Events
All ISSI events are free and open to the public. (There is a fee for some workshops as noted below).
For more information, please contact us at issi(at)berkeley(dot)edu or (510) 642-0813.
For wheelchair access to the Duster Conference Room (2420 Bowditch Street), please call (510) 642-0813 one day before the scheduled event.
Many of our events are video-recorded. You can see a list of available videos on our website. If you subscribe to our YouTube channel, you will be notified when new videos are available.
Fall 2019
September
Tuesday, September 10 I 12:30-2:00pm
Center for Research on Social Change Colloquia Series:
Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law
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
Friday, September 13 I 4:00-6:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
Fall Welcome Reception
Join us for an evening in community with a public address by John A. Pérez, UC Board of Regents Chair 2019-20.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Latinx Faculty Association, Alianza, and the Chicana/o Studies Program
Tuesday, September 17 I 4:00-6:00pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Colloquia Series:
Against Humanity: Why the Concept Does Violence to the Common Good
Sam Dubal, Visiting Scholar, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
This talk is not about crimes against humanity. Rather, it is an indictment of ‘humanity’, the concept that lies at the heart of human rights and humanitarian missions. Based on fieldwork in northern Uganda with former rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an insurgent group accused of rape, forced conscription of children, and inhumane acts of violence, I examine how 'humanity' conceptualizes the LRA as a set of problems rather than a set of possibilities, as inhuman enemies needing reform. Humanity hegemonizes what counts as good in ways that are difficult to question or challenge. It relies on very specific notions of the good – shaped in ideals of modern violence, technology, modernity, and reason, among others – in ways that do violence to the common good. What emerges from this ethnography is an unorthodox question – what would it mean to be ‘against humanity’? And how can a particular form of anti-humanism foster alternative, more radical efforts at social change in the realms of humanitarianism, medicine, and politics?
223 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies
Thursday, September 19 I 12:00-1:00pm
Center for Right Wing Studies Colloquia Presents: A "Brown Bag" discussion
Patterns of Conversion in the Radical Conservative Tradition
Eliah Bures, CRWS Visiting Scholar
"My work offers a new interpretation of the development of right-wing ideology in the 20th century. I argue that fascism, though defeated on the battlefield in WWII, survived the war by adapting to changing times and reinventing itself as an intellectual and cultural movement. Faced after 1945 with a climate unfavorable to right-wing mass politics, the far right’s writers and thinkers regrouped as a countercultural network of defiant “outsiders.” Organized through journals and institutes, they worked to cultivate followers and shift cultural narratives. My research uncovers how radical conservative intellectuals came to understand themselves in countercultural terms. I focus on the far right’s “emotional community” and on the ways friendship has shaped its social imagination. Friendship has long been central to right-wing thought, appearing in its attraction to elitist cliques, male bonding, and the “friend-foe distinction” as the essence of politics. Friendship proved no less crucial to right-wing intellectual counterculture after 1945, providing solidarity and mutual understanding to those who hungered for belonging, yet felt out of step with the times."
Duster Room, ISSI, 2420 Bowditch Street
Feel free to bring your lunch.
Friday, September 20 I 4:00-6:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
Identidad y Territorio: Palabra Viva
Professor Uc Be is a prominent Yucatec Maya poet and essayist who uses the pen name Lázaro Kan Ek. He contributes to training and reflection projects in Maya culture and identity in many indigenous communities of the Yucatán peninsula, through consulting and facilitation of workshops in Mayan language. This presentation focuses on the pedagogical, historical, economic, therapeutic, and spiritual relationship that Maya men and women still maintain with nature, with the land, and with their territory.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
This event is organized in collaboration with Prof. Patricia Baquedano-López, Rita Mora, the Director of Maya Women: The Helen Moran Collection, and Asociación Mayab.
