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Yang Lor, Assistant Teaching Professor, Sociology, University of California, Merced, with Tolani Britton, Associate Professor, Education, University of California, Berkeley, as respondent
Sponsored by the Center for Research on Social Change, part of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Co-sponsored by: Center for Studies in Higher Education, Department of Sociology
Migrants face trauma before, during, and after migration. The degree of the trauma may vary depending on the type and journey undertaken to reach the final destination, but it is present. Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative presents a talk with Ms. Tsui Yee, leading immigration lawyer, Dr. Gunisha Kaur, Anesthesiologist and human rights researcher, and Ms. Leah Spelman, Executive Director at the Partnerships for Trauma Recovery to discuss with moderator Prof. Khatharya Um of Ethnic Studies, what is the extent of trauma and how it manifests itself in the lives of migrants as they navigate their new realities. The talk will spotlight the need to study,research, and alleviate trauma in social, economic, political, and legal framework.
Co-sponsored by: IRLE, Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS), Center for Race & Gender, Institute of Governmental Studies, Social Science Matrix, Othering and Belonging Institute, Asian Pacific American Student Development, Center for Research on Social Change, The Institute for South Asian Studies
Speakers:
Angela Y. Davis, Professor Emerita, UC Santa Cruz
Dean Spade, Professor, Seattle University School of Law
Eric A. Stanley, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Jules Gill-Peterson, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University
LaVelle Ridley, PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
Moderator: Courtney Desiree Morris, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
At a time when LGBTQ rights are advancing, why are attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color increasing? Join us Tuesday, Nov. 2 at 5pm PT / 8 pm ET to hear from a panel of artists, organizers, and academics who will discuss this question and others posed by Eric A. Stanley’s new book Atmospheres of Violence.
Sponsored by: Othering & Belonging Institute, Center for Research on Social Change, Center for Race and Gender
Tiffany King, Associate Professor, African-American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Georgia State University
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Co-sponsored by Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, African American and African Diaspora Studies, Native American Studies, UC Berkeley
Please join us as we honor Phenocia Bauerle and Boun Khamnouane, recipients of the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize, and Aurora Lopez and Tabitha Bell, recipients of the KIDS FIRST: David L. Kirp Prize.
“Am I an American or Not? The Perils to Democracy When Racism Shouts Louder Than Facts, the Rule of Law, and the Constitution”
Keynote by Donald K. Tamaki, Senior Counsel at Minami Tamaki LLP.
John Jennings, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
For over a decade John Jennings has been a key figure in the archiving, creating, and cultivating of black popular culture in graphic novels, illustrated fiction, and graphic design. Jennings has contributed to creating a foundation of theory, community, and mentorship that has led to what some call the Black Speculative Arts Movement; his work has helped give a visual aesthetic to what some call Afrofuturism. This presentation will be a short retrospective of Jennings' work and current research and critical making projects.
Part of the ISSI Graduate Fellows Colloquia Series.
04/14/2020
Ian Haney López, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law, UC Berkeley
Over the last half-century, the Republican Party has exploited social divisions—and racism in particular—to win power, and then has ruled primarily on behalf of the ultra-wealthy. No one better symbolizes the conjoined dynamics of racism and plutocracy than Donald Trump. In this lecture, Prof. Haney López lays out the history of dog whistle politics and Trump’s place within it. Then he suggests a clear way forward. Haney López recently co-led a national research project focused on developing the most effective political rejoinder to strategic racism as a class weapon. The research demonstrates dog whistle politics can be defeated. Drawing on these results, this lecture assesses the looming 2020 presidential election.
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, Townsend Center
Co-sponsored by: the Townsend Center
Angela S. Garcia, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago
This book talk analyzes the ways federal, state, and local immigration laws shape the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US. Comparing restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states, it shows that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold for immigrants in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of erasing undocumented residents from the community, increased threat from restrictive localities creates conditions for immigrants to subvert the public gaze by “legal passing,” or attempting to mask the stigma of illegality to avoid police and immigration enforcement. As legal passing becomes embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities, resulting in coerced assimilation. In accommodating localities, undocumented Mexicans experience a sense of local membership and stability that is simultaneously undercut by federal deportation threat and complex street-level tensions with police. Combining social theory on immigration and law as well as place and race, the talk illuminates the human consequences of contemporary immigration federalism.
