For Immediate Release:  February 14, 2006
Contact: Marsha Mullan
610-328-8535
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/

Swarthmore Student-Hosted Diversity Conference
to Address 'Retooling for the Revolution'

Hundreds of students from liberal arts colleges around the eastern United States are expected to descend on Swarthmore College Feb. 24-26 for the 7th annual "Beyond the Box" diversity conference. Returning to the campus where it was founded in 1998, the conference this year will address "Retooling for the Revolution: Dismantling Systems of Inequality on Our Campuses, in Our Communities, and Across the Nation."

Two prominent sociologists are featured speakers at the conference: Eduardo Bonilla Silva of Duke University and Elijah Anderson of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Silva will present the opening address on Friday, Feb. 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the Science Center, Room 101. The keynote address by Dr. Anderson will be presented on Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:30 p.m. in the Cinema, Lang Performing Arts Center. These two speeches are free and open to the public.

Student organizers hope to use the conference to move discussions about diversity "beyond just numerical diversity on campus, beyond simply higher numbers of students of color" to deeper institutional commitments and appreciation for identities that cannot be defined by standard identification boxes on, for example, admissions forms.

About the Speakers

Eduardo Bonilla Silva is a professor of sociology at Duke University. His areas of interest include race and ethnic relations, political sociology, stratification, Latin American studies, and Puerto Rican history. He is the author of 16 scholarly publications and five books, the most recent, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (2001), and Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (2003). In these works Bonilla-Silva explores the shift in U.S. racial ideology from Jim Crow racism to more subtle forms of racism in the post-Civil Rights Era, specifically the persistent denial of a "race problem" among white Americans.

Elijah Anderson is the Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert on the sociology of black America, he is the author of the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (1978; 2003) and numerous articles on the black experience, including "Of Old Heads and Young Boys: Notes on the Urban Black Experience" (1986), commissioned by the National Research Council's Committee on the Status of Black Americans. For his ethnographic study Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (1990), he was honored with the Robert E. Park Award, for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology, of the American Sociological Association.

For additional information about the conference please visit: http://btb.swarthmore.edu.