News and Events

The Imperative to Refuse Psychic Intrusion in Palestine-Lebanon Solidarities

Part of the Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

November 20, 2024 4:00-6:00pm | Cervantes Velasquez Room, Bay Tree Bldg, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA

This talk will discuss the ways psychic intrusions are central features of settler colonial logics and how they are used with specific intent to disrupt solidarities. Palestine-Lebanon solidarities will be used as a "case study" to read the psycho-politico-affective forces that demobilize.

Featuring:

Lara Sheehi, Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychology, DOHA Institute for Graduate Studies

This Event is Sponsored By:

CRJ Director Christine Hong Awarded RCNV 2024 Inspiritor Award

Awarded by the Resource Center for Nonviolence

October 23, 2024

We are profoundly honored to award Dr. Christine Hong with this year’s Inspiritor Award. A champion of ethnic studies and inclusive education, Dr. Hong has significantly impacted our community by pushing for a localized curriculum that embraces the full spectrum of our histories. Her pioneering work with the RCNV to establish the Freedom School exemplifies her commitment to educating and empowering young minds in the spirit of social justice.

Dr. Hong’s advocacy doesn’t stop at local education reform; she is also a fervent supporter of global justice issues, particularly the inclusion of Palestinian narratives in ethnic studies despite considerable opposition. Her efforts ensure that the struggles and resilience of Palestinian people are acknowledged in our educational narratives, reflecting her dedication to global solidarity and the interconnectedness of our fights for justice.

International, Anticolonial Vanguards: The Palestinian Transnational Student Movement in Historical Perspective

Part of the Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

October 23, 2024 4:00-6:00pm | Cervantes Velasquez Room, Bay Tree Bldg, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA

This presentation focuses on the political potential of contemporary Palestinian transnational youth activism in Europe and USA. It compares student political engagement namely by examining the formation and development of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) during what is regarded as the "golden age" of the Palestinian revolution (1960s-1970s) with contemporary initiatives, efforts and strategies of mobilization amongst Palestinian youth in shatat (Diaspora). By looking to the past through a historical continuum that has molded present-day Palestinian youth activism, I propose that new futures can only be made through methodologies that tether together time and space.

Featuring:

Mjriam Abu Samra, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow Anthroplogy - UC Davis & University of Venice Ca’Foscari

This Event is Sponsored By:

Santa Cruz Black Upcoming Events

Black Neighborhood: Family Game Night

October 5, 2024 | 612 Ocean St, Santa Cruz, CA

Clotilda: Resistance, Resilience, Remembrance, and Rebuilding

October 12, 2024 3:00pm-6:00pm | 612 Ocean St, Santa Cruz, CA

Featuring:

Kamau Sadiki
Joycelyn Davis

PVUSD Candidate Forum

September 23, 2024 | Landmark Elementary School, 235 Ohlone Pkwy, Watsonville, ca

Join us for an evening with the PVUSD Board Trustee candidates up for election this November.

A Question and Answer on:

Ethnic Studies
Student Empowerment
Measure M Funding Priorities
Accountability to Community
Democratic Process and Transparency in the Board

Featuring:

Carol Turley, Area 2
Gabriel Medina, Area 3
Jessica Carrasco, Area 6
Adam Scow, Area 6
Dr. Lourdes Barraza and Elias Gonzales, Panel Moderators

This Event is Sponsored By:

MILPA | UCSC Center for Racial Justice | Resource Center for Nonviolence | Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice

2024 Summer Institute: Localizing Ethnic Studies

July 29-31, 2024 | Resource Center for Nonviolence

California stands to be the first state to implement ethnic studies broadly in K-12 education. Yet this moment of transformative possibility is fraught with danger. Caving to repressive interests, the state has sought to impose ideological “guardrails” around ethnic studies, a field of study that emerged from grassroots anti-imperialist struggle. Motivated by an undemocratic agenda, anti-ethnic studies groups funded by rightwing donors have rushed to offer “ethnic studies” curricula, while ethnic studies practitioners who have long fought for the realization of the field have found themselves in the crosshairs of deeply racist, defamatory, and harassing campaigns.

Given what is at stake in this moment, this year’s CRJ Summer Institute, “Localizing Ethnic Studies,” seeks to clarify the power potential of ethnic studies by returning to the grassroots. Rather than approach the field as a set of histories, struggles, and theories exterior to our region, this year’s institute focuses on the local as the necessary grounds for the building of ethnic studies as a community-responsive field. Reimagining the greater Santa Cruz region against the implied whiteness of its “surf, sun, sustainable farming, and redwoods” image and self-advertised lure as a Central Coast getaway, the CRJ Summer Institute approaches the local as the basis for an ethnic studies curriculum through a focus on place-based histories of not only race and racism, but also, community resistance, people power, and transformative social change.

As always, the Summer Institute is free and open to the public, but space is limited, and priority will be given to registrants who are K-12 teachers, other educators, high school and college students interested in ethnic studies, community members, organizers, and activists.

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation | Resource Center for Nonviolence | Barrios Unidos

¡Sí Se Puede! Screening and Conversation with Community Members

July 22, 2024 7:00pm-9:00pm | Landmark Elementary School, 235 Ohlone Pkwy, Watsonville, ca

The Center for Racial Justice is proud to co-sponsor the 2024-25 Ethnic Studies Freedom School, organized by Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice (PVESJ), a coalition of teachers, parents, students, and community organizers who have ceaselessly organized for an ethnic studies education that is responsive to local communities of color.

In the tradition of freedom and liberation schools, the 2024-25 Ethnic Studies Freedom School imagines education in the service of people most impacted by racialized forms of structural violence.

Starting this July and going into next fall, which marks the fortieth anniversary of the start of the 1985-87 Watsonville cannery strike, our monthly Ethnic Studies Freedom School will focus on community empowerment through collective study of the Watsonville cannery strike and its grassroots transformation of Watsonville. From a foundation of community knowledge, we will learn from each other and collectively study and organize to enact people power, economic justice, food sovereignty, abolition and community safety, and healing.

Please join us for our first community educational event, a film screening of ¡SÍ SE PUEDE! and a conversation with community members who supported the strike.

This Event is Sponsored By:

PVESJ | The Center for Racial Justice | Resource Center for Nonviolence | MILPA

Ethnic Studies in PVUSD Community Town Hall

Monday May 20, 2024 7:00PM-9:00pm | Landmark Elementary Multipurpose Room

Join us as we bring our Pajaro Valley Unified School District community together to educate and learn from one another on the current state of theEthnic Studies program, the Community Responsive Education contract, and to build a community rooted movement for justice and equity in PVUSD!

DINNER WILL BE PROVIDED! ALL AGES WELCOME!

Materializing Struggle: Ethnic Studies Oral Histories and Community Archives

Thursday, May 9, 2024 5:00pm-7:00pm| Resource Center for nonviolence

Capitalism requires inequality, as Black radical scholar, researcher, and organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore states, and racism enshrines it. In a workshop on the critical work of community archives and oral histories in ethnic studies education, we will ask how peoples subjected to dispossession, forced mobility, criminalization, labor exploitation, family separation, and premature death have struggled against the laws, systems, and structures designed to keep them down. How are the ephemera of their lives and their organizing materialized, if at all, in state or municipal archives? By contrast, what principles should animate documentary practices around and pedagogical approaches to people's movements for liberation, resources, and justice?

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Resource Center for Nonviolence | The History & Civic Project | The Humanities Institute

Christine Hong, second from left, showing her support for Ethnic Studies and Community Responsive Education at a rally in Watsonville.