Shorb House (Latinx Research Center), 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Latinx Research Center, Center for the Study of Law and Society, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative
Dawn Marie Dow, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, and Tina K. Sacks, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley, with moderator Amani Allen, Associate Professor of Public Health, UC Berkeley
At this interactive event, Dawn Dow and Tina Sacks will discuss their new books on African American women. Dow’s book, Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood (UC Press 2019), examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. The book reveals the painful truth of the decisions that black mothers must make to ensure the safety, well-being, and future prospects of their children. In her book Invisible Visits: Black Middle Class Women in the American Healthcare System (Oxford University Press 2019), Sacks challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination-particularly in healthcare settings-is a thing of the past and questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects poor racial minorities. She argues that simply providing more cultural-competency or anti-bias training to doctors will not be enough to overcome the problem. Rather than lecture, Dow and Sacks will serve as each other’s interlocutors, as well as engage with the audience, as they center the experiences of middle class African American women.
Toll Room, Alumni House
Sponsored by: Center for Research on Social Change and Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society
Co-sponsored by: Gender and Women's Studies, American Cultures Center, Townsend Center, Sociology, Center for Race and Gender, School of Social Welfare
Trevor Gardner, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Washington, with Franklin E. Zimring, William G. Simon Professor of Law, UC Berkeley as respondant
Three successive presidential administrations have opposed the practice of immigrant sanctuary, at various intervals characterizing state and local government restrictions on police participation in federal immigration enforcement as reckless, aberrant, and unpatriotic. This Article finds these claims to be ahistorical in light of the long and singular history of a field the Article identifies as “police federalism.” For nearly all of U.S. history, Americans within and outside of the political and juridical fields flatly rejected federal policies that would make state and local police subordinate to the federal executive. Drawing from Bourdieusian social theory, the Article conceptualizes the sentiment driving this longstanding opposition as the orthodoxy of police autonomy. It explains how the orthodoxy guided the field of police federalism for more than two centuries, surviving the War on Alcohol, the War on Crime, and even the opening stages of the War on Terror. In constructing a cultural and legal history of police federalism, the Article provides analytical leverage by which to assess the merits of immigrant sanctuary policy as well as the growing body of prescriptive legal scholarship tending to normalize the federal government’s contemporary use of state and local police as federal proxies. More abstractly, police federalism serves as an original theoretical framework clarifying the structure of police governance within the federalist system.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Sponsored by: ISSI Graduate Fellows Program
Co-sponsored by: Center for Research on Social Change, Department of Sociology, Center for the Study of Law and Society, and the Center for Race and Gender
Monisha Das Gupta, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
The virulence and pervasiveness of immigration enforcement have fueled migrants to organize in heterogeneous ways. My research about and activism in the movement during the last eight years have evolved into an engagement with a strain of anti-deportation organizing which takes up the cause of the most indefensible of immigrants and refugees -- those labeled criminal aliens. Non-citizens, who are branded with this label, are both legal permanent residents and undocumented. Ninety-two percent of all migrants caught in the dragnet of interior enforcement in 2016 were categorized as “criminal aliens.” What activists term “crimmigration” has become the most effective tool to remove migrants from the interior.
In this talk, I examine the relationship among mobility, forced removals, and claims to space by analyzing how high school-age members of Khmer Girls in Action (KGA) in Long Beach interrogate the school to prison to deportation pipeline. They link the criminalization of Khmer refugees to the legacies of United States’ wars in southeast Asia and the failures of the US refugee resettlement program. The “refugee voice,” which youth leaders learn to use in their communities, resets the dominant frameworks deployed to advocate for immigrant justice. By naming the waves of political trauma Khmer refugees in the United States experience, the KGA youth offer strategies that weld together gender justice, refugee justice and youth justice from an anti-carceral and anti-deportation perspective.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender.
Travis J. Bristol, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley
While policy makers and practitioners call for increasing the number of Black male teachers, researchers find that this subgroup has the highest rate of turnover. Despite ongoing local and state teacher diversity recruitment efforts, there is a paucity of research that examines Black male teachers’ school-based experiences and decisions to stay or leave their schools. To fill this gap in the literature, this talk will examine Black male teachers’ experiences in organizations.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender.
