished co-editing an anthology, Reclaiming Identity, which brought together a number of scholars interested in developing a more adequate conception of identity as the basis for progressive social change. The four scholars who met that summer in Satya's Mohanty's living room originally conceived of the Future of Minority Studies project as a bi-coastal year-long research project involving Stanford, Cornell, and Binghamton. We planned a series of events that included three symposia at Binghamton, a conference at Stanford in October 2001 and a follow-up conference at Cornell in November. Since that time, the project has grown to a size and in a manner that we could have hardly imagined. As other scholars became involvedÑand made the Future of Minority Studies project their ownÑwe have been transformed into an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, multi-generational, and increasingly international entity. We had a conference at the University of Michigan in October 2002, a retreat in Punta Cana in May 2003, a conference at the University of Wisconsin in October of that same year, and another conference at Cornell University in June 2004. Most recently, several of us participated in a conference in India that was co-sponsored by FMS and the Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies (IRIS) in Jaipur, India. More significant than the number of meetings we have held, though, is that the FMS project has spun off a variety of semi-autonomous projects, including the Realist Pedagogy Project, the Junior Scholars Caucus, the Global Identities Group, the FMS Summer Institute, and the "How Do Identities Matter?" network here at Stanford. Clearly, there was a felt need out there in the world for something like the Future of Minority Studies project.

A consequence of becoming multi-generational- which first happened at the Michigan conference with the inclusion of graduate students, one of whom was Karin Spirn- was that we became more aware of the need for better mentoring of graduate students and junior faculty, and in particular, of minority graduate students and junior faculty. Mentoring and pedagogy have thus become central foci of our activities, and our concern with both mentorship and pedagogy has influenced not only what we do, but also the way we do it. You will notice that this conference is structured in a way that is different from the way conferences are usually structured. For one thing, the panelists are all junior scholars, and the respondents are more senior faculty. For another, we made all the papers available ahead of time and encouraged all conference participants to read them. Our intent, in doing this, has been to provide a professional and yet friendly context within which junior scholars can get serious engagement from both scholars who are further along in their career trajectory, as well as from their peers. Moreover, we have done away with the "keynote speech" as something that does not always further sustained conversation and mutual learning. Finally, we have scheduled in a significant amount of discussion time, both formal and informal. I hope it works the way we want it to, and that you enjoy the day. I would like now to turn over the floor to Ulka Anjaria, a third year graduate student in MTL, the student coordinator of the "How Do Identities Matter" network, and my very able conference co-organizer. She will talk a bit about the Junior Scholar Caucus and provide the intellectual rationale for our meeting today.