Tuesday, September 24 I 4:00-5:30pm
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues Colloquia Series:
Qing Zhou, Associate Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley
One out of four children in the United States is growing up in an immigrant family. One out of five children in the U.S. are dual language learners (DLLs). Children of immigrant families and DLLs are exposed to diverse cultural values and languages in early development and face developmentally unique challenges and opportunities. In this talk, Professor Zhou will discuss the ecological model for understanding risk and protective factors for psychological adjustment in children of immigrant families and language minority homes. She will share findings from the ongoing longitudinal studies on children in Chinese American and Mexican American immigrant families in the San Francisco Bay Area conducted by her team in the Family and Culture Lab. Specific research questions are: 1) How do cultural orientations and language shape parental emotion socialization and children’s socioemotional adjustment? 2) How do English and heritage language development shape children’s executive functions and parent-child relationships in immigrant families? Implications of research findings for clinical interventions and early childhood education programs serving children of immigrant families and DLLs will also be discussed.
Shorb House (Latinx Research Center), 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Department of Psychology, Institute of Human Development
Wednesday, September 25 I 4:00-6:00pm
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues is pleased to co-sponsor:
Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It
Heather Boushey, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Many think that reducing economic inequality would require such heavy-handed interference with market forces that it would stifle economic growth. Heather Boushey insists that rising inequality actually undermines growth in three ways. It obstructs the supply of talent, ideas, and capital as wealthy families monopolize the best educational, social, and economic opportunities. It also subverts private competition and public investment. Powerful corporations muscle competitors out of business, in the process costing consumers, suppressing wages, and hobbling innovation, while governments underfund key public goods that make the American Dream possible, from schools to transportation infrastructure to information and communication technology networks. Finally, it distorts consumer demand as stagnant wages and meager workplace benefits rob ordinary people of buying power and pushes the economy toward financial instability. We can preserve the best of our nation’s economic and political traditions, and improve on them, by pursuing policies that reduce inequality—and by doing so, boost broadly shared economic growth.
IRLE, 2521 Channing Way
Sponsored by Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
Thursday, September 26 I 3:30-4:30pm
Center for Research on Social Change Colloquia Series:
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
Monica White, Associate Professor of Environmental Justice, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement revises the historical narrative of African American resistance and breaks new ground by including the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. The book traces the origins of Black farmers’ organizations to the late 1800s, emphasizing their activities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas much of the existing scholarship views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, Freedom Farmers reveals agriculture also as a site of resistance by concentrating on the work of Black farm operators and laborers who fought for the right to participate in the food system as producers and to earn a living wage in the face of racially, socially, and politically repressive conditions. Moreover, it provides an historical foundation that will add meaning and context for current conversations regarding the resurgence of agriculture in the context of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
132 Mulford Hall, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, College of Natural Resources; Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; Berkeley Food Institute
This event will be followed by a reception.
October
Tuesday, October 1 I 12:30-2:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex
This new book project, organized around the image of la puta, the whore, the perennial figure of Latinized feminine sexual excess, traces the figure of the Latina sex worker and Latinas who work sex, across a range of multi-medial forms of representation in order to interrogate the role of the visual in interpretive practices of meaning-making from the enigma that is sexual subjectivity. Biography: Juana María Rodríguez, professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, is the author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU 2014), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, Modern Language Association, GL/Q Caucus, 2015 and Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies, 2015 and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU 2003). She also co-edited a recent volume of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on Trans en las Américas. She has published in a numerous national and international academic journals including GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory; Radical History Review; differences; Lambda Nordica; Revista Post(s) and a/b: Autobiography Studies as well as in a range of popular media venues including Latino USA on NPR; Aperture; Página 12 in Buenos Aires; NBC.com, and Cosmo for Latinas.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Friday, October 4 I 12:30-2:00pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine is cosponsoring:
Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine
Jennifer J. Carroll, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Elon University
In the last few years, Ukraine has born witness to the major geopolitical crises of our decade: revolution; state- sponsored killings; foreign invasion; forceful occupation by a major world power; and ongoing war. Ukraine is also experiencing an enormous opioid epidemic and is home to the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the world. Despite all of our differences, Ukraine’s ongoing struggles with substance use, border integrity, and Russian interference appear strikingly similar to our own. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork in cities and villages across Ukraine, Dr. Carroll’s ethnographic research on substance abuse and treatment in the context of these crises asks us to consider:
• How are the social values of “addiction” and “treatment” in Ukraine entangled with broader discourses of power and sovereignty?
