TRiO Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program

TRiO McNair Faculty Research Mentor Dr. Sean Chabot has studied social movements for nearly fifteen years. As a graduate student, he became interested in the transnational dimension of the U.S. civil rights movement. Eventually, he decided to focus on how African American activists learned to understand and apply the Gandhian repertoire of nonviolent direct action in their own struggles against racial segregation.  Besides these two social movements, he has also written on the gay and lesbian movement, landless workers' movement in Brazil (MST), Zapatistas in Chiapas, and Iran's Green movement.  

In a March 2012 dialogue with McNair scholars, Dr. Chabot discussed his newly published book which highlights the role of collective learning in the Gandhian repertoire's transnational diffusion. Collective learning shaped the invention of the Gandhian repertoire in South Africa and India as well as its transnational diffusion to the United States. In the 1920s, African Americans and their allies responded to Gandhi's ideas and practices by reproducing stereotypes. Meaningful collective learning started with translation of the Gandhian repertoire in the 1930s and small-scale experimentation in the early 1940s. After surviving the doldrums of the McCarthy era, full implementation of the Gandhian repertoire finally occurred during the civil rights movementbetween 1955 and 1965. This book goes beyond existing scholarship by contributing deeper and finer insights on how transnational diffusion between social movements actually works. It highlights the contemporary relevance of Gandhian nonviolence and its successful journey across borders. Dr. Chabot focused on transnational diffusion between the Indian independence movement and U.S. civil rights movement, which is the subject of his book. He alsosuggested that his approach applies to the wave of revolution and resistance that is currently making history around the world.

Transnational Roots of the Civil Rights Movement:
African American Explorations of the Gandhian Repertoire

Published 2012 by Lexington Books, an imprint of the Rowan and Littlefield Publishing Group

TRiO McNair Faculty Research Mentor Dr. Grant Forsyth received his PhD in economics from Washington State University. His specialty areas are macroeconomics, and money and banking. Forsyth serves on the Washington state governor's Council of Economic Advisors and the Spokane mayor's Council on Economic Policy and Forecasting.  Dr. Forsyth has provided strong faculty research mentorship to numerous McNair scholars and his commitment to supporting undergraduate research was recognized at the 2011 Symposium where he was selected to give the keynote address, The Struggle for Research Success: Pushing the Rock of Sisyphus.