Read Now: Three University of California, Santa Cruz professors receive Mellon Foundation Affirming Multivocal Humanities grants

The Mellon Foundation has awarded three University of California, Santa Cruz, departments grants of $100,000 each for work that champions groundbreaking research in the realms of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Read Here: https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/04/mellon-multivocal-grantees-dw.html

Spring 2024 Living Writers Series: Imaginaries)Un(bound: Race, Justice, Writing

Thursdays, April-May 2024 5:20-6:55pm | UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall

April 11, 2024

micha cardenas

Part of the Peggy and Jack Baskin Intersectional Feminisms Series

April 13, 2024

Jennifer Tseng

May 2, 2024

Joseph Han

May 9, 2024

Kendall Grady and Nathan Osoria

May 16, 2024

Student Reading

May 30. 2024

Karen Tei Yamashita and Angie Sijun Lou

Part of the Peggy and Jack Baskin Intersectional Feminisms Series

This Event is Sponsored By:

Yosimar Reyes' One-Man Show "Prieto"

Friday, April 26 2024 7:30pm-10:00pm | UCSC Stevenson Event Center

Through the playful, lovably naive lens of an 8-year-old Reyes, Prieto tells the story of an overprotective grandmother who recycles bottles to support her family while her grandson wonders why they can't have money like his friends. It tells the story of chismosa vecinas (gossipy neighbors) who peek through their windows and watch as the neighborhood boys tease young Reyes for "acting like a girl." To escape from the taunting and the daily toil, Reyes creates an imaginary world for himself -- one made up of books and '90s R&B. Prieto saw its world premiere production at San Francisco's Brava Theater in October 2022. Now on tour with The Living Word Project, Prieto has seen productions at San Jose Theater, and Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San Jose, CA.

This Event is Sponsored By:

Ethnic Studies as Political Education & Liberatory Practice

Thursday, Arpil 18 2024 5:00pm-7:00pm| Resource Center for nonviolence

In its emergence in the Cold War U.S. university, ethnic studies located itself in an international Third Worldist struggle for liberation from the shackles of imperialism. Grounded in revolutionary theory and committed to real-world action, it signaled a movement for education, in the proverbial belly of the beast, aimed at serving the broadest possible collective. Animated by the radical idea that education must serve communities, the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) was part of a movement landscape that gave rise, under the rubric of community self-determination, to what might now be called mutual aid. What lessons can we draw from over half a century of ethnic studies struggle?

Featured Speakers:

Christine Hong
Jennifer Kelly

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Resource Center for Nonviolence | The History & Civic Project | The Humanities Institute

UC Faculty Ethnic Studies Council - Spring 2024 General Assembly

Whose University? Defend Ethnic Studies, Divest from Genocide, Opportunity for All!

Friday, March 22, 2024 10:00am-12:00pm | Zoom

Join us for organizing updates on UC Divest, Opportunity for All, and Area H Ethnic Studies

Hosted By: The UCSC Center for Racial Justice

The First Amerasians Book Talk with Yuri Doolan

Wednesday, February 21, 2024 5:00pm-6:30pm | HUM 1 RM 210

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).

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center For Racial Justice | Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation | UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

Santa Cruz Black Presents: B.L.A.C.K On Screen

The 2024 Film Series: Screenings Each Month (February-June 2024)

3rd Tuesdays @ Resource Center for Nonviolence
3rd Wednesdays @ Capitola Library
Movie times begin at 6:00pm

February Screening: Whose Streets?

February 20th and 21st, 2024 6:00pm-8:30pm

Tuesday at the Resource Center for Nonviolence

Wednesday at the Capitola Public Library

Doors open at 6:00pm, Film begins at 6:30pm

Post Screening Q&A at 8:30pm

March Screening: Tell Them We Are Rising

March 19th and 20th, 2024 6:00pm-8:30pm

Tuesday at the Resource Center for Nonviolence

Wednesday at the Capitola Public Library

Doors open at 6:00pm, Film begins at 6:30pm

Post Screening Q&A at 8:30pm

April Screening: Against All Odds: The Fight for a Black Middle Class

April 16th and 17th, 2024 6:00-8:30pm

Tuesday at the Resource Center for Nonviolence

Wednesday at the Capitola Public Library

Doors open at 6:00pm, Film begins at 6:30pm

Post Screening Q&A at 8:30pm

May Screening: The Taking of Harris Neck

May 21st and 22nd, 2024 6:00-8:30pm

Tuesday at the Resource Center for Nonviolence

Wednesday at the Capitola Public Library

This is a story of a land grab by the US Government in 1942. It is a story of racial injustice and resistance. 80 years later [the time of filming] the 2687 acres have still yet to be given back, as promised, to the descendants of the original owners, (deeded the land in 1865) Black people living in MacIntosh County, Harris Neck, GA

Doors open at 6:00pm, Film begins at 6:30pm

Post Screening Q&A at 8:30pm

June Screening: Descendant

June 18th and 19th, 2024 6:00-8:30pm

Tuesday at the Resource Center for Nonviolence

Wednesday at the Capitola Public Library

Doors open at 6:00pm, Film begins at 6:30pm

Post Screening Q&A at 8:30pm

Register Here: https://forms.gle/qov1KFgkknMaYWKG8

Theorizing Ethnic Studies from Below and to the Left

Thursday, January 18, 2024 5:00pm-7:00pm | Resource Center for Nonviolence

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.

Featured Speakers:

Christine Hong
Jennifer Kelly
Marisol Lebrón

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Resource Center for Nonviolence | The History & Civic Project | The Humanities Institute

The Space Between Jenin and El Barranquilo: Using Anzaldua’s Nepantla to Explore Palestinian and Guatemalan Displacement During Times of War

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

This Event is Sponsored By:

CADRC | The Center for Racial Justice | Arts Research Institute | UCSC Arts: Performance, Play, and Design

Revisiting the Third World Roots of Ethnic Studies

Thursday, December 14, 2023 5:00pm-6:45pm | Resource Center for Nonviolence

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.

Featured Speakers:

Christine Hong
Jennifer Kelly

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | Resource Center for Nonviolence | The History & Civic Project | The Humanities Institute

HSI Equity Talk: The Long Struggle for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Thursday, November 30, 2023 1:30pm-2:30pm | UCSC HUM 1 Rm 210 and zoom

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.

Featured Speaker:

Christine Hong

This Event is Sponsored By:

UCSC HSI Initiatives | The Center For Racial Justice | UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Community Defense Now: Fighting Academic Repression in Genocidal Times

Thursday, November 16, 2023 9:00am-11:00am | zoom

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.

Featured Speakers:

Isaac Kamola
Rana Jaleel
Heather Steffen

This Event is Sponsored By:

Gender, Jeju Women, and the Reconstruction of post-4·3 Jeju

Thursday, november 16, 2023 5:30pm-7:00pm | ZOOm

Friday, november 17, 2023 10:30am-12:00pm | zoom

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.

Featured Speakers:

Gwisook Gwon
Christine Hong
Sunghee Choi
Hyejin Shim

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center For Racial Justice | The Korean Policy Institute | The Ending the Korean War Collective

Carmelina Figures and Virgil Kills: A Play Date, Match, and Conversation with Ronaldo V. Wilson

Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Intersectional Feminisms: Series Event 2

Thursday, november 16, 2023 12:00pm-1:30pm | Merrill cultural center (ucsc)

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 Event is Sponsored By:

The Center For Racial Justice | Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation | UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

UC Faculty Ethnic Studies Council - Fall 2023 General Assembly

Critical Zionism Studies: Organizing Against the Right-Wing Attacks on Ethnic Studies

Featured Speakers:

Emmaia Gelman: Demystifying US Zionist Institutions’ Relationship to Race and the Right
Sean Malloy: A Safe Space for Apartheid: Moving Beyond Defensive Responses to Zionist Attacks on Palestinian Solidarity Efforts and Ethnic Studies

This Event is Sponsored By:

UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department | The Center for Racial Justice | Institute for the Critical Studies of Zionism

The Genocide in Gaza in our Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop

tuesday, october 24, 2023 2:00pm-3:00pm | hum 1 rm 210| zoom

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.