• How are those values mobilized in efforts to construct Ukrainian and Russian national identities?
• How do the elite subject people who use drugs to selective policing, human rights violations, and other delimited forms of citizenship in an effort to consolidate political power?
• And shouldn’t we in the U.S. be asking ourselves the same questions?
Garron Reading Room, 346 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Medical Anthropology Program, UC Berkeley
Friday, October 4 I 5:00-7:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
Sabidurías Callejeras: Art of Celia Herrera Rodríguez
Art exhibition opening event with an introduction by the artist.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Tuesday, October 15 I 11:10am-12:30pm
Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues is pleased to co-sponsor:
Indivisible Tohono: Infiltrating Spaces for the Empowerment of Our People
April Ignacio and Elayne Gregg with facilitators Fantasia Painter and Seth Holmes
Indivisible Tohono is a grassroots organization working on issues that affect the Tohono O’odham Nation and those that affect the Natives within the state of Arizona and federally. Tohono O’odham is a federally recognized tribe split by the US-Mexico border in what is today southern Arizona, and it has become well known for its refusal to allow a U.S.- built border wall on Tohono O’odham land. This event features two key members of Indivisible Tohono who will discuss their work in education and civic engagement including against the US-Mexico border and border-related militarization on Tohono O’odham land.
Valley Life Science Building, room 2040
Co-sponsored by: Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management; Department of Ethnic Studies; Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society; Native American Student Development; American Indian Graduate Program, Center for Race and Gender, Center for Latin American Studies.
Tuesday, October 15 I 3:00-5:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
The Infiltrators: Filmmaker Reception
Meet the filmmakers of the award-winning new film followed by a screening.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Thursday, October 17 I 11:10am-12:30pm
Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues is pleased to co-sponsor:
Indigeneity and Immigration
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Ph.D
Dr. Rivera-Salgado will discuss the process of "Indigenization" of Mexican migration to California and the unique challenges this population faces as they incorporate as long-term migrants into the fabric of US society. He will discuss the emergence of indigenous-led organizations that sustain collective action among these immigrants both here in California and in their communities of origin in Mexico. Some of the questions he will address are: How do we as scholars engage in successful collaborations with diverse communities in California? How do we choose the right research questions and what problems to address? How can we be clear about research roles in a collaboration with organized groups or different marginalized communities? Who are producers of knowledge? Who owns the data of a participatory action research project?
Valley Life Science Building, room 2040
Co-sponsored by: Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management; Department of Ethnic Studies; Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society; Native American Student Development; American Indian Graduate Program, Center for Race and Gender, Latinx Center of Excellence, Center for Latin American Studies.
Friday, October 18 I 3:00-5:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
Art as Research: Excavando al Rostro de la Memoria
A panel featuring scholars of arts research in conversation with artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez’s current exhibition Sabidurías Callejeras.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Tuesday, October 22 I 4:00-5:30pm
Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues Colloquia Series:
Power and Progress on the Prairie
Tom Biolsi, Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
This talk will be based on Prof. Biolsi’s recently published book, Power and Progress on the Prairie, which traces the history of “modernization,” “improvement,” or “progress” on Rosebud Reservation. The central question of the book is how ideas about making things “better” were invented and applied to the people—both Indian and white—and the land. The cases examined include plans to “civilize” Indians and “modernize” farmers; to rationally manage agricultural production and land-use; to mitigate environmental problems; to “rationalize” plans for nuclear war to increase the likelihood of “national survival”; and to extend voting rights to Lakota people. Each of these plans or programs is an example of what Biolsi calls governing. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault on governmentality, the book aims to understand how “problems” requiring correction came into public focus, or were actively made by experts with “remedies” or “solutions” in search of problems to fix.
