Events
Most ISSI events are free and open to the public. (Any fees are noted below).
Events sponsored or co-sponsored by ISSI and its constituent centers are listed 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.
Spring 2021
Thursday, January 21 | 4 - 5pm PT
Book Launch: Critical Epidemiology and the People’s Health by Jaime Breilh
Zoom Webinar | Access here (registration not required)
Local host: César Montaño, PhD. Rector of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador
Editor: Sarah Humphreville, Oxford University Press
Series Editor: Nancy Krieger, PhD, Professor of Social Epidemiology, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
Commentators:
- Charles L. Briggs, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley
- Howard Waitzkin, MD, PhD, Emeritus Professor, University of New Mexico
- Luisa N. Borrell, DDS, PhD, Distinguished Professor, City University of New York.
Author: Jaime Breilh, Md. MSc. PhD, Director of the CILAB Health Program of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar
Join us for the launch of Critical Epidemiology and the People’s Health (Oxford University Press 2021), which invites readers to the next great paradigm in public health by promoting a progressive, transdisciplinary, intercultural, community-building approach radically divergent from the presiding object-based, empiricist mode of thinking. A concise overview of the Latin American Social Medicine movement, this book introduces the work of leading scientist Jaime Breilh to a global English audience, focusing on key questions such as: What are the real challenges facing critical epidemiology during the current time of immense turmoil and inequity? How can we conduct responsible and sensitive public health research? What role does epidemiology play in addressing the societal ills of both the global North and South? And how can we create a more rigorous, updated, and effective epidemiology? In addressing these questions, Critical Epidemiology and the People's Health offers readers a clear-eyed and much-needed perspective on how to overcome Cartesian reductionism with renewed methodological tools to address the rampant growth of injustices harming our global collective health and to subvert the reigning notions of health prevention and promotion.
Sponsored by: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador
Co-sponsored by: Berkeley Center for Social Medicine; The Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies; Ministerio de Saúde, FIOCRUZ, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz
Thursday, January 28 | 4:00 pm PT
Rituals for Grief & Love: a reading with poets Sade LaNay and Sasha Banks
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Sade LaNay
Sasha Banks
Join us in celebrating two new poetry collections, I love you and I'm not dead by Sade LaNay and america, MINE by Sasha Banks. Released at the beginning of COVID-19, both poets' work cannot be any more timely. LaNay and Banks' collections each take the approach of archival resurrection to name and imagine Black life outside conditions of social death. In I love you and I'm not dead, LaNay's investment is not only their spiritual and physical healing, but the healing of Black women across time and space whose claims to freedom were loud and somewhere across the archival narrative, misread as quiet. As LaNay declares, "Disbelief does not undo the validity of an experience." In a similar poetic sensibility, america, MINE demands that readers confront America's history of racial and gender violence because "endings exist" and the end of the nation is soon approaching. In leaning on rituals of radical conjuring, LaNay and Banks draft roadmaps of fugitive escapes that make Black life in the future possible. Join us for a reading and discussion on poetics, grief, love, and celebration.
Sponsored by Center for Race and Gender
Co-sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Saturday, February 6 | 1:00 - 2:00pm PT
“Generation Rising” Book Launch with Loan Dao and PrYSM
Zoom Event | Register here (free)
Loan Thi Dao, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies, St. Mary’s College of California
Providence Youth Student Movement
Generation Rising traces the development of Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), a grassroots, LGBTQ+ youth-led organization of Southeast Asian Americans whose families migrated to Providence, Rhode Island, in the aftermath of the American war in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. This in-depth ethnography delves into topics that challenge a new generation of community organizers today: collective identity formation, intersectional leadership development, coalitions and political campaign strategies, and enacting a vision for a transformative movement. The book explores how Southeast Asian American organizers in this historic period have navigated the intergenerational demands from both their co-ethnic community elders and social movement elders to forge their own agenda, strategies, and culture, while resisting constraints imposed by funders. Their story captures the struggles and growth of movement-building for youth activists fighting to be free.
Sponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley
Co-sponsored by Asian American Research Center
Thursday, February 18 | 3:30 - 5:00pm PT
Sponsored by the Latinx Research Center
Friday, February 26 | 12 - 1:30pm PT
Revealed in the Wound: Iraqibacter and the Biology of History
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Omar Dewachi, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University
Building on ethnographic research on wounds and the ecologies of war and healthcare in Iraq and across the Middle East, this talk explores the rise of Iraqibacter, a moniker given to Acinetobacter baumannii — a superbug associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Tracing the histories and geographies of this “superbug” across the landscapes of war injury, I show how unravelling ethnographic and microbiological knowledge about antimicrobial resistance reveals deeper entanglements of this killer superbug in the political, biosocial, and environmental manifestations of long-term Western interventions and present-day conflict fallout across the region. Building on the notion of biology of history, the registration of human activity in bacterial life, I suggest that Iraqibacter could be understood as an archive of the changing ecologies and toxicities of war in Iraq and beyond.
Sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Co-sponsored by Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Thursday, March 4 | 3:30 - 5:00pm PT
Book Release: Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (2020)
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Arturo Aldama
Frederick L. Aldama
Alberto Ledesma
Jackie T. Cuevas
Gabriel Estrada
Paloma Martínez-Cruz
Jonathan Gómez
Jennie Luna
Sponsored by the Latinx Research Center
Monday, March 29 | 12:45 - 2:00pm PT
"On Place, Policy, and Pain: Key Dimensions of U.S. Monetary Sanction Punishment Regimes"
Zoom Webinar | Link coming soon
Karin Martin, Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington
Sponsored by Center for the Study of Law and Society
Co-sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Monday, April 5 | 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm PT
Decolonizing Indigenous Migration: Violence, Settler Capitalism, Gender and Law
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Shannon Speed (Chickasaw), Professor of Gender Studies & Anthropology, and Director of the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA
Kristen Carpenter, Council Tree Professor of Law, and Director of the American Indian Law Program at University of Colorado Law School
Angela Riley (Potawatomi), Professor of Law, and Director of Native Nations Law and Policy Center, UCLA School of Law.
How is the violence to which indigenous women migrants are subjected related to “neoliberal multicriminalism” and settler structures of indigenous dispossession and elimination? And how might migration law consider the colonial origins and impacts that undergird state policies on territorial sovereignty and border regulation?
Sponsored by Center for Race and Gender’s Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Native American Studies, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues at UC Berkeley; American Indian Studies Center, and Native Nations Law and Policy Center at UCLA; and the University of Colorado American Indian Law Program
Thursday, April 8 | 5:00 - 7:00pm PT
Archives of Conjure (2020): Healing Materialities and Race
Zoom Webinar | Link coming soon
Solimar Otero
2021 Alan Dundes Lecture
Sponsored by UC Berkeley Folklore
Co-sponsored by the Latinx Research Center
Thursday, April 22 | 4:00 - 6:00pm PT
Beyond La Bamba: Afro-Mexico, Culture, & the History of Blackness in Mexico
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Marco Villalobos, Producer/Director
Moderated by Tianna Paschel
Additional Speaker(s) TBA
Sponsored by the Latinx Research Center
Monday, April 26, 12:45 - 2:00pm PT
“Branches of Legal Mobilization: How Gender and Religiosity Matter for Educator Responses to Rights-based Complaints and Accusations”
Zoom Webinar | Link coming soon
Lauren Edelman (UCB)
Allen Micheal Wright (UCB)
Calvin Morrill (UCB)
Karolyn Tyson (UNC Chapel Hill)
Richard Arum (UCI)
Sponsored by Center for the Study of Law and Society
Co-sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
