The Institute plays a vibrant and important role in encouraging and stimulating research on race and public policy and in supporting the broader diversity agenda of UIC. It works as a community of scholars that provides minority faculty and students with a supportive home for their intellectual endeavors. In addition, sponsored and co-sponsored research combines basic scholarship on race and ethnicity with policy-relevant studies and community-development strategies to address pressing urban problems in areas such as health, education, workforce diversity, family poverty, immigration, safety, and racial justice. Our research is currently guided by these major themes.
• Migration, Displacement and Diaspora. IRRPP encourages policy-relevant basic and applied research that examines the validity of old frameworks in the study of these topics while promoting the development of new frameworks. The Institute supports the study of topics such as uprooting, the nature of new immigration and immigrants, linkages immigrants establish between the USA and their countries of origin, ethnic and racial diasporas, internal migration movements, undocumented migration, and their impacts --especially in the construction of race and disadvantage.
• Home, Community and Institutions. Research under this theme examines policies and practices that affect families, households and communities of color as well as the role policy plays in supporting or hindering the well being of these communities. Topics here include community fabrics, social networks, public institutions such as schools, health systems, and the criminal justice system.
• The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in a Globalizing World.Under this theme we examine changing conceptualizations of race and their overlap with class, gender, race, space and demographics in a globalizing world. Research and action here include studies on the new realities of race, race-mixing and their representation; relationships between race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity and other sources of differentiation; identity politics and their impact on the struggles of communities of color; new-race based movements; comparative studies of race across geographies; race and culture, and their policy and action implications.