Shorb House (Latinx Research Center), 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Native American Studies Program, Native American Student Development, American Indian Graduate Program, American Indian Graduate Student Association
Wednesday, October 23 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Research on Social Change is pleased to co-sponsor:
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Food Legacy in the Atlantic World
Judith Carney, Professor of Geography, UCLA
A striking feature of plantation era history is the number of first-person accounts that credit the enslaved with the introduction of specific foods, all previously grown in Africa. This lecture lends support to these observations by identifying the crops that European witnesses attributed to slave agency and by engaging the ways that African subsistence staples arrived, and became established, in the Americas. In emphasizing the African crop transfers that occurred between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the discussion draws attention to the significance of the continent’s food crops as a crucial underpinning of the transatlantic commerce in human beings, the slave ship as a means of conveying African crops to the Americas, and the enslaved as active participants in establishing African foodstaples on their subsistence plots and in the foodways of former plantation societies.
International House, Chevron Auditorium, 2299 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley
Sponsored by the Department of Geography
Thursday, October 24 | 12-1:30
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Article Manuscript Workshop
Ontological politics and its diseases in the womb of a Guarani midwife
Valéria Mendonça de Macedo, Professor of Anthropology at Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil) and Visiting Scholar at Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
With respondents: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of the Graduate School and Professor Emerita of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, and Mariana Ferreira, Professor of Medical Anthropology and Associate Director of the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies, San Francisco State University
This special event will bring together the author, two respondents, and the audience, for a focused discussion of an article manuscript by Valéria Mendonça de Macedo. During the event, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Mariana Ferreira will share their reflections on and suggestions for the manuscript, and then there will be open discussion. All attendees are asked to read the draft manuscript in advance (it will be emailed to you after registration).
Registration is required for this free event. Please register by 10/21.
Duster Room, 2420 Bowditch St, Berkeley
Tuesday, October 29 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Ethnographic Research Colloquia Series:
Surviving the Sidewalk: Latino Street Vendors in Los Angeles
Rocío Rosales, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Irvine
This talk is based on my forthcoming book Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2020). The book focuses on a group of Latino immigrant street vendors, known as fruteros, who sell made-to-order fruit salads out of large pushcarts in Los Angeles. For six years, I worked alongside and interviewed fruteros and traveled with them between work and home spheres. In this talk, I examine fruteros’ social and economic lives, as well as their day-to-day struggles, as they labor under the most restrictive anti-vending ordinances in the country while also being undocumented. In this talk, I will also address several methodological issues I encountered throughout my time in the field.
Shorb House (Latinx Research Center), 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Latinx Research Center, Department of Sociology
Wednesday, October 30 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Right Wing Studies is pleased to co-sponsor:
A book panel on NEWS ON THE RIGHT: Studying Conservative News Cultures
Anthony Nadler, Associate Professor, Media and Communication Studies, Ursinus College, and Research Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University
A.J. Bauer, Visiting Assistant Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication,New York University, Research Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University
Alex DiBranco, Doctoral Candidate, Sociology, Yale University, Graduate Student Coordinator, Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Moderator: Brian Dolber, Assistant Professor of Communication, CSU San Marcos.
This event will feature co-editors and contributors of News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019), a new book that seeks to initiate a new interdisciplinary field of scholarly research focused on the study of conservative news cultures. To date, the study of conservative media has proceeded unevenly, crosscutting several traditional disciplines and sub-fields, with little continuity or citational overlap.Speakers will discuss the scholarly head-winds facing researchers of conservative media, and what a more concerted interdisciplinary investigation may look like and yield.
