The CCDE strives to be a space where our community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni gather to promote greater equity. Through research collaborations, networking opportunities, action-oriented classes, mentorship programs, and community events we engage in dialogue to think critically about race and its intersections, to interrupt privilege, and ultimately to change the structures of power around us.
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
– Audre Lorde
The twenty-first century university incubates and produces knowledge in a world in which difference, what we define as perceptions of deviation from traditionally understood norms and patterns, is central to all of our lives. Consider, for example, that U.S. “minorities” constitute the majority of all new births in the nation; in 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, same-sex couples have the freedom to marry; and more first-generation college students today enter colleges and universities than at any other point in U.S. history.
And yet, despite its being built into our national values, equity eludes us. The population of children of color grows apace, yet race-based inequality remains entrenched; same-sex marriages are legitimized in many spaces, yet LGBTQAI youth are disproportionately bullied; working-class youth begin college at increasing numbers, yet they drop out at a far greater rate than their middle-class peers. Difference is increasingly the norm, but we have a great deal of work to do to understand the myriad factors that bring about and maintain inequality, and what we need to do to achieve equity across difference.
The CCDE research center is founded on two premises. First, it is essential for us as humans to negotiate difference by communicating through, within, among, and between races, genders, sexualities, classes, abilities, and more. Second, the University of Washington has a responsibility as a premier public research university to deploy our skills of scholarship, communication, and critique, to fight against the inequalities that persist in the face of our changing world.
Questions of difference are central to the faculty, staff, and students at the University of Washington, particularly in the Department of Communication. We research and teach on topics ranging from women of color on television, mixed-race Asian American museum exhibitions, gendered violence, disability advocacy websites, transgender representations, Latinas in the internet, and colorism amongst Black female undergraduate students. Faculty with aligned interests are also located in several other units on campus, including Education, History, American Ethnic Studies, English, Sociology, Social Work, and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW-Bothell.
The Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity will bring together these faculty, staff, and students to work with leading scholars, organizations in the local community and broader region, and civic leaders.
The meeting space for the Center is located in the Communications Building on the University of Washington campus in Room 129.