Greg Prieto, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of San Diego
Mexican immigrants who are most affected by the deportation regime are also the least available to resist it. Under what conditions are these unexpected activists moved to participate in collective mobilization? Their primary strategy to mitigate the risks of dispossession, deportation, and economic uncertainty is to avoid the unfamiliar and insulate oneself within the home and among family. This “shell,” a habituated response to the insecurities of immigrant life, functions both as a form of protection from these risks and as an encumbrance upon their availability for collective action. The experience of the shell also incubates a latent oppositional consciousness that recognizes the unfairness of their social status as necessary, but unwanted laborers. While the shell may be a deterrent to social movement participation, it also sows the seeds of resistance. Social movement scholars have recently focused on the role of threat in pressing these unlikely challengers into action. Though scholars typically conceptualize threat as an element of political opportunity, in this talk I examine the way community organizers leverage threat in the interactional process of community organizing for immigrant rights. Drawing on three years of participant observation and over 60 interviews with un/documented Mexican immigrants, I observed organizers amplify threat in the minds of immigrants by undermining their default strategy for managing risk: the shell. Stressing immigrants’ urgent responsibility to act on their own behalf, community members responded variously to the overtures of community organizers. Volunteerism at school, English language acquisition, close calls with immigration enforcement, and personal relationships to the organizers led to participation, while a more recent arrival and isolation depressed participation. Born of the quotidian experience of legal and economic precarity, the immigrant activism that emerges seeks to inhabit, rather than transform, normative institutions of work and family.
Multicultural Community Center (MCC), 220 Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by Ethnic Studies and Center for Research on Social Change, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by Center for Latino Policy Research, UC Berkeley
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, History and African American Studies and Interim Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA
Respondent: Eric Henderson, Policy Associate, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. In this talk based on her new book, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, she unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.
But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. View the City of Inmates book trailer here.
Hearst Memorial Mining Building Room 290, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by Department of History, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Division of Equity and Inclusion, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley
Paul Ortiz, Associate Professor, Department of History and the Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida
Professor Paul Ortiz will speak about his newly published book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2018). Spanning more than two hundred years, this much anticipated book is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.
Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas.
Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.
Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, Multicultural Community Center, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research, American Cultures, Center for Race and Gender, Department of Ethnic Studies, Department of African American Studies, Multicultural Community Center, UC Berkeley
Willow Lung-Amam, Assistant Professor, Urban Studies and Planning and Director, Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, University of Maryland, College Park
Over the last few decades, California’s Silicon Valley has become not only the world’s technological epicenter, but also one of the fastest growing, and most racially and ethnically diverse regions in the U.S. Spurred by the rise of tech giants like Google and Facebook, the region has attracted diverse, highly-educated immigrants from across the globe, particularly Asia, who have built their new lives among the region’s many predominately white, middle-class suburbs. Trespassers? explores the dreams and struggles of Asian Americans as they have made their homes in Silicon Valley suburbia, and the tensions that have often emerged over the region’s changing character. Join Dr. Willow Lung-Amam as she discusses her new book on the vital role of immigrants in the changing urban landscape and their fight for inclusion within the suburban American Dream.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley
Eric Pido, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University
Strategies of economic development, along with the changes throughout local economies in the Philippines, are often viewed solely through the lens of labor-sending and financial remittances, and the myopic interests of political elites in the country. This presentation, however, situates these political interests within the much larger global circuitry of financial speculation and rush for property investment dramatically altering the built-environment throughout cities all over the Global South. By tracing the dynamic coalescence of transnational property developers, Filipino American investors, and BPO employees in Manila, the concept of the “return economy” is introduced in order to convey the durable logic compelling and sustaining contemporary patterns of urban transformation throughout labor-sending countries. As a means of maintaining a foothold within the global market, Philippine state administrators have begun recognizing the significance of balikbayans, Filipinos visiting or returning to their homeland, in innovating the country’s economy and distinguishing itself from its neighbors. This discussion outlines the architecture of this emergent economy by describing three simultaneously working components, which together are reshaping the social fabric and landscape of Metro Manila.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Lisa K. Bates, Associate Professor, Director, Center for Urban Studies, Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University
with Carolina Reid, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley, as respondent
Black Portland is often portrayed through metrics of disparity and deficiency, without reference to particular regional structures of opportunity and disenfranchisement, and without hearing the voices of Black Portlanders themselves. Professor Bates uses Clyde Woods’ framework of blues epistemology as Black ways of knowing geography in order to elucidate the place history and justice claims of Black Portland. Black Portlanders’ experience is at once highly particular and universal in its blues narrative of enclosure, displacement, and the desecration of sacred spaces, expressed through stories of what artist Sharita Towne calls “joyful hardships.” Professor Bates considers how an emancipatory planning process, the Portland People’s Plan, can shift from recognition--the blues story of what might have been but for racial oppression-- to reclamation. By asking Black Portlanders to imagine what it would look like if their city loved Black people, the planning creates a space for both a counter-narrative of community history and a collectively developed pathway towards a more just future.