Featured Speakers:

Jennifer Mogannam
Sophia Azeb
Marisol Lebrón
micha cárdenas

This Event is Sponsored By:

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

The Work of Rape Book Talk and Seminar with Rana Jaleel

Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Intersectional Feminisms Series: Inaugural Event

thursday, october 19, 2023 4:00pm-6:00pm | HUm 1 rm 210| zoom

friday, october 20, 2023 10:00am-12:00pm | hum 2 rm 259| zoom

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.

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center For Racial Justice | Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation | UCSC Legal Studies Department | UCSC Feminist Studies Department

Institute for the Critical Studies of Zionism Presents: Battling the "IHRA Definition": Theory and Activism

friday, october 13 2023 8:00am-6:00pm | Resource center for nonviolence, santa cruz, ca

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.

Featured Panels:

IHRA, Critical Zionism Studies, & Anti-colonialism
Definitions for the Critical Study of Zionism
IHRA's uses of neoliberal rights discourse
IHRA, anti-CRT, Zionism's racial projects, & the cooptation of "antiracism"
Ethnic Studies and Palestine
IHRA and the global right

This Event is Sponsored By:

Race, Kinship, and the Korean War: Online Book Discussion and Syllabus Preview from the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective

Monday, June 12, 2023 5:00pm-6:30pm | zoom

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.

This Event is Sponsored By:

Korea Policy Institute | The Center for Racial Justice | Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective

UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council - Spring 2023 General Assembly

Organizing for Caste Abolition in the UC

friday, may 26, 2023 10:00am-12:00pm | Zoom

This quarter’s meeting will be dedicated to discussing Organizing for Caste Abolition in the University of California. Anti-caste organizers and members of the UC Collective for Caste Abolition will speak about efforts made to advance caste protections in higher education, the institutional limits of these efforts, and what a shared vision of caste abolition might look like, oriented around Dalit feminist approaches.

Hosted By:

The Center for Racial Justice

Time for a New Farm: The Future of Antiracist, Decolonial, Land-Based Education at UC Santa Cruz

wednesday, may 24, 2023 6:00pm | zoom

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.

This Event is Sponsored By:

The Center for Racial Justice | The Black Lives Matter Garden

The Inedible Plate: On Caste, Race, and Food Politics

Wednesday, may 24, 2023 10:00am | virtual

Join Here: casteonthemenucard.eventbrite.com

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.

This Event is Sponsored By:

Change Makers–Resisting Erasure: Unearthing History for our Futures

Wednesday, May 24, 2023 7:30pm-9:30pm | Classroom unit 002

RSVP Here: https://tinyurl.com/KYTe2

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:

Why California? A Roundtable on the 2023 Report on Reparations for African Americans

Wednesday, May 17, 2023 5:00pm-6:30pm | zoom

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.

We are also circulating the following materials from the interim report:

This Event is Sponsored By:

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

Resisting Institutional Casteism: Snippers of Dalit Queer Life

tuesday, may 9, 2023 6:00pm | zoom

Feature Speaker:

RiRi: Artist, Community Organizer, and PhD Scholar

This Event is Sponsored By:

the Decolonizing Humanism(?) Initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society | UCR Religious Studies and Holstein Family and Community Endowed Chair | UCLA Center for India and South Asia | UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture | UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies | UCSD Department of History | UCSC Center for Racial Justice | UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Composting Grief to Seed the Radical Imagination: Farming is Medicine

Saturday, may 27 2023 | zoom

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, mother, and a composer. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. With an introduction by Dr. Ndola Prata, co-Director of the University of California Global Health Institute, Dr. Marya presents and performs with members of her band, Rupa & the April Fishes, for her plenary speech “Deep medicine and the care revolution!” at UC Global Health Day 2022, on Saturday, May 7 at UC Santa Cruz

This Event is Sponsored By:

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land Book Talk and Celebration

Wednesday, May 3, 2023 4:00pm | hum 1 rm 210 and zoom

Join Here: http://bit.ly/41oB6gs

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

Left to right: Xavier Livermon, PhD, the first director of Black studies and associate professor at UCSC, students Mak Konefal, Chris Cuadrado, Ileana Waddy, Ivan Vega, and Christine Hong, PhD, CRES chair, helped build the CRES program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Photo courtesy of Christine Hong)

Read Insight into Diversity's Article on "Invisible Labor," featuring Christine Hong

INSIGHT Into Diversity, the oldest and largest diversity magazine and website in higher education, published an article featuring Christine Hong and her work in building CRES and the Center for Racial Justice. Click the link below to read the full article.

https://www.insightintodiversity.com/invisible-labor/

Coming to Understand Latino Anti-Black Bias

Wednesday, April 5 2023 2:00pm-4:00pm | Santa Cruz Haybarn

Please join us as we welcome Tanya Katerí Hernández to discuss her book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. Praised as the "most important Afro-Latina voice on civil rights today," Hernández argues that unmasking Latino anti-Black bias is essential for fostering multiracial democracy in the United States.

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, and an Associate Director of Fordham's Center on Race, Law and Justice. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.

This Event is Sponsored By:

UC Ethnic Studies Council Meeting–Winter 2023 General Assembly

Friday, march 17, 2023 10:00am | ZOom

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

Papeles Para Todos: A Community Movement

monday, march 13, 2023 7:00pm | UCSC Namaste Lounge and zoom

Join Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94971803656?pwd=blNDTzNrSi9GYldiZ05kR3BnM3BZdz09#success

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

The Indigenous BorderLands: An exploration of the border/lands from indigenous perspectives across the Americas

Tuesday, March 9, 2023 4:00pm | ucsc cowell ranch hay barn

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

CRES/FMST Book Talk and Celebration– Invited to Witness by Jennifer Kelly

Thursday, march 2, 2023 4:30pm | hum 1 room 210

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

The Crisis in the Caregiving Industry: The Gendered and Racial Exploitation of Filipina Migrant Workers

Thursday, march 2, 2023 5:30pm-7:00pm | Social sciences 1 room 075

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

Rebellion, Reform, and the U.S. Punishment System, featuring Jarrod Shanahan

wednesday, february 8, 2023 5:00pm | Hum 1 rm 202 and zoom

Register Here: tinyurl.com/RebellionReform

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

Ethnic Studies Teaching Inquiry Group

monday, december 12, 2022 4:30-6:30pm | zoom

Register Here: tinyurl.com/ESInquiryGroup

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)

Protecting Mauna Kea: Grand Opening of the Kūkula Arts Exhibition

Wednesday, November 9, 2022 4:00-6:00pm | UCSC Porter college lower quad

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:

Stories of Action: Community Activism in the Face of Racism in Latin America

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 3:30-5:00pm | Humanities 1 room 202 Charla en español

wednesday, November 2, 2022 4:00-5:30pm | Humanities 1 room 210

We are proud to welcome and sponsor two talks by Natalia Barrera-Francis, an award-winning journalist and anti-racist activist from Lima, Perú. She will deliver two talks at UCSC on Nov. 1st and 2nd, one in Spanish and one in English, respectively, to share her experiences as a youth activist and inspire the audience to take action against racism in Latin America.

Featured Speaker:

Natalia Barrera Francis

This Event is Sponsored By:

UC Ethnic Studies Council Meeting (Public Session)

friday, october 7, 2022 | 2:00-3:00pm pst | zoom

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

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.

