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) or Wildavsky Conference Room (2538 Channing Way), 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 2018
September
Wednesday, September 12 I 4:00-5:30pm
ISSI Fall Colloquia Series:
The Effect of Age at Migration on Poverty among Immigrants: Differences by Country of Origin
Alisa C. Lewin, University of Haifa, Israel Institute Visiting Faculty, Stanford University Visiting Associate Professor
Determinants of Poverty among Post-1990 Immigrants in Israel: Does Age at Migration Matter?
This study examines the effect of age at migration on poverty among immigrants to Israel. Migrants arriving as children are less likely to experience poverty as adults because they acquired their education in the host country. Working-aged immigrants typically interrupt their employment, and are likely to encounter some economic hardship. Immigrants arriving at older ages may encounter severe difficulties in finding employment and they have fewer years to accrue pension benefits, thus they are the most vulnerable. Those arriving after age fifty have higher odds of being in poverty than those migrating at younger ages.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Tuesday, September 25 I 12:00-1:30pm
Title: The Invisible Reality of ‘Chinthat Roge’ (A Life of Chronic Worry): The Illness of Poverty in Dhaka's Urban Slum Settlements
Sabina Rashid, Professor and Dean, BRAC University School of Public Health
The biomedical ‘disease’ model that dominates much of public health theory and practice is missing the important connection people make between their bodies and their everyday life worlds. In many parts of the world, health is experienced and embodied in the emotional, mental, spiritual, physical and social, and political-economic worlds people inhabit. Chinthar roge (“worry illness”) as expressed by the impoverished living in Dhaka slum settlements, humanises the medical domain by paying attention to people, not just disease specific worlds to which human beings peripherally belong. For residents, life is one of exhausting and relentless uncertainty, dealing with endemic poverty, erratic jobs, insecurity and crime, precarious living conditions, unstable relationships and networks. Basic services, such as water, education and electricity services remain limited or inaccessible, or they pay high costs for access. Housing is insecure and evictions are routine in the lives of informal settlers. Their very existence is one of continual stress and fragility. Chinthar roge clearly highlights the limits of medicine as most residents’ lives are situated between hope, fear, anxiety and chronic deprivations. Chinthar roge is not an illness borne per say, but to them akin to a ‘way of life’ illness, it is their core being which embodies this everyday pain, worry and suffering and the body then becomes a form of truth telling, and the medicalisation of this illness speaks of the unspeakable of their existence. We need to recognise that health is as much mental, emotional, spiritual as it is physical, and directly impacted by the social, economic and political conditions that people inhabit. Unless we own up to the fundamental reality of the illness of poverty, we will continue to produce short-term band-aid solutions, with little improvement in the lives of the most disadvantaged.
Stephens Hall, 10 (ISAS Conf. Room)
Sponsored by The Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Wednesday, September 26 I 12:00-1:30pm
Center for Research on Social Change Colloquia Series:
Moving Beyond Recruitment: Supporting and Retaining Black Male Teachers
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.
October
Thursday, October 4 I 4:00-5:30pm
Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies Colloquia Series:
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Kathleen Belew, Assistant Professor of History and the College, University of Chicago
The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out—with military precision—an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In this talk, based on her new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Kathleen Belew presents a history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.
Belew’s disturbing history reveals how, returning to an America ripped apart by a war which, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. Belew shows how the white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Her analysis argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the History Department and the Sociology Department.
Tuesday, October 9 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Ethnographic Research Colloquia Series:
The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil
Alvaro Jarrín, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, College of the Holy Cross
Beauty is considered a basic health right in Brazil, and plastic surgery is offered to working-class patients in public hospitals in exchange for becoming experimental subjects. This talk will trace the biopolitical concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, and will explore the raciology of beauty that allowed plastic surgeons to gain the backing of the State. For patients, on the other hand, beauty has become affectively linked to citizenship and national belonging, and becomes a form of capital that maps onto and intensifies the race, class and gender hierarchies of Brazilian society. It is by examining the interplay between biopolitics and affect, therefore, that one can understand how beauty becomes a visceral reaction to oneself and others.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies.
Wednesday, October 17 I 12:00-1:30pm
Center for Research on Social Change Colloquia Series:
Mobility, Expulsion and Claims to Home: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession
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.
