Two interdisciplinary initiatives at the University of Notre Dame are joining together to support research that will examine the intersection of race and fundamental social structures such as wealth and democracy.
Housed in the College of Arts & Letters, the Initiative on Race and Resilience (IRR) and the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) are collaborating to provide grant funding for Notre Dame faculty and graduate students to advance their work in two interdisciplinary research themes — Race, Wealth, and Resilience and Multiracial Democracy and Resilience.
“Academic communities have been talking about both issues for generations, but having a more substantive impact and improving the situation for either topic is really, really pressing,” said Mark Sanders, director of IRR and professor of English and Africana studies.
IRR and ILS will invest in the inquiry around these two areas through research grants of up to $5,000, which are open to Notre Dame faculty members and graduate students across all colleges and schools.
Guided by the University’s commitment to defending the dignity of all humans and promoting a just society in which every person can flourish, the research themes also align with pillars of Notre Dame’s Strategic Framework and amplify the strength and impact of liberal arts research within the arts, humanities, and social sciences to answer the pressing issues in today’s society.
Through the Multiracial Democracy and Resilience theme, researchers are invited to pursue projects that will examine ways in which multiracial and ethnic democracies — domestically or internationally — have dealt with systemic barriers that have prevented full societal participation. Grants will support projects that explore new systems, frameworks, and practices geared toward a more demographically pluralistic society.
The Race, Wealth, and Resilience theme will support research proposals that question and examine the historical role of race in the creation of U.S. policies, tax and penal codes, banking system, and overall wealth, and specifically how that has affected Black and Latino communities.
“We want to have an impact on how people think about the kind of democracy that we want to have,” Sanders said. “We also can't separate political access from economic power, so the racial wealth gap really speaks to a structural problem for participating relative to Latinx and Black communities.”
Each of the themes will have grant opportunities that will support either individual research efforts or combine similar ideas into working groups. By intentionally creating communities of scholars working on similar questions from different disciplinary perspectives, Sanders hopes to inspire collaboration that leads to bigger, bolder ideas.
Sanders and Luis Fraga — director of ILS and the Rev. Donald P. McNeill, C.S.C., Professor of Transformative Latino Leadership Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Professor of Political Science — are hopeful that the interdisciplinary groups will also attract experts from outside Notre Dame who will give public lectures open to the campus and surrounding community, in addition to interacting with each working group. The hope is that the research will culminate in two conferences, where findings stemming from the papers will be presented and shared.
Given the themes’ direct connection to the University’s new initiatives on democracy and poverty, Sanders and Fraga see a significant opportunity to support social science research — but they also hope to support work in the arts, humanities, and other disciplines, as well.
“In a larger sense, the arts, literature, music, and all kinds of cultural expression can have an impact on how we think about structural barriers and how we address them,” Sanders said, “and the importance of overcoming them in our investment in having a country where people have access to resources so that they can flourish.”
Originally published by at raceandresilience.nd.edu on May 27, 2025.