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| JAMES
TURNER |
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James Turner is the founder
of the Africana Studies and Research Center--founded 1969--and
a professor of African and African American Politics and Social
Policy at Cornell. He also organized Cornell's Council on African
Studies, forming a basis for the university's interdisciplinary
African Studies.
Turner initiated the term "Africana Studies" to conceptualize
the comprehensive study of the African diaspora and the three
primary global Black communities-Africa, North America, and
the Caribbean. The Africana paradigm is now widely adopted by
educational programs as the epistemology for the field of Black
studies.
Turner was a founding member of TransAfrica, an African American
lobbying organization. During the 1970s, he was a national organizer
of the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee, which pressed
the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States. In 1974, he
served as chair of the North American delegation to the Sixth
Pan African Congress, and in 1973, he co-chaired the International
Congress of Africanists in Ethiopia.
As a Schomburg Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture, Turner conducted research on the political
philosophy of Malcolm X that served as the basis for his work
on the prize-winning PBS series Eyes on the Prize. The recipient
of the Association of Black Sociologists' Award of Distinction,
he has served as president of the African Heritage Studies Association
and on the editorial boards of several leading Black Studies
journals.
Turner holds a B.S. from Central Michigan University, an M.A.
from Northwestern University, a certificate in African Studies
from Northwestern's African Studies Center, and a Ph.D. from
the Union Graduate School in Cincinnati.
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