Tuesday, October 23 I 1:00-2:30pm
Indivisible Tohono: Resisting the US-Mexico Border and Militarization on Tohono O’odham Land Through Education and Civic Engagement
Speakers:
April Ignacio, Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, Annamarie Stevens - members of Indivisible Tohono O'odham
Moderated by:
Fantasia Painter, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Ethnic Studies, and Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley
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 recent refusal to allow Trump’s Wall on Tohono O’odham land. This event features three key members of Indivisible Tohono who will discuss their work against the US-Mexico border and border-related militarization on Tohono O'odham land through education and civic engagement
554 Barrows Hall
Sponsor: The Native/Immigrant/Refugee Research Crossings Research Initiative of the Center for Race and Gender
Cosponsored by: Native American Student Development (NASD), Native American Studies (NAS); Indigenous and Native Coalition and Recruitment and Retention Center (INC-RRC), Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) Diversity and Democracy Cluster, American Indian Graduate Program (AIGP), American Indian Graduate Student Association (AIGSA), Joseph Meyers Center for Research on Native American Issues
Wednesday, October 24 I 4:00-5:30pm
ISSI Fall Colloquia Series:
The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption
Nikki Jones, Associate Professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley
with respondent:
Clarence Ford, MPP, Policy Research Associate
Location: Dwinelle 117, Academic Innovation Studio
Co-sponsored by: Center for the Study of Law and Society, American Cultures Center, and the Berkeley Underground Scholars
Thursday, October 25 I 12:00-1:30pm
Crossing Paths: Graduate and Undergraduate Exchanges of Indigenous Research
Speakers: TBA
554 Barrows Hall
Co-sponsored by: American Indian Graduate Program, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, Native American Student Development, Native American Studies
Friday, October 26 I 12:00-1:30pm
Family Separations: Beyond Violence Histories to Build Belonging
Heide Castañeda, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida; Ericka Huggins, Human Rights Activist, Poet, Educator, Former Black Panther Party Leader and Political Prisoner; Angie Junck, Supervising Attorney, Immigration Legal Resource Center
Moderator: Seth Holmes, Co-Chair, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Sponsored by Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
November
Thursday, November 1 I 4:00-5:30pm
Center for Ethnographic Research Colloquia Series:
Dangerous Research: Reflections on fieldwork in an insecure context, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Ann A. Laudati, Ciriacy-Wanthrup Research Fellow, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley
Just as new forms of war and non-state armed actors have blurred the lines of the battlefield, researchers - whether they like it or not - have become part of the social, political, and economic equations that shape life in conflict zones. In many cases, they have little control over those equations. However, descriptions of scholarly findings often leave out these details, intentionally or unintentionally portraying the researcher as independent and in control. Drawing on over 16 months of qualitative fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this talk aims to re-center discussions of “doing dangerous fieldwork”. It considers not only methodology as a practical consideration, but also the fact that who we are, how we are seen, with whom we interact and how we respond matter and, ultimately, play a considerable role in shaping the field, both for the researcher and the researched, in which we work in and after we’ve left.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Friday, November 2 I 12:00-1:30pm
Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research presents:
2018 Midterm Election: Blue Wave or Red Wall? A Pre-Election Panel Discussion
Featured Speakers: Mark DiCamillo, Director, Berkeley IGS Poll; Samantha Luks, Managing Director, Scientific Research, San, Francisco, YouGov; Eric McGhee, Research Fellow, Public Policy Institute of California; Laura Stoker, Associate Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Moderator: Jack Citrin, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Social Science Matrix, 820 Barrows Hall
Co-sponsors: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Public Law and Policy Center, Social Science Matrix
Thursday, November 8 I 4:00-5:30pm
ISSI Fall Colloquia Series:
TBD
Laura Stoker, Associate Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Thursday, November 15 I 4:00-5:30pm
Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues Colloquia Series:
On Indian Ground: California. A Return to Indigenous Knowledge: Generating Hope, Leadership, and Sovereignty Through Education
Joely Proudfit, Chair and Professor of American Indian Studies; Director of California Indian Culture & Sovereignty Center, CSU San Marcos
and
Nicole Lim, Executive Director, California Indian Museum and Cultural Center
Authors and Editors of On Indian Ground: California, Proudfit and Lim will discuss issues related to Native American education reform in California. They will address the impacts of genocide, colonization, racism and historical bias upon curriculum and student achievement. Additionally, they will present holistic indigenous perspectives that can be integrated into systems of education to foster equity, success and social justice.
Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by: American Indian Graduate Program, Native American Student Development, American Indian Graduate Student Association, Native American Studies, Indigenous Language Revitalization DE, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education.
December
Tuesday, December 4 I 5:30-7:00pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Colloquia Series:
Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health
Howard Waitzkin, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico
Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall
Co-sponsored by National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association
