The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers in US-occupied South Korea to adoptive American homes during the 1950s and 1960s. It explores the Cold War ideologies undergirding this so-called rescue and shows how the process of child removal and placement via US refugee and adoption laws profoundly shaped the lives of mixed race Koreans and their mothers.

Yuri W. Doolan is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and inaugural Chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).

During a time when ethnic studies is under highly coordinated, powerfully funded attack, this workshop focuses on the theoretical foundations of ethnic studies in order to clarify the stakes of the field as a socially transformative arena of thought and action. This workshop gives us an opportunity to collectively study theorizations of racism central to the field and to begin to consider the role of theory in the liberatory practices of ethnic studies. In small discussion groups, we will examine and analyze examples of ethnic studies theory from below and to the left.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE

• Public Talk: Digital Arts Research Center 108

• Public Performance: Wednesday, January 17th, 2024 7:30pm | Mainstage

• Workshop: Thursday, January 18th, 2024 *for UCSC community members only

In a moment of broad statewide implementation of ethnic studies in response to AB 101, this workshop revisits the field's origins in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) struggles led by students at Bay Area universities. Among other questions, we will explore how returning to the roots of ethnic studies enables us to understand its relevance to anticolonial and anti-racist struggles today. We will ask: how was the internationalist concept of the "Third World" vital to the field's formation? Why did the state unleash war and police power against striking students? By delving into digital archives together, we will collectively examine select materials and discuss incorporating them into teaching, in both classrooms and community spaces.

The HSI Equity Talks are a place for regular discussion on topics relevant to UCSC as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. We seek to engage speakers from across campus as we welcome the attendees to engage critically with the content presented at these talks. Together we will unpack complex topics centered on the praxis equity and servingness.

In the wake of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the Korean War, the women of Jeju Island were molded into “Wise Mothers, Good Wives” in service to family and nation. Following the targeted decimation of men in Jeju through counterinsurgency massacres, women were enjoined to practice self-sacrifice, uphold Confucian morality, and assume economic roles as primary caretakers. How did this process of gender formation in the aftermath of war contribute to the broader process of South Korea national reconstruction? What aspects of post-war gender ideology did Jeju women resist? By interrogating these matters, this talk examines how Jeju women’s struggles shed light on the intertwined histories of militarization and gendered violence between Korea and the United States.

Ccccome to play across love, place, memory and form, with me and my Mom, Carmelina C. Wilson, who inspired my works Carmelina: Figures (Wendy's Subway, 2021) as she volleys much into Virgil Kills: Stories (Nightboat Books, 2022). Please bring a photograph of a younger you, your fave loved one, and/or a note, playing, or at play; and you're invited to add this to our "Live, Down the Line Collage of Beings," linking us ALL together through the space of the poetic line, sentence, paragraph, and picture. Get Ready to be where you are, and to play with us, all, together in our match of shared room/s, courts and fieldzzZ....!    –Ronaldo V. Wilson

This urgent and timely event focuses on fighting the academic repression that is ramping up in concert with the Zionist genocide in Palestine. Join us this Thursday from 9am-11am PST on Zoom for a conversation between Isaac Kamola, Rana Jaleel, and Heather Steffen on countering fascistic criminalization of academic speech and strategizing around community defense and anti-repression. This event is sponsored by the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, and co-sponsored by the National  Students for Justice in Palestine, UC Divest, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, Decolonizing Humanism(?) at UCR's Center for Ideas and Society, Cops Off Campus at UCR, and the UCSC Center for Racial Justice.

This teach-in is open to all, but will be geared toward those teaching and TA’ing this quarter. We will contextualize the unfolding genocide on Gaza and offer resources for facilitating these discussions in your classrooms.

Rana M. Jaleel is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. There, she is a 2022-2025 Chancellor’s Fellow and a 2021-2024 College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow. She is the Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, and Faculty Advisor for the Sexuality Studies Minor. Her book, The Work of Rape received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was co-winner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. A long time member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Rana M. Jaleel is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. There, she is a 2022-2025 Chancellor’s Fellow and a 2021-2024 College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow. She is the Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, and Faculty Advisor for the Sexuality Studies Minor. Her book, The Work of Rape received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was co-winner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. A long time member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Join activists & academics to explore the political, historical, and cultural conditions that enable IHRA campaigns, and share insights and organizing tools to support resistance. This event focuses on North American academia, government, and institutions while also mapping the ways IHRA is making incursions internationally. It will highlight victories, successful strategies, and paths of ongoing organizing.

