Created in 2021 the Chicago Center is located at the  The University of Chicago. As part of this partnership, the coordinator is hosted for two years at the University of Chicago in the United States and one year at the Paris Center of the University of Chicago in France.

Discover in 180 seconds the thesis of Aurore BOUTET, coordinator of the Chicago Center (2024-2027), PhD student at Sorbonne Université (ED 020)

 

PhD dissertation topic : « Black Women and the Welfare Rights Movement in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit » under the supervision of Andrew DIAMOND and Romain HURET

Situated at the crossroads of many other social protest movements of the same period, such as feminism, civil rights, Black Power and the movement against the Vietnam War, the welfare rights movement was at its height during the 1960s in the US, mostly in the great urban centers of the North-East and the Midwest. Mainly driven by poor black women who organized to improve their community's living conditions, this movement sought to redefine the very contours of citizenship by asserting the “right to life”, i.e. the de-correlation of survival and salaried work through welfare. However, despite its scale, the fight for welfare rights has fallen into relative obscurity compared to the other movements mentioned above. Since the mid-2000s, several American historians have studied the movement on a national scale, but local and regional studies are still few and far between.

Aurore Boutet's thesis aims to analyze black women’s activism within the welfare rights movement in three major urban and industrial centers of the Midwest (Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit). Such a study, focusing on a pioneering region of community organizing, would enrich our understanding of the history of the long black freedom movement by showing the cross-fertilization of social, racial and economic demands, and our comprehension of the backlash against racial liberalism, since the criticism of the welfare system played a crucial role in the formation of the New Right, whose ideas went on to dominate the American right from the late 1960s onwards.

To contact the center :

chicago@institutdesameriques.fr

Local referents

Consult the thesis topics of former coordinators of the center

Adam BIGACHE (coordinateur de 2021 à 2024), Université d’Aix-Marseille

« Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) et la médiation littéraire de la Renaissance de Harlem », sous la direction de Cécile Cottenet.

And before...

IdA's New England Center has been replaced by the Chicago Center. It was based on the campus of Boston College, in the premises of the International Development Department. Shep Melnick, professor of political science at BC, was IdA's local referent. On May 2 and 3, 2014, the seminar the “Early Modern France and the Americas: Connected Histories” launched the Center at Boston College. This event was sponsored by the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the Clough Center for Constitutional Studies, the John Carter Brown Library and the French Consulate General in Boston.

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