Teaching a Course on Race in the Marketplace

In recognition of Black History Month and the continued need to recognize the importance of teaching about race in the marketplace, we feature recent work published by Sonya Grier, Francesca Sobande, and Bea Porter, "Empowering student engagement with race in the marketplace: a research-informed approach," published in the Journal of Marketing Management. In the spirit of TCR's newsletter, Sonya reflects on the backstory of this article and how the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) course at American University evolved into a research-informed framework and concrete tools that readers of this article (and this newsletter) can adapt in their teaching.

Sonya, on behalf of the authorship team, writes the backstory:

"The Beginning: In Spring 2020, I began designing a course titled Race in the Marketplace (RIM) with a clear goal: to center race in marketing and business education, rather than treating it as a subset of culture or diversity. I wanted to answer the question:

What does it take to help business students talk about race with rigor, reflexivity, and care—and to do so in ways that actually change how they see markets and marketing strategy?

To answer this question, I started by drawing on the emerging work of the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Research Network and asked what it would mean to bring race-conscious pedagogy directly into a business school classroom. Very quickly, collaboration became central—not only to building the course itself, but also to shaping the research article that eventually grew out of it.

From the outset, I was fortunate to have strong institutional support. My department chair, Ron Hill, was enthusiastic about the idea and made it clear he was happy to schedule the course. I also consulted extensively with my colleague Sarah Mady, who served on the University’s DIV-Course Committee responsible for reviewing courses for inclusion in the AU Core Curriculum. I submitted the RIM course proposal in February 2021, and after gaining approvals at the school and university levels, the first offering of the course was scheduled for Fall 2022.

Curating a Race-Conscious Marketing Curriculum: The course took shape in close collaboration with my research assistant, Bea Porter. Drawing on her public anthropology training, Bea kept the “student’s view” central as she helped identify and curate articles, cases, and other materials for this new Race in the Marketplace (RIM) course.

Race in the Marketplace: Crossing Critical Boundaries became a cornerstone text, offering a critical, cross-disciplinary, international overview of how race and markets intersect across domains—from corner stores to financial, technological, and healthcare markets. Additional readings were harder to find: traditional marketing research often overlooked race and intersecting injustices, while many race-focused studies did not fully center race in relation to marketplace systems. This gap reinforced our sense that the RIM course—and research about it—could offer a distinctive pedagogical contribution and support instructors seeking to incorporate RIM or design courses in similarly challenging, emerging fields. We began to see the class as a marketplace intervention for racial equity.

From the beginning, the course was grounded in the RIM pillars: international, intersectional, critical, and interdisciplinary. We aimed to show how race structures markets and consumption, how consumers navigate and resist these structures, and how strategic marketing practices might disrupt persistent discrimination and racism across markets. The course grew out of a sense of responsibility to prepare students for a changing marketplace in which equity, accountability, and racial justice are increasingly central to strategy and stakeholder expectations- even as they change and evolve.

One guiding question anchored our course: if students could not speak about race with comfort, rigor, and reflexivity, how could they meaningfully participate in strategic discussions or initiatives aimed at marketplace equity in their workplaces?

At the same time, we were acutely aware of two common challenges in courses about race. One is the risk of ‘preaching to the choir.’ The other is the danger of retraumatizing or overburdening students who already experience racialized harm. The course needed to do far more than assign reading; it had to provide conceptual tools, structured dialogue, and concrete assignments that invited students to analyze markets, marketing practices, campaigns, and policies through a race-conscious lens.

In response, we designed the class as a trauma-informed learning environment that prioritized psychological safety, shared responsibility, and multiple modes of engagement.

Guest speakers were integral to this work. Among them, Francesca Sobande, from the University of Cardiff, played a particularly impactful role. She immediately connected with students through the “Reflecting Race” project—an integrative assignment using photo-elicitation in which students analyzed marketing challenges through photographs and developed potential marketing remedies—while also sharing her empirical research. Students’ journals and end-of-semester reflections consistently highlighted Francesca as a powerful and memorable contributor to the course.

Developing the RIM Course Manuscript: After teaching the RIM course for the first time in Fall 2022, I began to think seriously about how to share what we had learned with a wider scholarly and pedagogical community. In January 2023, although I had never met him, I reached out to Mark Tadajewski, editor at the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM), to ask his advice about a pedagogically oriented research article for a journal not exclusively focused on pedagogy. I wanted the work to reach the broadest possible audience. Mark was encouraging, pointed me to several examples of pedagogical articles in different journals, and suggested that JMM itself might be a suitable home for such a paper.

