Institute for Diaspora Studies (IDS)

The Institute for Diaspora Studies (IDS) is a collaboration between the Department of African-American Studies (AAS) and the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University to undertake interdisciplinary and cross-regional scholarship, training, curricular development and community outreach. This endeavor represents a new phase in the study of African-descended populations and their political, cultural and historical phenomena. The institute serves as a site of convergence for scholars whose interests in African-descended populations cross disciplinary and regional boundaries, to examine the interactions among African-descended populations in cross-national perspective. The institute coordinates efforts of core and affiliated faculty at both PAS and AAS to enable them to develop projects on the African Diaspora that situate the themes and issues of the African Diaspora not solely within African-American Studies or African Studies, but also within debates across the social sciences and humanities.

The Institute has created the website, Global Mappings A Political Atlas of the African Diaspora. This interactive website demonstrates linkages between transnational black politics, social movements and world historical events of the 20th century. Previous maps traced and charted the cultural transmission and dissemination of African religious practices and cosmologies to the New World and beyond, as well as the circulation of specific African populations within the New World through the Middle Passage. However, no existing educational tool, web-enabled or otherwise, gave scholars, students and the public an opportunity to explore the political linkages between African-descended organizations and individuals across national and regional boundaries through the twentieth century. The Global Mappings website fills this gap.

The basic premise undergirding the Global Mappings project is that by the late nineteenth century, African and African-descended communities and organizations in Africa, the New World and Western Europe viewed themselves as part of a supra-national "imagined community" that was not territorially demarcated.

Currently, there are entries in the Atlas covering two separate time periods: 1900-1926 (covering the rise of European colonization of Africa and the reaction of Pan-Africanists) and 1960-1989 (covering the Black Power movement and modern day civil rights struggles).