Featured Speakers:

Andrew Jolivette
Christine Hong
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen
Darlene Lee
Dan Ma
Kimberly Woo
Roxana Dueñas
Rekia Jibrin

Hosted By: The Center for Racial Justice

Also check out This Is My Revolution by the Students of Roosevelt High School 9th Grade Ethnic Studies Class, 2014-2015, available for purchase from the non-profit 826LA. https://826la.org/this-is-my-revolution/

University News: Building Communities to Stand Up Against Anti-Black Racism

The UCSC NewsCenter published an article reviewing the first day of our inaugural Summer Institute led by Yusef Omowale, a staff member of the Southern California Library. Read the full article here:

https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/08/crj-inaugural-summer-institute-feature-dw.html

War Against Our Schools: Film Screening and Collaborative Viewing Guide Launch

Wednesday, june 1, 2022 | 3:00-4:30pm pst | zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Uj8CcpCsTQWWIvDeCmCjTw

Please join us for a screening of La Guerra Contra Nuestras Escuelas/ War Against our Schools, a documentary project exploring the short and long term impact of school closings and privatization in Puerto Rico. After the screening, we will unveil the collaborative viewing guide created by Defend Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rico Syllabus to accompany the film. The guide features a microsyllabus exploring topics from the film, teaching tools, and advocacy resources that can be used in educational and community settings. Together, the film and viewing guide explore and historicize threats to public education in Puerto Rico and provide avenues for action needed to defend our schools.

Featured Speakers:

Marisol Lebron

Yarimar Bonilla
Isabel Guzzardo
Mikey Cordero
Sarah Molinari
Frances Medina

Bilingual Interpretation Provided By: Babilla Collective

Amihan: Filipinx Diasporic Music as Resistance and Revolution

Thursday, may 26, 2022 | 10:00am Pt | Zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpdeirrTIsGNBsxv73vS2ZpaHGTlI8TmhC

Pilipinx Historical Dialogue: The purpose of this course is to foster an interactive conversation and space of political education amongst participants regarding Pilipinx history, diaspora, organizing, and culture.

Presented By: Bayanihan and the Center for Racial Justice

Conversation on The Celine Archive with Filmmaker and Arts Dean Celine Parreñas

tuesday, may 24, 2022 | 2:30pm pt | zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eY6We9C7SSqUdcByRVv6gA

In 1932, Celine Navarro was buried alive by her own community of Filipino Americans in northern California. Filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu, finding kinship with Navarro’s long-lost story, exhumes her tragic life story while trying to unravel the mystery of her murder. This documentary paints a vivid portrait of the early Filipino migrant community, creating space not just for a reckoning with the haunting violence of Navarro’s murder but also belated community grief.

Please view the film in advance.

After registering, you will receive two links that will enable you to do the following:

View The Celine Archive (available from 5/12-26)
Join the May 24 webinar

The Stories of Pilipino Migrant Labor in San Jose: Challenging the Neoliberal Export Labor Policy of the Philippines

tuesday, may 17, 2022 | 10:00-11:30am pst | zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrd-uurj0sHdwAbEy0ayidh-xX_wDTDA4h

Presented By: Bayanihan and the Center for Racial Justice

City on a Hill Press: “Invisible Labor, or Labor of Love? Transforming Structures of Whiteness.”

City on a Hill Press, the student-run weekly at UCSC, published an article on the toll of invisible labor for faculty of color, highlighting the CRJ’s “Calling Out Whiteness” event series. Read the full article here: https://www.cityonahillpress.com/2022/04/27/invisible-labor-or-labor-of-love-transforming-structures-of-whiteness/

Nos Tenemos / We Still Here Film Screening and Q&A with Filmmakers Eli and Kahlil Jacobs-Fantauzzi

Thursday, April 28, 2022 | 1:00PM PST | ZOom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_x5kg7AC9QGqv8vI-PlXtkg

ABOUT THE FILM: “We Still Here” introduces the incredible youth of Comerío, Puerto Rico navigating the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a disaster that brought an unprecedented level of devastation. In the lush mountains in the center of Puerto Rico, 24-year-old Mariangelie Ortiz leads a group of young residents who never thought they would become the leaders of their community, nonetheless find themselves traveling to Washington D.C. to protest in the halls of Congress. Follow them in this coming of age story to find their power and begin creating a sustainable future for themselves and their community.

Students as Agents of Transformative Change

Necessary Trouble: Thinking with the Legacy of John R. Lewis – Event 5

Wednesday, April 13, 2022 | 4:00pm pst

Register for either the limited-availability in-person event or the virtual event here: transform.ucsc.edu/john-lewis-college-event-series/

More than simply an institution of higher education, UC Santa Cruz has been a site of powerful student organizing and transformative engagement with the world, including struggles that have challenged the structural racism and neoliberalism of the institution itself. This event puts the spotlight on student organizers who catalyzed transformation in both the classroom and beyond.

Featured Speakers:

Elias Bautista
Chris Cuadrado
Mak Konefal
Ivan Vega
Ileana Waddy

Moderator:

Xavier Livermon

This event is sponsored by:

Center for Racial Justice | John R. Lewis College and College Nine | Institute for Social Transformation | Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion | the Division of Social Sciences

CRJ Event Series: Transforming Structures of Whiteness in University Leadership

Day 3: Recognizing Invisible Labor in the University: Ways Forward

Friday, May 6, 2022 | 12:00pm - 1:30pm | zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_s-BLvUG0StS7ErSqa07VdQ

Faculty and staff from historically minoritized groups disproportionately engage in research, teaching, mentoring, service, and leadership work that is essential to university functioning and to a mission of servingness. Yet such efforts are of ten invisible and unrewarded. Panelists will discuss examples of promising practices developed both wi thin the University of California system and beyond for recognizing invisible labor.

Featuring:

Shauntay Larkins, Assistant Manager and Undergraduate Advisor, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Emily J. Ozer, Professor of Community Health Sciences, UC Berkeley
Stefano Profumo, Professor of Physics; Chair, Senate Committee on Academic Personnel
Jackie Rabouin Psychotherapist , UCSC Counseling and Psychological Services
Margaret Shih, Associate Vice Chancellor, BruinX, UCLA Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Neil Jacoby Chair in Management; Professor of Management and Organizations, UCLA

Read More:

How We Embraced the Challenge of Institutional Change to Pave the Way for Community-Engaged Research by Emily Ozer
Promoting Institutional Change To Support Public Psychology: Innovations and Challenges at the University of California by Emily Ozer, Regina Langhout, and Rhona Weinstein

Day 2: Calling out Whiteness in University Structures of Leadership

Friday, April 1, 2022 | 12:00pm - 1:30pm | zoom

Register Here (UCSC only): https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpcu6urzoqEtPv8psrEq46Bk29RHe7SfqY

Centering the voices and lived experiences of faculty of color (FOC) is critical for exposing and transforming problematic structures of university leadership. From a brief research talk, audiences will learn how FOC navigate and reform structures of Whiteness in leadership. Interactive discussion with divisional deans will follow, with goals of understanding how to bolster the leadership efforts of FOC and undo structures of Whiteness.

Featuring:

Rebecca Covarrubias, Assistant Professor psychology
Katherine Quinteros, Graduate Student, Department of Psychology

Read their research paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cUQCFl1ov776qD3isTJ9k_LZMM4I6Ajy/view?usp=sharing

Day 1: Enacting Solidarities: Faculty/Staff Affinity Groups Report Back

Friday, February 18, 2022 | 12:00 Pm - 1:30pm | zoom

Register Here (UCSC only): https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEucO2ppjsjEtKFsgWSQEmRPBa-9g9P8qvK

The Faculty Community Networking Program was created to provide DEI arenas of community, development, and support for faculty from historically marginalized communities on campus. In this forum, leaders of these groups will present the issues and recommendations that emerged from their collective discussions, and report back on their groups’ experiences in trying to improve faculty community, development, and support. Discussion will focus on how to move this work forward.

