Every year since 2002, the Radcliffe Institute has sponsored faculty-led seminars on topics as broad as discrimination in the workplace and as specialized as statistical models for speech and audio signal processing. In Exploratory and Advanced Seminars, scholars from Harvard and other universities convene in small groups for one- to three-day collaborations. The Institute hosted eleven Exploratory Seminars and four Advanced Seminars in 2007–2008.
Fifteen scholars from around the country gathered in late April to take stock of research findings on the corporate and public policies that are used to combat race and gender inequality in the workplace. Frank Dobbin RI ’07, a sociology professor at Harvard, led this Exploratory Seminar, which concluded that on many scores, such as the employment of mothers and the relative wages of African Americans, little has changed in a decade or more.
The goal of the group, as it evolved over the two days, was to begin assembling a compendium of strategies—as revealed in research—that have proved successful in reducing inequality at work. By comparing notes from different disciplines, the group compiled an impressive list of findings. For example, regulatory uncertainty increases employers’ efforts to reduce discrimination, most likely because of employer anxiety. Also, several studies suggest that greater on-the-job contact with people of other races can lead to the lowering of job segregation and inequality.
The seminar ended with plans to refine the list of corporate and public policy interventions that have reduced inequality and to make these research findings known to judges, federal regulators in charge of civil rights and affirmative action laws, and human resource experts and corporate executives.
An Advanced Seminar titled “Beyond Creative Incorporation: Cultural Innovation in the Ethiopian Diaspora” was led by two Radcliffe Institute fellows, Kay Kaufman Shelemay RI ’08, the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University, and Steven Kaplan RI ’08, a professor of African studies and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They invited an interdisciplinary group of eleven scholars to join them in discussing such diaspora issues as transnational artists’ networks and song lyrics and the impact of the Internet in shaping diaspora and homeland consciousness. One recurring theme in the seminar was the importance of new technologies and their transformative effect on creativity and concepts of community. Following their seminar, Shelemay and Kaplan arranged with the journal Diaspora to publish the papers presented at Radcliffe in late 2009 or early 2010.
