Mellon Research Initiatives

This initiative brings UC Davis faculty and graduate students together with outside scholars and activists to advance a research agenda that focuses on racial capitalism. The historical relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial debates in U.S. historiography. Sometimes explicitly, often only implicitly acknowledged, it shapes fundamental questions about inequality, value, life, bondage, and freedom, among others, across the disciplines of race and ethnic studies, history, literary studies, law, economics, sociology and anthropology. Over the course of the next three years we will be staging dialogues across current work and chart new directions for the study of racial capitalism.

Our three-year Mellon Research Initiative will begin the process of creating a Feminist Arts & Science Shop at UCD. Our initiative draws on the European model of science shops that provide space for communities to participate in the creation of scientific and technological research agendas. We build upon this work by including the arts and specifically orienting our research agendas towards social justice ends. The UCD Feminist Arts & Science Shop will encourage the development of new science-making and artistic and humanistic modes of inquiry by providing a designated platform to co-create new ways of thinking about democracy and knowledge making in a community-engaged way.