Featuring:

African-American/Black/Caribbean (chaired by Courtney Bonam)
Asian American/Pacific Islander (chaired by L.S. Kim)
Disabilities & Chronic Illness (chaired by Megan Moodie)
Indigenous (chaired by Katie Keliiaa)
Latinx/Chicanx (chaired by Kirsten Silva Gruesz)
Women in STEM (chaired by Rebecca Braslau)

Read the groups 2018-2019 reports here: https://academicaffairs.ucsc.edu/faculty-community-networking-program/2018-19_group_reports.html

This event series is sponsored by:

Poetry and Protest: Writing Amidst Chaos with poet Alan Pelaez Lopez

Tuesday, February 22, 2022 | 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM | Zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tGDPW0SrTWebqkeNGYOuyw

In this poetry reading and community conversation, Alan Pelaez Lopez will reflect on what it means to create art in the middle of legal and political violence. They'll read from their book, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, and a manuscript-in-progress tentatively titled trans*imagination in the hope that the work can invite questions about abolition, migrant futures, and the radical trans imaginary.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the intimate kinship units that trans and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. Their debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are also the author of the chapbook, to love and mourn in the age of displacement.

The Center for Racial Justice Presents: A Screening of Halmoni with Ju Hong

Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM | ZOOM

Watch Halmoni Here: https://vimeo.com/213793631

In 2013, Ju Hong, a Bay Area immigrant rights organizer, emerged onto the national scene when he challenged President Obama on his mass deportation record during a speech in San Francisco. His intervention was covered by major media outlets, and his writings subsequently appeared on Politico, Huffington Post, and The Korea Times.

Ju is the board chair of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC), and a member of the Leadership Council of Immigrants Rising.

His passion project, ImmigrAsians Podcast, captures the stories of Asian undocumented people in the United States. You can follow his passion project on Instagram @ImmigrAsians.

Support the work by...

signing the #citizen4all petition: https://nakasec.org/c4all-action
calling Congress sessions: https://forms.gle/yYLMSGcbuA6o6mJo8
following Ju Hong's personal podcast on Instagram @Immigrasians (https://www.instagram.com/immigrasians/)

About the (un)docustudies series

This series explores a range of narratives surrounding undocumented status and migration as part of the (Un)docu Studies course, which aims to empower undocumented students and their allies as agents of transformative social change. This series is sponsored by Undocumented Student Services at UC Santa Cruz.

Unbound: The Life and Legacy of Asian American Community Historian Judy Yung

Friday, November 5, 2021 | 3:00 pm - 5:00 pM (PDT) | Zoom

Through this event we aim to honor and celebrate Judith "Judy" Yung’s tremendous work legacy as a UCSC emerita professor of American Studies, community and public scholar of Chinese American history, innovator in oral history methodology, prize-winning author, teacher, supportive colleague, and cherished mentor.

Program:

Welcome remarks by Professor Alice Yang (UCSC)
Remembrances by George Ow (Chinese American History Enthusiast and Philanthropist) and Buck Gee (Angel Island Foundation)
Community forum: Alice Yang will moderate conversation with alumni Mana Hayakawa (Oakes College, '01, American Studies), Lora Collier Chan (Oakes College, '01, Anthropology), Kio Tong-ishikawa (Merrill College, '04, Asian American Studies and Business Management Economics), Yukiya Jerry Waki (Merrill College, '99, American Studies)
Academic forum: Profesor Emerita Karen Tei Yamashita (UCSC) will moderate conversation with Professor Emerita Bettina Aptheker (UCSC), Professor Gordon Chang (Stanford), and Professor Erika Lee (U. of Minnesota)
Closing remarks from Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder

This event is sponsored by:

THI Forgotten Wars Research Cluster and CRJ Event:

Geographies of Kinship: A Conversation with Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem and Adoption Rights Activist Kim Stoker

Monday, May 10, 2021 | 2:40 PM | Zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TG-yaTWESJWYiE9PQ1In_w

Please join us for a conversation on the war-forged geopolitics behind the Korean adoptee diaspora and adoptee organizing with the director of Geographies of Kinship Deann Borshay Liem and adoption rights activist Kim Stoker, facilitated by Amy Mihyang Ginther (Theater Arts).

Please view the film before the event. Attendees with an @ucsc.edu email may watch the film for free at this website (under "school email films," click Geographies of Kinship): https://www.newday.com/watch-now

About the film: In a tale about the rise of Korea’s global adoption program, four adult adoptees who were raised in foreign families return to their country of birth, mapping the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew. Along the way they question the policies and practices that led South Korea to become the world's largest “sending country”—with 200,000 children adopted out to North America, Europe, and Australia. Emboldened by what they have experienced and learned, they become advocates for birth family and adoptee rights, support for single mothers, and historical reckoning.

Participant Bios:

Deann Borshay Liem has over twenty years’ experience working in development, production, and distribution of independent documentaries. She produced, directed, and wrote the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (Sundance, 2000) and the award-winning films, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS, 2010) and Memory of Forgotten War (with Ramsay Liem; PBS, 2015). She formerly directed the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) where she supervised the development, distribution, and broadcast of new films for public television and worked with Congress to support minority representation in public media. A former Sundance Institute Fellow, Deann directed, produced, and wrote the new documentary, Geographies of Kinship.

Kim Stoker lived in South Korea for almost twenty years. She was a leading activist for adoptee rights with Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), the first adoptee-run political advocacy group of its kind. Returning to the country of her birth and building a life there has indelibly changed her outlook on the world, on the Koreas, and on international adoption. She's currently based back in the United States where she works as a writer and editor.

Amy Mihyang Ginther is a queer, transracially adopted professor at University of California, Santa Cruz in the Theater Arts Department. She is an award-winning theatre maker, scholar, and activist who has lived, taught and performed in the US, Europe, South America, and Asia. Her work utilizes devising methods to create documentary/autobiographical theatre that focuses on themes of loss, belonging, grief, race, power, and representation. Ginther’s last play, Homeful, was performed Off-Broadway (Best Storytelling Show), in London, and at Exit Theater (Best of Fringe, sold-out run). She is currently devising a musical, No Danger of Winning, that examines the experiences of former contestants of color from The Bachelor/ette and is editing a volume on decolonial, anti-racist actor training (Routledge).

Event free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Christine Hong at cjhong@ucsc.edu.

Event of Interest:

Reparations for Black Americans - The Road to Racial Equality in California and Beyond

thursday, april 15, 2021 | 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM PST

REGISTER HERE: https://go.ucsc.edu/3qXW5Em

In 2020, California established the nation’s first state task force to study and make recommendations on reparations for the institution of slavery, the atrocities that followed the end of slavery, and the ongoing discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present. Although the movement for reparations extends to the eighteenth century, it has gained new momentum in recent years. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) first introduced legislation to create a national task force to study reparations in 1989. The current version of the bill, H.R. 40, has at least 169 co-sponsors in the House, but has yet to achieve majority support.

Join us on April 15, 4pm Pacific Time (7pm Eastern) for a conversation with some of the country’s leading experts and advocates for reparations, to discuss these questions and more.

– How does the movement for reparations fit into efforts to close the racial wealth gap and promote racial equality?
– Why study and discuss reparations in California?
– What are the connections between the California task force and national debates about reparations?
– What might reparations for Black Americans at a federal level look like in the 21st century?

