Campus and Civic Partnerships

 

The Center supports and sponsors a number of public programs geared towards promoting an investigation of the ties between race, ethnicity and culture. These events are often presented in partnership with University of Chicago Registered Student Organizations (RSOs), other campus centers and academic units, as well as community-based institutions.  

 

Current Partnerships

  • Black Metropolis Research Consortium:  The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is a Chicago-based membership association of libraries, universities, and other archival institutions. Its mission is to make broadly accessible its members’ holdings of materials that document African American and African diasporic culture, history, and politics, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago. The University of Chicago serves as the current host institution of the BMRC and is the BMRC’s fiscal agent. 

  • CAN TV:  CAN TV (Chicago Access Network Television) is an independent nonprofit established by the City of Chicago in 1983 as the public’s space on cable television free of commercials, filters, and censors. On our five local channels you can see the diversity of people and ideas that reflect Chicago, including voices often excluded from the mainstream media.

  • Chicago Humanities Festival:  The Chicago Humanities Festival presents entertaining and smart programming about ideas that matter. But we do more than that. We shape ideas, helping our audiences see the world anew. We help them challenge the boundaries of contemporary knowledge and culture. We help them understand what it means to be human.

  • Chicago Theological Seminary:  Chicago Theological Seminary is an affiliated seminary of the United Church of Christ. For over 160 years, we have educated future leaders for a multitude of ministries. Since our beginning, CTS has pushed at the growing boundaries of the church in order to make our faith relevant and transform our society towards greater justice. Our student body now represents more than 40 different faith traditions, perspectives and denominations. 

  • Haymarket Books:  Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, radical book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.”

  • Historical Preservation Society of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party: The Historical Preservation Society of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party is creating tangible, place-based educational and cultural learning experiences based on the Black Panther Party's historical record in Illinois.

  • Parole Illinois: Parole Illinois works as a coalition of people inside and outside of prison who are working toward a more just and humane legal system. We believe in the power of redemption and transformation. We believe it is inhumane to order people to spend decades in prison until they die there without any periodic assessment of whether such sentences are necessary for public safety. We therefore stand against policies that sentence people to death by incarceration, whether that be life-without-parole or excruciatingly long sentences that people cannot outlive. We believe that parole would present the most expeditious way for the many over-incarcerated people in Illinois to obtain their freedom. We don’t take this fact lightly. We are prepared to devote substantial effort to establishing a fair and inclusive parole system and maintaining a fair and effective parole board.

  • Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project:  The Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project is a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Maximum Security Prison through classes, workshops and guest lectures. Classes offered include subjects ranging from poetry, visual arts, and film study to political theory, social studies, and history.  Read more about this partnership, formed with the UChicago Civic Knowledge Project  >>

  • Seminary Co-op Bookstores:  Since 1961, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores have served the University of Chicago's community of scholars as well as the greater South Side, and acted as an epicenter of cultural and intellectual life. Over the past 50 years, the Co-op has grown from a small, basement store into a labyrinth of books at two locations in Hyde Park, with over 100,000 titles on their shelves. 

  • South Side Projections:  A nonprofit organization that presents unique film screenings at locations across Chicago’s south side. At many screenings, we enlist scholars, activists, and filmmakers to lead discussions, understanding the films to be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation about how films engage with complex social and political issues. Other screenings are opportunities to present seldom-seen films of historical and artistic value. 

  • Sisters in Cinema: In 2014, Sisters in Cinema was established as a 501(c) 3 non-profit corporation in the state of Illinois with an inclusive mission to entertain, educate, develop and celebrate Black girls and women media-makers and future generations of storytellers and their audiences.

  • UIC Social Justice Initiative:  The Social Justice Initiative (SJI) at UIC is a campus-wide project that grew out of several streams of activity and discussion. Begun as a collective effort in 2010 by UIC faculty, staff, students, administrators and community partners, SJI seeks to build upon and foreground a critically important part of our mission as a diverse public research university in a global but often contested city. 

An archive of some of our past collaborative programming is included on the left sidebar for your consideration.

Interested in making use of our space for your next event?  Read more here >>