Part of the ISSI Graduate Fellows Seminar series.
Co-sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change, Center for Race and Gender, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, Department of City and Regional Planning, and Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, UC Berkeley
04/06/2017
Anjuli Verma, Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley
Scholarship on mass incarceration in the U.S. has surged over recent decades, for good reason. However, this talk pivots attention to prison downsizing and decarceration as emergent social facts in the 21st century. Prisoner rights litigation (Brown v. Plata 2011) in combination with state law and policy innovations in the form of Public Safety Realignment (Assembly Bill 109 2011) and the voter-initiated Proposition 47 (2014) have made California the current epicenter of prison downsizing. Realignment legislation devolved criminal justice supervision from the state to the county level, making counties responsible for the penalties they impose for a sizeable class of offenses. The present research investigates how California’s 58 counties responded to this challenge. Findings from the first in-depth analysis of the state’s prison Realignment will be presented with respect to a key question: will Realignment result in system-wide decarceration, or merely the relocation of incarceration to alternative institutional sites, such as local jails? Multiple methods are used to describe and explain different responses and identify the local conditions that appear to have made decarceration possible in some places but not others. Discussion of the theoretical and policy implications will confront foundational questions about the social organization of governmental power and conditions of institutional change and resistance, as well as urge the field to revisit deinstitutionalization as a distinct social process with consequences for stratification and inequality, community health and wellbeing, and human dignity.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Gary Okihiro, Professor, International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
A conversation with author about his book, Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College demanded the creation of a Third World studies program to counter the existing curricula that ignored issues of power—notably, imperialism and oppression. The administration responded by institutionalizing an ethnic studies program; Third World studies was over before it began. Detailing the field's genesis and premature death, Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectual history of ethnic studies and Third World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying some of their core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories. In so doing, he establishes the contours of a unified field of study—Third World studies—that pursues a decolonial politics by examining the human condition broadly, especially in regard to oppression, and critically analyzing the locations and articulations of power as manifested in the social formation. Okihiro's framing of Third World studies moves away from ethnic studies' liberalism and its U.S.-centrism to emphasize the need for complex thinking and political action in the drive for self-determination.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Center for Race & Gender, Departments of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Keramet Reiter, Assistant Professor, Criminology, Law & Society and Law, UC Irvine
With an introduction by Jonathan Simon, Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law, UC Berkeley
Commentators:
Francisco Casique, Lecturer, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Rebecca McLennan, Associate Professor, History, UC Berkeley
Franklin E. Zimring, William G. Simon Professor, Law, UC Berkeley
Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long term and common. Prisoners in solitary spend twenty three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end. They are held entirely at administrators’ discretion, with no judges or juries involved. In 23/7,legal scholar Keramet Reiter tells the history of an original “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, where extreme conditions sparked statewide hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013—the latter involving nearly 30,000 prisoners. Reiter describes how the Pelican Bay prison was created—with literally no legislative oversight—as a panicked response to the perceived rise of black radicalism in California prisons in the 1970s. Through stories of gang bosses, small-time parolees, and others, she portrays the arbitrary manner in which prisoners are chosen for solitary confinement, held for years, and routinely released directly onto the streets. Here we see the social costs and mental havoc of years in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book is instant required reading on a topic that increasingly commands national attention.