Speakers

William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, co-authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century

Anne Price, President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, U.S. Representative for California’s 13th congressional district

Moderated by Chris Benner, Director of the Institute for Social Transformation

Limited number of FREE books available to event registrants (priority given to UCSC students).

Co-sponsored by: The Institute for Social Transformation, Center for Racial Justice, and Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UC Santa Cruz.

CRJ and CRES Event in association with CES Journal:

Publishing in Critical Ethnic Studies - A Workshop for Graduate Students

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 | 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM | Zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2xXE9sitQWu7IqcvXlccLA

Publishing in academic journals is often cited as a baffling endeavor. In this webinar we will hear from the current co-editors and managing editor of Critical Ethnic Studies journal on its unique approach to intellectual work, submissions, the genre of the journal article, the revision process, and more. There will be time for Q&A so please come with any queries you may have.

Featured Guests:

Christine Hong (Associate Professor of Literature and CRES, CRES Director, CRJ Co-Director, and Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Co-Editor)

Neda Atanasoski (Professor of Feminist Studies and CRES, CRJ Co-Director, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Co-Editor)

Trung Nguyen (PhD Candidate in HistCon, FMST, and CRES, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Managing Editor)

Event of Interest:

Beyond Surveillance: The Capacity and Creep of Caring Relations

thursdays, April 1 and 8, 2021 | 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM PST

REGISTER HERE: APRIL 1 REGISTRATION LINK APRIL 8 REGISTRATION LINK

Hosted by the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Organized by Nassim Parvin, Associate Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology; and Neda Atanasoski, Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies, Co-Director of the CRJ.

Bracketing the commonly used categories of surveillance and privacy within discussions of technological creep into all domains of life, we instead ask participants to consider the multiple, contested, and potentially hopeful axes of seeing and being seen within, through, and against software, algorithms, automated systems, and platforms. We ask not only how these axes of seeing work within and against racial-colonial and gendered scopic regimes which have to do with policing and managing labor and populations, but also they draw the boundary between “the private” and “the public.” While accounting for various technological objects and platforms as a part of digital surveillance capitalism, we also ask, what is not captured about care and vision within the liberalism’s binary rubrics of surveillance and privacy that reproduce the primacy of the free self-possessed individual as the political ideal? How are the boundaries of the inside and outside, family and stranger, and subjects/objects worthy of being seen, watched, or monitored drawn through the design and intended uses of particular caring technologies? What is it that remains unseen--as in unrecognized, unnoticed, or otherwise unworthy of our attention?

April 1

Claudio Celis Bueno, Research Fellow, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies

Katie Keliiaa, Assistant Professor, UC Santa Cruz

Tamara Kneese, Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco

Renee Shelby, Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

April 8

Iván Chaar López, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Erin McElroy, Postdoctoral Researcher, AI Now Institute

Luke Stark, Assistant Professor, University of Western Ontario

Mitali Thakor, Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University

Co-sponsored by the Center for Racial Justice

CRJ Event: Mistruth and Consequences - Feminist Scholars on “Comfort Women” Denialism and Grassroots Movements for Justice

wednesday, march 10, 2021 | 4:00 pm | zoom

REGISTER HERE: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pQW7zWYyRDGZkmiXbgNE_A

In the three decades since Kim Hak-sun of South Korea first publicly identified herself as a former “comfort women” of the Japanese Imperial Army, a global movement for long overdue justice has emerged. Although Japan systematically destroyed vast troves of wartime records in the lead-up to surrender, academic research in the long wake of Kim’s revelation has offered a nuanced corroboration, based on substantial survivor testimony and extant historical documents, of the existence of a regionally far-reaching imperial system of military sexual slavery. This discussion focuses on not just the recent firestorm around Harvard legal professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s denialist “research” but also the remarkable transnational grassroots activism, including feminist scholarly and pedagogical initiatives, for reparative justice.

Sung Sohn is the co-founder and executive director of the Education for Social Justice Foundation. A former bilingual resource and classroom teacher, she authored “Comfort Women” History and Issues: Teacher Resource Guide (2018), and “Comfort Women” History and Issues: Student Resource Guide (2018).

Alexis Dudden is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her books include Trouble Apologies (Columbia University Press, 2014), which interrogates the interplay between political apology and apologetic history among Japan, Korea, and the United States, and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (University of Hawai‘i, 2006).

Jinah Kim is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and faculty affiliate in Asian Studies at the California State University, Northridge. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019). She is a member of the Ending the Korean War Collective.

Kei Fischer is Chair of Ethnic Studies at Chabot College in Hayward, CA. She co-founded Eclipse Rising, a Bay Area-based community group dedicated to promoting the radical history of decolonization and transnational political engagement by Zainichi Koreans.

Co-sponsored by the Korea Policy Institute

CRJ and CRES Event:

White Supremacy in the Golden State: Sikh Targets, Responses, and Solidarities

tuesday, march 9, 2021 | 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm | Zoom

REGISTER HERE: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hSzJtUXNTwyh_GbVdV4rwA

On August 25, 2019, Paramjit Singh was murdered while going for his evening stroll in an affluent area of Tracy, CA. The case against the alleged perpetrator, who had affiliations with white supremacist groups, was quickly dropped by the judge while the Singh family has been left shocked. While specific political economic contingencies increase formations of white supremacist groups, their presence, power, and assertions of paramountcy in California has dated back to its admittance in the Union in 1850. Anti-Asian violence then and now has a particular trajectory in California and in this discussion we look at how power is asserted locally and which white supremacist groups are most active in various regions of California. Using Sikh-Americans as a specific example, we examine how communities respond, react, and seek to build their own power and solidarities.

Naindeep Singh Chann is the Executive Director of the Jakara Movement, the nation’s largest Punjabi Sikh youth organizing and base-building organization, dedicated to educational justice, immigrant rights, and resident empowerment and civic engagement.

Co-sponsorship from the Sarbjit Singh Aurora Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies.

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CRES and CRJ Event: Queering the Undocumented Archive - A Conversation with Yosimar Reyes and Julio Salgado

monday, february 22, 2021 | 2:30 PM PST | Zoom

REGISTER HERE: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RGuy01ScQkWmZhjxaMpvWA

Julio Salgado is the co-founder of Dreamers Adrift and the Migrant Storytelling Manager for the Center for Cultural Power. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depict key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and the migrant rights movement.

Yosimar Reyes is a nationally acclaimed poet and public speaker. Born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in Eastside San Jose, Reyes explores themes of migration and sexuality in his work. The Advocate named Reyes one of “13 LGBT Latinos Changing the World” and Remezcla included Reyes on their list of “10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know.”

CRES/FMST Book Talk and Celebration - Kwaito Bodies by Xavier Livermon

FRIDAY, February 19, 2021 | 1:00 - 2:30 pm | zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_APiWOGM9SpaqPPhGunpeIQ

Join us for a CRES/Feminist Studies Book Talk celebrating the publication of Associate Professor Xavier Livermon's new book: Kwaito Bodies. Xavier will be joined by respondents Marcia Ochoa, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies and Savannah Shange, Assistant Professor, Anthropology.

In Kwaito Bodies, Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg's nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.

Associate Professor Xavier Livermon was hired through the Black Studies recruitment for the Critical Race & Ethnic Studies program and is an anchoring faculty member for the new Black Studies minor. Xavier earned his PhD from UC Berkeley and comes to Santa Cruz from the University of Texas-Austin, where he was an Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies. His research exists at the intersection of popular culture, gender, and sexuality in post-apartheid South Africa,encompassing African Cultural Studies, Black Popular Music, Black Performance, Black Queer Studies, HIV/AIDS and African Diaspora Studies.