109 Moses, IGS Library, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by: Institute of Governmental Studies
November
Tuesday, November 5 I 4:00-5:30pm
Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues Colloquia Series:
What Drives Native American Poverty?
Beth Redbird, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow, Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, Northwestern University
It has been nearly 40 years since the last large-scale comprehensive assessment of Indian economic well-being. Since that time, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 gave rise to increased tribal sovereignty and manifested in changes to tribal institutions and policies. Indian nations rewrote their constitutions, generated their own tax and business regulatory structures, set up welfare systems, remade school curricula, and gained control over their land. But, we continue to lack a basic understanding about the economic well-being of America’s first peoples. This project examines the development of new tribal institutions and seeks to disentangles the complex interwoven aspects of modern tribal economies that drive economic well-being. Using a decomposition model, I find that changes in residence (returning to reservations), family structure, and lack of education play a small role in Native poverty, whereas the structure of employment is the most significant cause in the poverty increase. Findings suggest that the changing nature of tribal labor markets is having significant and unpredicted impacts on Native poverty and inequality.
Shorb House (Latinx Research Center), 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Sociology, Native American Studies Program, Native American Student Development, American Indian Graduate Program, Native American Studies Library, American Indian Graduate Student Association, Native American Law Students Association
Tuesday, November 5 I 12:30-2:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
The Census in California Politics
New research on Latinx democracy in California led by Prof. Cristina Mora in collaboration with the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Wednesday, November 6 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Ethnographic Research Colloquia Series:
Exploring Plantation Worlds: Towards Ethnographic Collaboration
Tania Murray Li, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Plantations are huge institutions; not one field site but many. They are rigidly hierarchical, segregated by gender and ethnicity, and they have complex relations with the surrounding society. It is difficult for a single researcher to become familiar with multiple plantation worlds, suggesting the need for a team approach. In this talk Tania Li describes the rewards and challenges of team-based ethnographic research drawing on work she carried out in Indonesia’s oil palm plantations together with her collaborator Pujo Semedi and around 100 students from their two universities (Toronto, Gadjah Mada).
Moses Hall, Room 223
Co-sponsored by Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Institute of International Studies
Tuesday, November 12 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Right Wing Studies Colloquia Series:
After Obamageddon: Reflections on the Rise of Right-Wing 'Doomsday' Prepping in 21st Century America
Michael Mills, Lecturer in Criminology, School of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, University of Kent
This talk draws on a sustained ethnography of American 'Doomsday' prepping. Drawing on fieldwork taking place in 2014 and 2018, it pays particular attention to the political dimensions of doomsday prepping culture, including the political discontents that many preppers identify as energizing their activities (under both Obama and Trump). The talk will highlight ways in which the fears of many American preppers align with relatively mainstream right-wing politics (rather than more fringe perspectives with which prepping tends to be associated in much academic and popular commentary). That said, it will also contend that prepping's status as a 'mainstream' phenomenon is dependent on a continually shifting right-wing mainstream that increasingly embraces Far and Extreme Right thinking. It will conclude by offering some thoughts as to how prepping culture may change in the future – specifically as the USA heads into (and beyond) the 2020 election.
Shorb House (Latinx Research Center), 2547 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Center for Ethnographic Research
Thursday, November 14 I 4:00-6:00pm
The Latinx Research Center Presents:
Does Abstraction Belong to White People?
Queer Latinx choreographer Miguel Gutierrez speaks on race, gender, and dance with the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
Wednesday, November 20 I 4:00-5:30pm
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues Colloquia Series:
The Trouble With Inequality
Jeff Manza, Professor of Sociology, NYU
Academic Innovation Studio, 117 Dwinelle Hall
Co-sponsored by Goldman School of Public Policy
December
Tuesday, December 10 I 4:00-6:00pm
The Latinx Research Center:
Holiday Pachanga
Join us for our annual holiday celebration with pan dulce y chocolate.
Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way