2240 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley, CA
Sponsored by Center for the Study of Law and Society
Co-sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change and Human Rights Center
Julia Chinyere Oparah, Associate Provost and Professor and Co-Chair of Ethnic Studies, Mills College
Research justice is a strategic framework within which those directly affected by structural violence and discrimination use research tools in order to achieve self determination and lasting social change. Based on a term coined by DataCenter, an Oakland-based research collective, this movement toward community-driven research demands that academic researchers interrogate questions of power, privilege and accountability in our research praxis. Using a research justice approach, Oparah worked alongside members of Black Women Birthing Justice to document black women's experiences of childbirth, and to publish an anthology of critical essays and testimonies on black bodies and birth justice. Their research uncovered birthing as a site of disabling, trauma or even death for black women and gender non-conforming people. In this talk, Oparah explores her experience as an activist scholar in the movement to #LiberateBlackBirth and shares both the transformative power and the dilemmas of research justice.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Center for Race & Gender Social Movements Working Group and Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Robin Marsh Ph.D., Resident Researcher, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, UC Berkeley
This talk reports on a two and half year (2014-2016) collaborative multi-university tracer study of African alumni of partner universities (UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, McGill University, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser and EARTH in Costa Rica), supported by the MasterCard Foundation. The abridged and full reports are just out: http://africanalumni.berkeley.edu. This pioneering study, led by Robin Marsh, is the first of its kind to investigate the career trajectories and social contributions of African alumni of international universities. In addition to a comprehensive survey, the in-depth interviews with sixty UC Berkeley African alumni on the continent and in the diaspora reveal fascinating life stories of return dilemmas, career choices and transformational leadership. The findings have important policy implications for international scholarship programs and for universities interested in expanding their global impact particularly through stronger alumni networks. This talk will present the main research questions and findings of the study.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Center for African Studies, UC Berkeley
Phillip M. Ayoub, PhD, Assistant Professor, Politics, Drexel University
In the last two decades, the LGBT movement has gained momentum that is arguably unprecedented in speed and suddenness when compared to other human rights movements. This talk investigates the recent history of transnational movement in Europe, focusing on the diffusion of the norms it champions and the overarching question of why, despite similar international pressures, the trajectories of socio-legal recognition for LGBT minorities are so different across states. In this talk, I suggest new domestic preconditions and international pathways for socio-legal change. I make the case that a politics of visibility is central to norm diffusion. The exchange of ideas with other countries—which activists can broker and enable—and the extent of a state’s openness to international organizations have demonstrable effects on diffusion and social change. They have engendered the interactions between movements and states that empower marginalized people - mobilizing actors to demand change, influencing the spread of new legal standards, and weaving new ideas into the fabrics of societies.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Center for Race & Gender Social Movements Working Group and the Institute of European Studies
Erica Kohl-Arenas, Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Management, The New School
Can philanthropy alleviate inequality? Do antipoverty programs work on the ground? In this eye-opening analysis, Erica Kohl-Arenas bores deeply into how these issues play out in California’s Central Valley, which is one of the wealthiest agricultural production regions in the world and also home to the poorest people in the United States. Through the lens of a provocative set of case studies, The Self-Help Myth reveals how philanthropy maintains systems of inequality by attracting attention to the behavior of poor people while shifting the focus away from structural inequities and relationships of power that produce poverty. In Fresno County, for example, which has a $5.6 billion-plus agricultural industry, migrant farm workers depend heavily on food banks, religious organizations, and family networks to feed and clothe their families. Foundation professionals espouse well-intentioned, hopeful strategies to improve the lives of the poor. These strategies contain specific ideas—in philanthropy terminology, “theories of change”— that rely on traditional American ideals of individualism and hard work, such as self-help, civic participation, and mutual prosperity. But when used in partnership with well-defined limits around what foundations will and will not fund, these ideals become fuzzy concepts promoting professional and institutional behaviors that leave relationships of poverty and inequality untouched.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way, UC Berkeley
Torsten Heinemann, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Sociology, Universität Hamburg
Since the 1990s, many countries around the world have begun to use DNA analysis to establish biological relatedness in family reunification cases. To be reunited, family members have to prove their family status by official documents. Even if applicants possess the required documents, immigration authorities often reject the information as they question the authenticity of the documents. In this context, many countries resort to DNA tests to resolve cases in which they consider the information presented on family relations to be incomplete or unsatisfactory. In this talk, I present the results of an international research project on the use of DNA testing for family reunification in Europe and will compare them with the situation in the USA. I outline general trends of DNA analysis for family reunification and analyze the societal and political implications of parental testing in this context. I argue that DNA analyses for family reunification establish and strengthen a biological family model which is in contrast to the more pluralistic and social concepts of family in many societies in Europe and North America. I will then relate my findings to the ongoing debate on biological citizenship and show that biological criteria play an important role in decision-making on citizenship rights in nation-states. I argue that the use of parental testing for immigration endorses a biological concept of the family that is mobilized to diminish citizenship rights.The argument is based on an extensive document analysis as well as interviews with representatives of international governmental organizations, international and national NGOs and immigration authorities, lawyers specializing in immigration law, geneticists and those applying for family reunification.