For a playlist of kwaito music curated by Professor Livermon, visit https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6coj7TvjsRC3nhxZx3HiIl?si=ene4Zzy_QoSPxphziRZa7w

#StopCVE: Challenging State Surveillance of Muslims in the Biden/Harris Era, with Fatema Ahmad

Tuesday, February 16, 2021 | 9:00 -10:00 am | Zoom

REGISTER HERE: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DbPHELCuTKCSfs-oszuJSg

In 2014, the Obama administration launched Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a grant program that funneled federal money to police, universities, and nonprofit organizations in the name of combating terrorism. Although CVE and other “anti-radicalization” programs target Muslims and political activists, they have enjoyed support from some liberals who view anti-radicalization as a softer, more humane form of policing. Revised and expanded during the Trump years under the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program, such surveillance initiatives are embedded in at least nineteen municipal police departments across the United States. In this conversation with Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, we will discuss the history and impacts of CVE and consider the prospects for such programs under the Biden/Harris administration.

Fatema Ahmad (she/hers) is the Executive Director at Muslim Justice League, where she leads MJL's efforts to dismantle the criminalization and policing of marginalized communities under national security pretexts. She joined as Deputy Director in 2017 and increased MJL's focus on organizing within and collaborating across impacted communities to resist and subvert surveillance. That included growing the Building Muslim Power collective, a group that shifts power through creative actions. Fatema also leads the national StopCVE network, spearheads MJL's research, and is a leader in the Donor Advised Funds campaign of the Public Good Coalition.

In conversation with Neel Ahuja, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Co-sponsored by UCSC Department of Feminist Studies and The Humanities Institute Memory of Forgotten Wars Cluster

CRJ and CRES Book Talk and Celebration: “A Violent Peace” with Christine Hong

Friday, January 22, 2021 | 2:00 - 3:30 PM | ZooM

REGISTER HERE: https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AQnAUz8yRLy3VICviKHRCA

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Christine Hong’s new book, A Violent Peace: Race, US Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, offers a radical account of the United State's transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between US police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia.

Christine Hong is an Associate Professor of Literature and a principal faculty member in CRES. She is currently serving as the Director of the CRES Program, having previously served as the Undergraduate Director. In addition, Christine co-directs the CRJ along with Neda Atanasoski.

With respondents:

Neel Ahuja - Associate Professor, FMST / CRES

Alyosha Goldstein - Professor, American Studies, University of New Mexico

Co-sponsored by the Literature Department and Feminist Studies Department.

CRJ and CRES Event:

Open Forum on Campus Policing

Tuesday, November 24, 2020 | 3:00 - 5:00 PM | Zoom

Join us for a CRES-sponsored Forum that will introduce the statewide Cops off Campus campaign, allow you to hear about our community’s experiences with policing, and learn tools to understand why abolishing the UCPD is important and necessary.

Zoom Link: tinyurl.com/cres-open-forum

Fascisms Symposium

This two-day symposium asks what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the present authoritarian convergence. Panelists address the question of fascism as a geopolitically and historically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism, and focus on the variety of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized subjects across the planet.

Click Here to Register and Join the Webinar!

Moderated by

Dr. Alyosha Goldstein, Professor of American Studies, University of New Mexico

Dr. Simón Ventura Trujillo, Assistant Professor, Latinx Studies, English Department, New York University

Fascism and Organized Violence

Wednesday, october 28, 2020 | 2:00pm - 4:00PM (PT) | zoom

Dr. Johanna Fernández is an Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, The City University of New York. She is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. Fernández’s recent research and litigation has unearthed an arsenal of primary documents now available to scholars and members of the public. Her Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015). With Mumia Abu-Jamal she co-edited a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, titled “The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor” (Routledge, 2014). Fernández wrote and produced the film Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (BigNoise Films, 2010), as well as directing and co-curating¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three New York City museums. She has also published internationally in media outlets from Al Jazeera to the Huffington Post.

Dr. Allan E.S. Lumba is an Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Tech. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and has served as a postdoctoral fellow in Global American Studies at Harvard University and the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. His research explores the historical entanglements between racial capitalism and U.S. colonialisms in the Philippines and more broadly the Pacific from the late nineteenth century to the present. His first book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Dr. Anne Spice is a Tlingit member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation, a queer Indigenous feminist and anti-colonial organizer, and acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Ryerson University. Her work is in the tradition of feminist activist ethnography, and supports Indigenous land defense against settler state and extractive industry invasion. She has been actively supporting the Indigenous land re-occupation on Wet'suwet'en territories since 2015, and her work dwells in the intersection of traditional land use, Indigenous geographies, histories of Indigenous resistance, poetry and art. Her writing has been published inEnvironment and Society,Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and Asparagus Magazine.

Fascism and Regimes of Knowledge

Wednesday, november 4, 2020 | 2:00pm - 4:00pm (PT) | zoom

Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Codirector of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012). While Abu El-Haj’s two books to date have focused on historical sciences (archaeology, and genetic history), her third book, tentatively titled Soldier Trauma, The Obligations of Citizenship, and the Forever Wars (Verso, forthcoming) examines the field of (military) psychiatry, and explores the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of American soldiers.

Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva is Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia, and an Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and Visiting Professor of Law, at Birkbeck University of London. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, forthcoming) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and published in art venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux.

Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris is a cultural critic, author and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. She is founder and Director of the Global South Center, a hub for critical inquiry, aesthetic praxis, and experimental forms of social living. Macarena works on cultural memory, race, queer and decolonial theory, and rethinking the anthropocene. She is author of the recently published The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, a book that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Américas (UC Press, 2018), Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Gómez-Barris is author of numerous essays in art catalogues, including work on Laura Aguilar, Julie Mehretu, Cecilia Vicuna, and Carolina Caycedo, as well as essays in numerous peer reviewed journals. She was a Fulbright fellow in 2014-2015 at Sociology and Gender Department in FLACSO Ecuador, Quito. She is co-editor with Diana Taylor of “Dissenting Acts,” a Duke University Press series.

Dr. Cynthia Young is the Department Head of African American Studies and Associate Professor of African American Studies, English, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Young is the author of Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Duke University Press), which looks at the influence of Third World anticolonialism on activists, writers and filmmakers of color in the 1960s and 1970s. The project earned her fellowships from the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She is the author of articles, reviews and short essays in several journals including American Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Dispositio/n, American Literature, Cinema Journal and the Journal of Visual Culture. She also co-edited with Min Song a forum for American Quarterly entitled “Whiteness Redefined or Redux?” Her current book manuscript, Terror Wars-Culture Wars: Race, Popular Culture and the Civil Rights Legacy After 9/11considers the contours of popular culture and contemporary discourse in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The project has been supported by a fellowship at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

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CRJ Event: A Zoom Teach-In on Anti-Asian Xenophobia in an Age of Covid-19

Friday, May 29, 2020 | 2:00 - 3:30 pm | Zoom

Anti-Chinese xenophobia inaugurated the United States as a gatekeeping nation in the late nineteenth century. Figured as dangerous to the public health, the Chinese—and successive Asian migrants—were likened to an invasive disease and subjected not only to exclusion laws but also to white vigilante violence. In this era of pandemic, a moment conditioned by phobia about China’s global rise, xenophobic conspiracy theories about the “Chinese virus” abound. China has been placed in the crosshairs of the media and politicians, and Asians and people of Asian descent have been targeted on social media and subjected to acts of violence. From mid-March to mid-April of this year, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center received almost 1,500 reports of anti-Asian coronavirus discrimination in the United States against people of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Filipino, Hmong, Thai, Lao, and Cambodian ethnicity.