From the start, Bea and I worked closely on what became the RIM course paper. We focused on building a research-driven approach to teaching about race in the marketplace, identifying central content and detailing how to integrate key concepts and strategic marketing questions into course development using a backward design framework. We also aimed to guide scholars and educators seeking to integrate race into the marketing curriculum meaningfully. We submitted our first manuscript to JMM in December 2023. The initial reviews were positive and constructive, emphasizing the importance of strengthening our focus on assessment, especially in evaluating the course’s impact on students.

Deepening the Research Through Collaboration: Coincidentally, the very next day after receiving the reviews, I welcomed Francesca to Washington, DC, where she was visiting American University as part of RIM’s first Global Dialogue, to present her work on social media. Over breakfast, we discussed potential collaborative projects, and Francesca mentioned her interest in pedagogical research. Given her sustained engagement with the class as a guest speaker, it felt entirely natural to invite her to join Bea and me as a coauthor on the invited revision.

Francesca brought a fresh set of eyes and a distinctive perspective that significantly strengthened the manuscript. She helped us sharpen the role of engagement as a foundation for the student empowerment we hoped to foster. We also incorporated a pre- and post-course survey, which enabled us to provide clearer evidence of how students from diverse backgrounds experienced and engaged in the course. We worked for several months on the revision and resubmitted the paper, which was accepted in Fall 2025. Throughout the two-year process, the paper evolved from a paper on course development into a more generative framework for empowering student engagement with race in the marketplace—one that attends to rigor, accessibility, diverse student positionalities, and trauma-informed practice. Student voices also come through vividly, as our qualitative analysis of their work—especially their journals—reveals deep engagement and significant learning. The article became not simply a record of a single course, but an invitation to others to imagine how race-conscious, research-informed pedagogy can contribute to more equitable markets.

An Invitation to Build Equitable Marketplace Futures: The project was truly a labor of love. Each of us—drawing on our different backgrounds, experiences, and areas of expertise—contributed perspectives that broadened and deepened the conversation about RIM pedagogy. We hope that this framework and the detailed pedagogical guidance it offers will help instructors move beyond surface-level engagement with race in marketing curricula, toward cultivating graduates who can think critically about, and act meaningfully within, racially complex marketplaces. We invite others to adapt, challenge, and build on this work as we collectively imagine what equitable marketplace futures might look like.

Reflecting on the collaboration, Francesca shared: “It’s been a privilege to contribute to this work and to get to participate in Sonya’s class, which supports students to develop critical skills to address issues related to race in the marketplace and society.”

Bea added: “Developing this course was an incredible learning opportunity for me, which absolutely changed and expanded my perspective. From an anthropological perspective, I understood how pervasive racial inequity was at a systemic level. However, seeing it in practice through the nuances of marketing led me to realize that race truly impacts every facet of life, from billboards to the ads we see on TikTok. I began this work to utilize my White privilege in a productive and meaningful way, but through collaboration with Dr. Grier, I have not only done this but also have grown in ways I had never imagined. I am so grateful for this experience and wish that I could make Race in the Marketplace a required teaching for all students.”

I share their sense of gratitude. It is an incredible privilege to teach a course that is so necessary, and to have the opportunity to share this research so that others might create similar spaces for students to grapple with race and the marketplace in transformative ways. If you are experimenting with or curious about race-conscious pedagogy in marketing or related fields, we would be delighted to learn from your experiences and to explore future collaborations."

Sonya A. Grier, American University

Francesca Sobande, Cardiff University

Bea Porter, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Read: Grier, Sonya A., Francesca Sobande, and Bea Porter (2026) "Empowering student engagement with race in the marketplace: a research-informed approach." Journal of Marketing Management 42.1-2: 119-147. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2025.2585853

Abstract: We build a research-driven approach to university education about race in the marketplace, explaining what can cultivate student engagement. Our approach aims to create a shared understanding of the core components of teaching critical studies of race in the marketplace for instructors and to support student application of such knowledge to enhance marketplace equity. We design a structured pedagogical process, integrating discussion of key marketing concepts, power relations, and strategic issues central to understanding race in the marketplace. We detail how the course was implemented and empirically assess students’ critical engagement using text analysis and a pre-and post-course survey. Overall, we provide guidance for educators who desire to address issues of race in their curriculum and classrooms – whether as a semester-long course or through specific course modules.