Academia from the Margins: Mary Rambaran-Olm and Adam Miyashiro Discuss White Supremacy, Racism, and the Academy

Mary Rambaran-Olm and Adam Miyashiro are no strangers to discussions of race and racism in medieval and Anglo-Saxon studies. Within the past few years, they helped found the organization Medievalists of Color, which aims to create a space for scholars who find themselves marginalized in a field with pernicious strains of white supremacy and Euro-exceptionalism. Mary recently drew even more attention to the matter by publicly resigning her position on the executive board of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at the second meeting of the Race Before Race symposium in Washington DC. Even now, members of the society are struggling to find a way to re-name and re-brand as a means to shed recent accusations and to ideally make the society more inclusive.


Mary and Adam join Remixing the Humanities to discuss recent developments in the field given the attention and fallout from Mary's speech at Race Before Race. We talk about what it means to have the scholarly and the public-facing conversations operating in tandem, and the dangers of "cloistering" academic inquiry within the confines of perceived prestige and rigor, as well as the real harm caused by ivory-tower gate-keeping. What cost to graduate students of color bear when they enter a field that wants them as students, but not necessarily as co-contributors? How do we push forward to make all fields of study more inclusive and welcoming? Does one need to operate within the per-existing system in order to affect change, or at what point does breaking with the norms become the catalyst for a real movement?

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