Save ISSI

In order to save money, the Vice Chancellor for Research Office has decided to close ISSI in June of 2021. Some of our affiliates are fighting the closure and have developed this website to showcase the value of the Institute and the widespread support for it. Please help save ISSI:

• Sign the petition on the website (there's a form to do so).
• Amplify our message on social media. There's a pinned tweet on the ISSI Twitter page which you can like, share, retweet. And likewise on Facebook. If you prefer to put it in your own words, that's much appreciated too! Please use the hashtag #SaveISSI

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story about the closure and the fight to save ISSI.

2020-21 FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize

Nominations due Tuesday, January 19th, 2021

ISSI is now accepting nominations for the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize. The award of $2,500 honors an outstanding social change activist/scholar in California whose work transforms the existing social landscape and serves as a bridge between the academy and the community. The Prize uses a nomination system, where someone other than the nominee identifies the nominee, their contributions, and the kinds of expertise they bring to understanding how change works. Nominations are due by 5pm on Tuesday, January 19th, 2021. Read more here.

Kamala Harris's Rise, Multicultural Roots and Challenges

Two of ISSI's affiliates, Tina Sacks and Larry Rosenthal, are featured in a recent Berkeley News article about the impact of Kamala Harris's biracial and multicultural roots in her journey to the vice presidency. Tina Sacks, Chair of the Center for Research on Social Change, obverses, The fact that she is not a direct descendant of American slavery may have made the white establishment feel more comfortable with her and less guilty about our own past.” Larry Rosenthal, Chair of Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, predicts, "The liberal world’s celebration of Kamala Harris’s multiple breakthroughs will be mirrored on the right by a widespread and relentless narrative of her as the point person for stealing away that America that instead was supposed to be on its way to being ‘great again.’”