The Race, Education and Democracy Lecture and Book Series, a collaborative effort of Simmons College and Beacon Press, will bring annually to Boston a prominent scholar to deliver four to five public lectures on the topic of Race, Education and Democracy. These lectures will form the basis for a book to be published by Beacon Press. 

This Lecture and Book Series aims to reestablish in the public imagination the historic connection between public education and the possibility of a robust democracy, against the backdrop of the issue of race in America.

The Series is aimed at a broad audience and will present educational issues in all their complexities, in readily accessible language.  The Series proceeds on the assumption that public education is at the center of American public life and that discussions about critical educational issues need to occur in the public domain and engage Americans from many different backgrounds in thoughtful and complicated conversations.

But what happens when the media intervenes and threatens to eclipse the school in shaping identities, laying out possibilities, framing issues of justice, deciding who is a member and who is an outsider? Does the media provide its own kind of public education? And if this is the case, what role should educational institutions--from public schools to colleges and universities-- play in shaping and prefiguring democratic possibilities? What the kind of education is required, if we are to prepare young people for democratic citizenship in a heterogeneous society, at a time when the media has grown in importance?

In light of these queries and others, we are pleased to announce that
Dr. Patricia Hill Collins will deliver the 2008 lectures, addressing the overarching theme:  Another Kind of Public Education:  Race, the Media, Education and Democratic Possibilities.
 
Dr. Patricia Hill Collins is the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland/College Park and one of the leading social theorists and feminist scholars in the country. In her research and scholarship, she has examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and nation.

She is the 100th President of the American Sociological Association and the award-winning author of Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism and From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism.  She began her professional career teaching
7th & 8th grade social studies at St. Joseph’s Community School in Roxbury.

Theresa Perry
Professor of Africana Studies and Education
Simmons College
300 The Fenway
Boston, Ma. 02115
P. 617-521-2257
theresa.perry@simmons.edu