Register Here: bit.ly/racekinshipkorea

Featuring Hosu Kim, Youngoh Jung, and Christine Hong in conversation with Joo Ok Kim.

Framings of the Korean War as a fratricidal war overlook the centrality of sexual and gendered violence to the war and the intimate manifestations of this violence in the present. How has the unending Korean War reconfigured the terms of kinship beyond “blood family”? How has its violence shattered and rescripted notions of belonging?

The online, open-access Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective syllabus is a political education platform serving as an anti-imperialist tool against permanent war.

Sponsored by the Korea Policy Institute, The Center for Racial Justice, and the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective

engaging education (e2) is a student initiated outreach and retention center at UCSC for student engagement and academic excellence. e2 provides a supportive and dynamic space for programming that addresses the low rates of recruitment, retention and graduation that historically underrepresented and under-resourced communities face within higher education.

Dr. Taylor is a nationally recognized author, scholar, activist and professor of African American studies. She writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.

This Event is Sponsored By:

Asian Pacific Islander Student Alliance | Bayanihan | Black Student Union | MEChA | Student Alliance of Native American & Indigenous Peoples | Education for Sustainable Living Program | Student Environmental Center | Student Media Council | TWANAS | Vietnamese Student Association | African American Resource & Cultural Center | Asian-American Pacific Islander Resource Center | Cantú Center | Center for Racial Justice | Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center | El Centro | Institute for Social Transformation | Legal Studies Program | Womxn’s Center | CoCurricular Programs Office | John R. Lewis & Kresge Colleges | Anthropology | Community Studies | Critical Race & Ethnic Studies | Education | Latin American & Latino Studies | Politics

Understanding land as pedagogy requires, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, centering “intimate relationships of reciprocity, humility, honesty, and respect with all elements of creation, including plants and animals.” Because racial capitalism is sweeping in its multidirectional violence, decolonization entails “the sharing of the liberatory politics of Indigenous peoples and people of color who have also been forced to live through oppression.” It is grounded in a deep-seated ethics of accountability and responsibility. We invite you to join past and present students, staff, faculty, and apprentices from the Center for Agroecology* and the broader campus, as we dare to imagine the possibilities of land-based education at UC Santa Cruz. We will weave together a cross-cohort and community-based account of the history and present of the UCSC Farm, as we explore the necessary foundations for land-based learning centering racial justice and decolonization at the root and heart.

Join us for a virtual screening of the documentary film, Caste on the Menu Card, made by students of the School of Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), which delves into the idea of food as a site of exclusion by focusing on beef-eating practices in Mumbai and portrays concerns related to livelihood, brahmanical social inclusion and human rights. Apart from tracing the mythological and historical roots of meat-eating culture, the film also discusses the political economy of the leather and meat industries. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Atul Anand and Rajyashri Goody, moderated by Dr. Shaista Aziz Patel.

In June 2022, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans released its interim report to the California Legislature. The public comment period will come to a close on June 30, 2023.

In this last stretch, please join us for a roundtable discussion with task force member Don Tamaki, moderated by Gina Dent and featuring panelists Christine Hong, Xavier Livermon, and Hiroshi Fukurai. Panelists will discuss the significance of California, multiracial solidarity, and broad-based public education in the struggle for Black reparations.

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Visualizing Abolition | African American Resource and Cultural Center

Please join FMST/CRES professor Felicity Schaeffer for a discussion of her newest book, in conversation with Jennifer Gonzales and Kat Gutierrez

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land, examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O'odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Exploring the logic of borders, Schaeffer turns to Indigenous sacred sciences and ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation. 

Felicity Schaeffer is a UCSC Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is also the author of Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas, and co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship. 

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | Feminist Studies

10:00am–11:00am:

• Faculty of Color Exposing and Reforming Structures of Whiteness in UC Leadership with Becca Covarrubias and Kat Quinteros

11:00am–12:00pm:

• Organizing Against UC Austerity in Ethnic Studies

This Event is Organized and Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice

Join us for a presentation from the Papeles Para Todos Campaign (Citizenship For All Campaign). The Papeles Para Todos campaign is a movement led by and for undocumented immigrants that demand citizenship for all 11 million undocumented people in the country, a stop to all deportations, the release of children at the border, the reunification of families, the closure of detention centers, and the abolition of Immigration Enforcement (ICE).

This event was organized in collaboration with the student coordinators of CRES 70U: (Un)Docustudies.

