Professor, Black Studies
 George Lipsitz studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality, and has been active in struggles for fair housing and educational equity.
Disciplinary methods, truth tests, conversations, and concerns continue to be vital and essential parts of scholarly work, but some research objects and research questions can be addressed more effectively through interdisciplinary work. At UCSB we experience the both of both worlds. Our distinguished faculty conducts excellent research and trains researchers inside the disciplines, but we also benefit from the presence of interdisciplinary departments, programs, and collaborative research efforts.
In my thirty years of teaching in different universities all across the nation, I have never seen a better climate for interdisciplinary scholarship than the one we have here at UCSB. Campus structures, rules, and regulations encourage dialogue across and within disciplines. The extraordinary group of original and generative scholars grounded in interdisciplinary frames makes this campus a wonderful place for doing this kind of work.
I hold an appointment in Black Studies, an interdisciplinary department with faculty members trained in history, political science, literature, psychology, urban planning, musicology, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies. We profit greatly from the different perspectives we bring to similar research objects, learning as much from our differences as from our similarities. We work closely with other distinguished interdisciplinary units on campus: Chicana and Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Feminist Studies, Religious Studies, and Education. Yet we also collaborate on research projects and teach students in the disciplines. For example, I hold adjunct appointments in English, Film and Media Studies, and History, and have served on dissertation committees in Religious Studies, and Musicology. My appointment also includes regular responsibilities in the Department of Sociology where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses, advise master’s and doctoral students, and co-author research with departmental colleagues.
Interdisciplinarity has an enormous presence in my research and teaching. My degree is in history, but I have published work in specialized journals in anthropology, sociology, musicology, literary studies, art history, communication, film studies, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Graduate students that I have advised are now professors in a broad range of humanities and social science disciplines as well as in interdisciplinary programs.
One of the more exciting projects that I have participated in at UCSB has been the Race, Place, and Power initiative. Composed of faculty and students from across the campus working on issues of space (such as cognitive mapping, borders, boundaries, cultural morphology, transportation, environmental justice, migration, trade, and war), we have organized conferences, lectures, courses, colloquia, study groups, community outreach, and collaborative research and publication. In the Black Studies department, we have worked on and off campus on issues of community development, residential segregation, educational inequality, and the connections that link culture and place.
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