This teach-in will be led by two founders of the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. Russell Jeung, chair of Asian American Studies at SF State, will offer a long historical view of anti-Asian racism and brutality, and Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, will address the data the reporting center has gathered in the past two months. In a moment in which we are witness to the slide between anti-Asian rhetoric and anti-Asian brutality, how should hate speech be understood? Given the necessity of social distancing, what kinds of community process around racial harm can we envision and bring into being?

Russell Jeung is Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State University. A scholar of race and religion, he's written At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus Among Ancestors and Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans. With Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, he helped to establish the Stop AAPI Hate center.

Cynthia Choi is Co-Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a community-based civil rights organization based in San Francisco. CAA partnered to establish Stop AAPI Hate, an online reporting center dedicated to documenting hate incidents and developing community-based solutions. She has led local, state, and national community-based organizations working on a range of issues from reproductive justice, gender-based violence, immigrant/refugee rights, and environmental justice issues in both the nonprofit sector and in philanthropy.

Co-sponsored by the SUA Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, and the Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Resources: You can find Stop AAPI Hate's latest report here and the quick guides, "Five Things to Consider When You're Experiencing Hate" and "Five Things to Do When You're Witnessing Hate," here.

Event of Interest: Speculative Futures of Labor - New Feminist & Critical Race Approaches

Monday, march 2 - tuesday, march 3, 2020 | humanities 1, room 210

The UC Speculative Futures Collective presents a symposium featuring emergent approaches to labor in light of the surge of interest in technological socioeconomic transformations (including robotics, AI, and app-based on-demand services). Participants include Curtis Morez, Jennifer Rhee, Xiao Lui, Erin McElroy, Heather Berg, Julietta Hua, and Kasturi Ray, with responses from Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Savannah Shange, Neel Ahuja, Nick Mitchell, and Carla Frecerro.

This symposium is part of the UC Speculative Futures Collective (UCSD, UCR, UCI, and UCSC) that over two years will feature events bringing together scholars and others in the field of Speculative Futures to envision more sustainable worlds and futures.

Co-sponsored by the Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair in Feminist Studies, the Center for Racial Justice, the Humanities Institute, and the Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future.

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CRJ Event: Film-Screening of “Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue”

Thursday, February 13, 2020 | 5:00 - 8:00 PM | Humanities 1, room 210

The CRJ will be screening a film, “Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue,” directed by Miki Dezaki. Following the screening, filmmaker Dezaki and Professors Noriko Aso (History) and Christine Hong (Literature/CRES) will lead a conversation and discussion about the film.

Miki Dezaki is a graduate of the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He worked for the Japan Exchange Teaching Program for five years in Yamanashi and Okinawa before becoming a Buddhist monk in Thailand for a year. He is also known as “Medamasensei” on YouTube, where he has made comedy videos and videos on social issues in Japan. His most notable video is “Racism in Japan,” which led to numerous online attacks by Japanese neo-nationalists who attempted to deny the existence of racism and discrimination against Zainichi Koreans (Koreans with permanent residency in Japan) and Burakumin (historical outcasts still discriminated against today). “Shusenjo” is his directorial debut.

CRJ Event: “Territories of Resistance: Mezcala and Epistemologies Against Oblivion”

Thursday, January 30, 2020 | 2:00 - 5:00 PM | Humanities 1, room 420

In collaboration with the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, the CRJ presents a discussion on the struggle against dispossession and violence in Mezcala, resistance organized around the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and its connections to war.

Ines Duran Matute is a research-activist that has supported the Coca Indigenous community of Mezcala in defense of their territory and the national struggle of Indigenous peoples in Mexico.

Rocio Moreno is an historian from the Pueblo Coca (Jalisco) and is Mezcala’s councilmember on the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG).

CRJ Event: “Refugee Returns” with Hong-An Truong

tuesday, january 21, 2020 | 4:30 - 6:30 PM | Humanities 1, room 210

Using photography, video, and sound installation, Hong-An Truong’s talk engages question about history and how knowledge is produced through media forms. Often drawing on her lived experience as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, her work explores historical and political themes, especially around war, violence, and race. Truong’s talk will focus on several recent projects that explore how citizenship and notions of belonging are constructed in order to expand our conception of refugees and Asian American identity within a larger global history of anti-colonial struggle and cross-national organizing.

Recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, Hong-an Truong is an artist who explores immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Studies in the MFA Program at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Listen to the recording:

Introducing Artist-in-Residence, Hong-An Truong

The CRJ is excited to bring a short-term artist-in-residence, Hồng-Ân Trương, to UC Santa Cruz! Truong will give a public artist lecture and guest lectures at undergraduate classes the week of January 21-23.

Trương is an artist who uses photography, video, and sound to explore immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions at the International Center for Photography (NY), Art in General (NY), Fundación PROA (Buenos Aires), Istanbul Modern (Istanbul, Turkey), Smack Mellon (NY), the Nasher Museum of Art (Durham, NC), The Kitchen (NY), Nhà Sàn (Hanoi), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC), EFA Project Space (NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), Franconia Sculpture Park (MN), Leslie Tonkonow Gallery (NY), Rubber Factory (NY), the Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MN), among many others.

She was included in the New Orleans triennial Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp in 2017-2018. Her collaborative work with Hương Ngô was exhibited in the biannual exhibition on photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Being: New Photography 2018. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Artnet, The Wall Street Journal, and Hyperallergic, among others. She participated in The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program in 2016-2017, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Marble House Project (VT), the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Elsewhere Museum (NC), the Center for Photography at Woodstock (NY), and the Visual Studies Workshop (NY).

Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Shifter Magazine, Pastelegram Magazine, PERFORMA09: Back to Futurism, edited by Roselee Goldberg, and Contemporary Theater Review. She has been awarded an Art Matters Foundation Grant, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant, and is a 2019-2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in Fine Art. She received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine and was a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. She is currently the artist in residence at the Capp Street Project at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art at CCA in San Francisco. Hồng-Ân is based in Durham, North Carolina where she is an activist and a teacher. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Event of Interest: Protecting Mauna Kea

Monday, November 25, 2019 | 5:00 - 8:00 PM | College 9 & 10 Multipurpose room

Come listen to indigenous elders and cultural practitioners of Hawai’i and learn why they are calling on the UC to withdraw from plans to construct the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea.

Speakers & Musicians

Liko Martin - elder songwriter and storyteller of Hawai’i and 50-year veteran of Hawaiian resistance movements.
Kealoha Pisciotta - Mauna Kea Hui spokesperson, cultural practitioner and former telescope systems specialist.
Laulani Teale - frontline Kanaka Maoli activist, musician, traditional herbalist and peacemaker.
Valentin Lopez - Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, whose tribal territory encompasses Santa Cruz.

This event was organized in response to an urgent request of support issued by Hawaiian cultural practitioners to the students of UC Santa Cruz. Kia’i (protectors) of Mauna Kea have maintained a peaceful camp at the base of the mountain since July 15, preventing construction of the TMT from proceeding. Tensions are high, winter is coming, and the State of Hawai’i is threatening to use police or National Guard to remove Hawaiian elders and kia’i by force.

CRJ and CRES Event:

Ethnic Studies Now!

Defending the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum

Tuesday, october 15, 2019 | 5:20 pm | Thimann lecture hall 3

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin is an interdisciplinary social justice-based educator, community scholar, organizer, and artist. He is a statewide lead liaison and spokesperson for the Save CA Ethnic Studies Coalition, co-chaired the AB2016 CA Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Advisory Committee, and is co-editor of the acclaimed book, Rethinking Ethnic Studies (Rethinking Schools, 2019).