50 years since Cedric Robinson walked the halls of Stanford Political Science

50 years ago Cedric Robinson was granted his doctoral degree from Stanford University’s department of Political Science. His dissertation project, The Terms of Order, posed a comprehensive challenge to the central concepts of the discipline of Political Science. Cedric Robinson went on to be  one of the most accomplished political theorists to graduate from Stanford; yet, almost no one in our department has heard of him or read his writings — unless they are also scholars in Black studies. Who was Cedric Robinson? What were the challenges he posed to the discipline of political science? Why is he not read or known at Stanford today despite his huge academic successes? 

This workshop is an opportunity to answer some of these questions via a presentation from graduate student, Natasha Patel. It is also an opportunity for the political theory community to have a broader conversation of processes of segregation within the discipline. How and why do we think Cedric Robinson’s work is not a mainstay of political science? Given his work is at the heart of contemporary North American Black studies, what is it about our subfield that results in processes that exclude theory from communities marginalized by the academy?