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | John R. Lewis College

Featured Speakers:

• 4:00pm–Teresa Gregor: Aa'a Mat Tipaay Ak'wee, Bringing Her/Voice Back to the Land: Incomplete Repatriations in "The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero"

  Dr. Gregor is Kumeyaay from the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel and also Yoéme. Her research focuses on California American Indian Women, sovereignty, literary and cultural repatriation, and tribal resiliency and revitalization.

• 6:00pm–Harsha Walia: Abolish Border Imperialism: Migration, Racial Capitalism and Empire

  Harsha Walia is the author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Her work addresses how current migrant and refugee crises are the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change, generating mass dispossession worldwide.

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Humanities Institute | The Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation | UCSC Feminist Studies | The Center for Racial Justice

Attend to learn the experiences of Filipina Migrant Workers from labor rights activist Felwina Opiso-Mondina, a representative of PAWIS San Jose.

Featured Speaker:

• Felwina Opiso-Mondina

This Event is Sponsored By:

PAWIS SJ | Cowell College Senate | UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | The Center for Racial Justice

Invited to Witness draws from participant observation of solidarity tours across Palestine and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists to explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism by extending deliberately truncated invitations to visit Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. The book shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Saids words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.

Featured Speakers:

• Jennifer Kelly, Professor in FMST and CRES

• Nick Mitchell, Professor in FMST and CRES

• Sophia Azeb, Professor in CRES

This Event is Sponsored By:

UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | UCSC Feminist Studies | The Center for Racial Justice

A conversation with scholar Jarrod Shanahan about the history of prisons and jails in New York, the present arrangement of the carceral state, and the 2020 rebellion. 

Featured Speaker

• Jarrod Shanahan

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice

In this first inquiry group meeting, we will discuss the origins of Ethnic Studies in California through the student strikes of 1968 -- and consider their relevance to K-12 Ethnic Studies teaching today.

In these inquiry groups, we aim to: connect with a like-hearted community of educators; build with movements for social and educational justice; and share resources for sustaining and strengthening Ethnic Studies teaching and teachers

This Event is Sponsored By:

UCSC CRES Department | UCSC Education Department | The Center for Racial Justice | The History and Civics Project

(Inquiry Group participants will receive a $50 stipend)

Kūkula: Santa Cruz in Solidarity with Mauna Kea features art, music, and messages from the movement to protect Mauna Kea and all Indigenous People’s sacred places.

Featuring:

• Free Food

• Storytelling

• Live Music

• Hula Dance

Come see the exhibition at the Porter College Sesnon Gallery from November 9th-27th!

Sponsored By:

UCSC Mauna Kea Protectors | Mauna Kea Education & Awareness | Center for Political Ecology | Cantú Queer Center | Porter College | Kresge College Senate | Center for Racial Justice | Jack & Peggy Baskin Endowed Chair in Feminist Studies | UCSC History of Consciousness | UCSC Community Studies

UC Ethnic Studies faculty members will present the latest report on the University’s Area H admissions requirement and the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. A coalition of university faculty, K-12 educators, and students will speak on their experiences fighting for the implementation of Ethnic Studies university admission requirements and high school graduation requirements. Presenters will give updates on the progress of the campaign, share blocks to the campaign coming from within and outside the University of California, and end with a call to action for all attendees.

This session is public, and open to all who are interested in the future of Ethnic Studies in California K-12 and higher education.

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_A6yBxmBjQaOzcHz9HgKvVQ

Foregrounding political education as an anti-imperialist tool against permanent war, these two sessions represent the launch of the online, open-access Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective syllabus, a collaboration among antiwar activists and scholars that has been four years in the making. By focusing on the reverberations of the Korean War, a devastating war of imperial U.S. intervention that has yet to come to an end, we shift focus from U.S. Cold War academic debates about the war’s “origins” to a collaborative dialogue about the war’s “ends,” so to speak—namely, the consequences of its irresolution, including its ongoing violence and ramifications in the diaspora, in the present.

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYocOCvpjouGdR_zebCwgrxGUfFkVBN9gTq

The second day focuses on the writings and legacies of Harry Chang, whose 1970s theorizations of racism through a Marxist lens shaped critical race theory, ethnic studies, and anti-imperialist community-based organizing in ways that are not broadly recognized. Although his ideas and methodological approaches to the study of race in the United States were innovative, deeply influential, and far ahead of their time, Chang himself remains a relatively unknown figure.

The speakers are five community organizers and scholars who took part in Harry Chang’s workshops and political education study groups in Ohio and the Bay Area during the 1970s. 

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMtdO-prDsiG90IpeasZ7ROiZtdu9zkM5H9