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About the Project
History of the Transforming Community Project
Emory’s Transforming Community Project was born out of racial conflict among faculty but led to an effort to have the entire institution rethink and confront its own race history. As lead investigator and TCP co-director, Dr. Leslie Harris, writes:
Founded as the jewel of the cotton-and-slave South, Emory was designed to educate the white elite and thus uphold one kind of racial superiority. But its history mirrors and embraces a wider array of interracial histories and legacies. The project has developed a creative and continuing conversation about the relationship between what is seen in the South as the fundamental racial dynamic—that between blacks and whites—and the multiracial and multiethnic reality that has existed throughout Emory’s history. (See below for links to the full article in Academe.)
The Transforming Community Project (TCP) began as a five-year program (2005-2010), funded by the Emory University President's Office as a strategic initiative and also by the Ford Foundation's "Difficult Dialogue" initiative. The first five years of TCP's work engaged all sectors of the Emory University community in a process of discovery and dialogue about Emory’s racial history. The principle defining feature of the project has been the intentional way dialogues are facilitated around a common curriculum to guide participants through the interplay between past and present, providing a more informed context for people as they confront issues of diversity as a community.
See also: Harris, L., “(Re)Writing the History of Race at Emory” in Academe Online, 2006.
Harris, L. & Usher, J., “From Disenchantment to Dialogue and Action: The Transforming Community Project at Emory University” in Change, March/April 2008.
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