CDS @JHU
Initiative for Critical Diaspora
Studies
Student-led advocacy working group
at Johns Hopkins University
Land Acknowledgement
The CDS initiative, as a collective of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, acknowledge that the places now known as Baltimore County and Johns Hopkins University exist as a result of colonial violence.
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In 1652, Susquehannock leaders unwillingly transferred these lands to the English in an unsuccessful effort to stop English settlers encroaching up the Susquehanna River. We acknowledge that these places and their Indigenous inhabitants exist without rigid political borders and boundaries maintained by settlers and settler governments.
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In addition, this land was also home to Indigenous peoples formerly occupying lands known as Choptico, land upon and beyond both banks of water now known as Wicomico, where they lived for untold centuries prior to first European colonization.
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We also acknowledge that the Piscataway Indian Nation continues to maintain a relationship with the land where we gather today. We acknowledge their long-standing kinship with this land and these waters.
We acknowledge the descendants of those displaced, who have for more than three centuries endured forced assimilation, misidentification, intentional omission of existence, and loss of traditions, language, worldview, and lifeways, and been forced into a diasporic existence. We acknowledge the resilience of those from the Susquehannock, Choptico, and Piscataway Nations in holding steadfast to their culture and identity and maintaining efforts to recover a portion of their former homeland while recovering from invasion, displacement, and oppression.
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We invite you to learn more about each of these Indigenous nations listed, to consider donating or making institutional resources available to tribal peoples, and to reconsider in what ways you can improve your relationship with the lands you steward. The CDS initiative is dedicated to its mission of holding Johns Hopkins University accountable for the institutional harms it has perpetrated, including its complicit role in settler colonial violence.
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Our
Mission
The Critical Diasporic Studies initiative seeks to diversify undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University to reflect the changing needs of our student populations through the creation of a new interdisciplinary academic space. CDS will connect existing centers of study at Hopkins to build additional courses as well as an academic major. Our primary aim is to coalesce these academic offerings under the central theme of diaspora with the aim of establishing inclusive and representative areas of study centered not around static geographical location, but rather, broader themes of migration and displacement in the context of white supremacy and colonialism. Students majoring in CDS would have the opportunity to focus in specific tracks of study, such as the following: Migration, Citizenship, and Borders; Global Indigeneity; Empires, Wars, and Carceralities; and Transnational Solidarities and Social Movements.
Baltimore Community Partners
We strongly believe that our initiative, and the resulting academic major, must acknowledge and excavate the ties between Johns Hopkins University and the community in which we are situated. A key component of our envisioned major is a strong community-based learning component to the curricula that is carefully considered alongside community partners, such that the partnership between CDS and the Baltimore community is mutually fruitful. Read more about our established community partners here.
coming soon!
CDS is in the active process of dialogue with our community partners, along with the Center of Social Concern at JHU. Check back soon for developments!
coming soon!
CDS is in the active process of dialogue with our community partners, along with the Center of Social Concern at JHU. Check back soon for developments!
