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GIG (Global Identities Group)

Collaboratively researched and written publications, while common in the natural and social sciences, are rare in the humanistic disciplines. By changing the usual methodological practices, a new research network group, facilitated by Professor Paula Moya, is self-consciously working against the "lone genius" model of humanistic scholarship. Instead, her group will highlight the social nature of all knowledge and incorporate the best practices of the "laboratory" working environment in the social and natural sciences, as each participant allows the ideas and perspectives of others in the group to challenge, refine, and enrich the research and writing they produce in collaboration with one another.

Professor Paula Moya has written broadly about the complexities of racial and gender identities and how they affect the judgment of scholarly work both within and across disciplines. She is a faculty member in English and Director of the Undergraduate Program at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, as well as faculty coordinator for the workshop "How Do Identities Matter?" Professor Moya has brought scholars to campus from Syracuse, SUNY-Binghamton, Cornell, and the University of Michigan to meet with faculty and graduate students at Stanford. These scholars have formed a research network team that grows out of this workshop and also forms part of a national group of scholars addressing the Future of Minority Studies in a global context.

The team has met to develop a collaboratively-authored book that will examine the most crucial social issues of identity that face our diverse society today. This team will incorporate a broad cross-section of the multi-disciplinary literature on the issues they consider, and simultaneously analyze various categories of identity (gender, sexuality, disability, race). The book they produce will be greater, both in breadth and depth, than the kind of publication any single scholar could attempt alone, and together they will map out a new kind of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities.

The Global Identities project is also supported by the Research Institution of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) at Stanford.