Michael Dumas, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education and African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Hegemonic notions of race, multiculturalism and diversity proffer an understanding of social progress that is generally linear, gradual, steady and earnest. The story we tell ourselves is that we are becoming ever more democratic and tolerant, that we are more sophisticated in our ability to synthesize and analyze information about race and racism, and that we are more committed to racial equity, justice and opportunity than ever before. However, in this historical moment, we also witness increasing economic inequality along racial lines, nearly weekly stories of anti-Black violence and death, massive urban deterritorialization and dispersal, erasing Black homeplaces and priming these spaces for white accumulation. Through it all, the discourse in the public sphere suggests an increasing sense of justification of economic and social inequality, a sense of corporate and white entitlement to (dis)possession of land, and a seething disgust and disregard for the lives of Black people. In this talk, Professor Dumas wants to briefly explore what it means to research and document contradictory historical moment(s) of official anti-racist progress and white innocence, on the one hand, and on the other hand, enduring white defensiveness and racial fragility in the face of material and psychic Black suffering. Most importantly, how do we refuse hegemonic constructions of historical racial memory in our own work, and how do we acknowledge and honor attempts by insurgent Black subjects to refuse antiblackness and put forward alternative notions of Black historicity and futurity?
Conference Welcome and Keynote
May 2, 2014
Jane Mauldon, Interim Director, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Claude Steele, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UC Berkeley
Troy Duster, Chancellor's Professor, UC Berkeley
Breaking Barriers, Building Community: Panel 1: “Engaging Communities as Partners for Change: Race, Space, Place”
May 2, 2014
Moderator: Michael Omi, Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Speakers:
Teresa Córdova, Professor, Urban Planning and Policy, and Director, Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago
Hector Fernando Burga, Lecturer, Urban Studies and Planning, San Francisco State University; Visiting Scholar, ISSI
Eleanor Ramsey, President, Mason Tillman Associates
The 2014 Yamashita Prize Award Ceremony
May 2, 2014
David Montejano, Chair, Center for Research on Social Change
Robert Yamashita, Assoc. Prof. of Science and Society Studies, CSU San Marcos
2014 Honorable Mention, Mimi Kim, Founder, Creative Interventions, and PhD Candidate in Social Welfare, UC Berkeley, introduced by Veena Dubal, PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley
2014 Prize Winner, Sarah Ramirez, Health Educator, Pixley Medical Clinic, introduced by Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley
Breaking Barriers, Building Community: Panel 2: Race and the Material World: Bodies and Buildings
May 2, 2014
Moderator: David Montejano, Professor, Ethnic Studies and History, UC Berkeley
Speakers:
Willow Lung-Amam, Assistant Professor, Architecture Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland
Maxine Craig, Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies, UC Davis
Stephen Small, Associate Professor, African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Breaking Barriers, Building Community: Panel 3: Street, School, Work: Sites of Organizing and Il(legality)
Moderator and Closing Remarks: Rachel Moran, Dean and Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law, School of Law, UCLA
Speakers:
Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Assistant Professor, Education, University of San Francisco
Victor Rios, Associate Professor, Sociology, UC Santa Barbara
Jennifer Chun, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Toronto
05/02/2014
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor of History, UCLA
with Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, Berkeley Law School, as respondent
Immigrant detention is, today, the single-largest dimension of human confinement operated by the U.S. Federal government. Yet immigrant detention is often forgotten as a pillar of the nation's carceral regime. This strange omission is rooted in a decision made one century ago by the United States Supreme Court, which determined that human confinement in the pursuit of deportation is "not imprisonment in a legal sense." This paper excavates the origins of immigrant detention as a practice of human confinement that operates, in a legal sense, separate and apart from imprisonment but everyday fills the nation's jails, prisons, and detention facilities.
