Imprint recently sat down with various members of HART, the Department of History’s Anti-Racism Taskforce, to better understand the initiative’s progress, plans for the future, as well as how students on campus can get involved.
Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, assistant professor of history and founding member of HART, “helps facilitate and organize within the task force,” but ultimately views students as the key voices at its core. “I see my role as just being there to support the students with their initiatives and to sort of connect between the students and then the faculty,” she said.
Besides students (both at the undergraduate and graduate level), the task-force has faculty and staff who work together to promote anti-racist education and critical thinking, all while raising awareness on other existing anti-racist initiatives and resources on campus and within the wider community. “We’ve had about twenty or so people be involved in HART, whether that be students, staff, faculty, and every year when new people get involved, we get to learn from them, [and] the perspectives, experience, and expertise that they bring,” Bruce-Lockhart said.
The group initially formed in January 2021 out of the History department’s desire to come together, have conversations, and reflect on how they could do better. “I’m a historian so we know that issues have been issues for a very long time,” she said. “But I think during the pandemic, and after the murder of George Floyd, there was a lot more kind of public discussion and institutions like universities were … taking a new or more deep look at systemic racism.”
HART is not just for history students, but all campus members interested in learning more. “If non-history students want to get involved, there are lots of options,” Bruce-Lockhart says. From resources like research guides on racism and anti-racism for both students and faculty members to hybrid seminars, there are countless ways for students to get involved. For Black History Month and Asian Heritage Month, HART had student researchers speak on a panel with the wider departments and community.
There is also the HART Book Club and Student Speaker series, led by history PhD student and HART member Catherine Ramey.
For Ramey, HART is “a really open space, and we really just want more people to engage and come talk, like there’s no expectation on the level of knowledge or point you’re at in the program you’re with […] Whether you’re a first-year or a PhD student, if you’re coming and you want to talk about the books, that’s what matters.”
She and the other members of HART try to line up whatever they’re reading with each heritage month that’s happening in a way that engages students. She veered away from non-fiction books since the President’s Anti-Racism Task Force (PART) already has an anti-racism book club with non-fiction novels, and this offered students more variety. “I read non-fiction all the time so if I didn’t want to read it, I didn’t want to expect other people to read it,” she said.
Saif Zaman, UW Arts First course instructor and member of HART, similarly works to engage his students with HART as well as the various anti-racism resources that the university has to offer. “Due to the nature of my course, 70 to 80 percent are from racialized communities so I guess I do talk about HART a bit more in my courses but so do all the other [history] faculty members,” he says.
Unlike other anti-racist initiatives on campus, HART specifically uses historical case-examples to better understand racism as depicted in history and how racialized communities have tackled such issues. “Personally I work with South Asian history, I work with Islamic history so I look at how stereotypes regarding Muslims or regarding Indians have been perpetrated in the historical texts, and we have discussions on that,” Zaman says.
Like Zaman, HART undergraduate representative and fourth-year history and English student Shelby Page works to increase engagement among students. “The things I’ve been working on since January is kind of how to get undergrads involved in HART [since] it’s been a lot of grad students involved with it up until now,” Page explains. “There’s a lot of people who are involved in that and who want to present papers and present their research and that kind of stuff and that kind of went into what HART was doing.”
Beyond engaging undergraduates, Page was also on the student speaker panel for the history department’s high school conference last May, where local high schoolers came to campus to learn about the history program and HART for a day and attended mock lectures. “It was really cool seeing the grade 10 students and seeing that they were actually interested in it,” she said.
HART has also been working with the Centre for Teaching Excellence to develop anti-racism pedagogy workshops in the history department to reconsider curricula and reading lists. Some of HART’s other goals are to make their events, resources, and initiatives more accessible to the broader community, as well as to create more connections with clubs on-campus, though online options remain available for those who choose them. The main goal for HART, however, is getting students involved. “It’s letting people know that we exist and that we’re doing things. My goal is to shout into the void of undergrads and say, ‘Hey, we’re here!’” says Page.
