Reckoning With Race and Gender in Public Administration and Public Policy: A Substantive Social Equity Turn

Abstract

Promoting race-aware and gender-aware scholarship is essential for giving substance to social equity research. This review and introduction provides an account of one such initiative to promote race and gender scholarship through collaboration between Public Administration Review (PAR), and the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), and introduces the PAR Race and Gender Symposium. CORGES is an informal group of scholars motivated by the pressing need to address issues of racial justice and gender justice in public administration and public policy scholarship. This PAR symposium is based on the CORGES inaugural conference, held virtually in September 2020. Conference organizers, with the help of Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Hall, devised and oversaw a thoughtful and detailed plan to provide developmental feedback before papers were submitted to PAR's standard peer review process. The symposium is comprised of 14 research articles and 2 viewpoint contributions. In addition to describing symposium contributions, this review provides an account of CORGES origins and its ongoing intellectual and normative commitments on furthering inquiry on racializing and gendering, while also elaborating on the idea of everydayness of scholarly activism. CORGES, with a recently expanded board of advisors committed to centering public administration scholarship on race and gender, as well its intersection with other markers of oppression, continues to support academic research and public outreach on race and gender scholarship.