Word: higginbotham
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Darryl is just one example of the social entrepreneurs that Higginbotham hopes to breed through this program. This summer, Oluwadara A. Johnson ’10 launched a camp for young girls in Nigeria to learn the value of education, enlisting the help of a Nollywood film star to discuss issues of self-esteem. Cherie N. Rivers, a graduate student in the African and African American Studies department, is currently trying to write a rigorous scholarly dissertation while also upholding the aims of the social engagement initiative...
Students preparing to embark on a social engagement project look at the subject from every angle, integrating a wide range of viewpoints. “What we offer is a team of perspectives in this department to our students,” says Higginbotham, using a group of students working with Haitian Creole diabetes patients as an example. “They have to work with John Mugane’s African Language Program because they have to get the Haitian Creole under their belt; they have to work with an anthropologist so that they can get the ethnographic skills...
...Sangu’s partnership, which brings together the expertise of an neurobiology concentrator and an African Studies concentrator. In addition to this combination of knowledge, Darryl and Sangu went through the African Language Program and met with a variety of experts in African anthropology, culture, and history. Higginbotham recalls with pride when Darryl introduced himself to an Agyemanti town meeting in their native tongue of Twi and received a round of applause. “They trusted him. There was an openness...
However, despite the inventiveness of the program, Higginbotham feels that the African and African American department is simply going back to its roots. “We feel like we are fulfilling a mission that was inherent to the whole call for African American and African studies as we see it today. We feel that we are...living up to a mission that was part of our founding call...” The student protestors of the ’60s and ’70s did not just want to learn about the black contribution to the world...
Whether the program is a novel step toward revamping academia or a return to the African and African American Studies Department’s roots, it is taking education into what Darryl calls the “reality realm.” If there is an ivory tower, Professor Higginbotham is tearing it down...