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.

---

Spring 2019

---

January

---

Monday, January 28 I 4 - 7pm

The Feminist Resistance to the Radical Right in Brazil

Talíria Petrone, Brazilian Federal Congresswoman from Rio de Janeiro State;
Sâmia Bomfim, Brazilian Federal Congresswoman from São Paulo State;
Fernanda Melchionna, Brazilian Federal Congresswoman from Rio Grande do Sul State;
Jô Cavalcanti, Brazilian Co-State Representative from Pernambuco State

On the eve of entering office, four female politicians are an emboldened, new generation of feminist officials at the forefront of defending and redefining democracy in Brazil. Building their trajectories out of local grassroots struggles, each has developed distinct approaches in their respective states. Ten months following the assassination of city councilwoman Marielle Franco, their collective work demonstrates that Marielle is still present. They will discuss feminism, formal politics, and innovative modes of resistance to the radical right turn in government. We will consider ways we can take action in solidarity.

Booth Auditorium (Room 175), UC Berkeley School of Law

Co-sponsored by: Departments of Anthropology, Gender & Women's Studies, Graduate School of Education, African American & African Diaspora Studies, Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese; Tianna Paschel (research funds); Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS); Institute of International Studies (IIS); David and Natasha Dolby Fund; Global Metropolitan Studies; Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI); Center for Race & Gender (CRG); Center for Right Wing Studies; Townsend Center for the Humanities and Social Science Matrix.

RSVP: If you’d like to reserve a seat, please register on Eventbrite so we get a sense of numbers. Space may be limited. Information on further events during their visit will be sent in January. You can also visit the Forum facebook page. The event will be largely in Portuguese but simultaneous interpretation will be provided.

Join us in this unprecedented opportunity to hear from and dialogue with four newly elected Brazilian politicians as they begin historic terms in office

---

February

---

Friday, February 1 | 12 - 2pm

The Devil Really is in the Details: Why Specificity Matters in Understanding the Global Radical Right

Brian Porter-Szucs, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, University of Michigan

There are obvious similarities between Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Erdoğan, Jair Bolsonaro, Jarosław Kaczyński, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, and all the other politicians we have come to call ‘populists.’  Not only is that label misleading, but analyzing them as part of a single ideological movement can lead to confusion. This presentation will use the example of Poland to illustrate the necessity of local expertise in understanding seemingly global trends.

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies

---

Wednesday, February 6 | 4 - 6pm

Intersectional Histories, Overdetermined Fortunes: Understanding Mexican and US Domestic Worker Movements

Chris Tilly, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA

What determines whether movements of informal workers succeed or fail? Using cases of domestic-worker movements in Mexico and the United States, Tilly seeks to  build upon the literature on social movements and intersectionality by adding historical analysis of the movements’ evolution through a cross-national analysis of movement differences. Historically, these two movements have been propelled by multiple streams of activism corresponding to shifting salient intersectional identities and frames, always including gender but incorporating other elements as well. Comparatively, the US domestic-worker movement recently has had greater success due to superior financial resources and greater political opportunities – advantages due in part precisely to intersectional identities resonant with potential allies. However, this relative advantage was not always present and may not persist. By comparing the historical changes and cross-national contrasts between these two movements, Tilly draws greater conclusions about informal-worker organizing and its potential for social change.

IRLE Director's Room, 2521 Channing Way

Sponsored by: Institute for the Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)

Co-sponsored by: Center for Research on Social Change, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies,  Center for the Study of Law and Society, and Sociology Department.

---

Friday, February 8 | 5 - 7pm

The Latinx Research Center presents:

Melanie Cervantes Lecture and Expanded Art

The Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way

---

Wednesday, February 13 I 4:00-5:30pm

ISSI Colloquia Series:

The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption

Nikki Jones, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley, with Clarence Ford, MPP as respondent

This event will feature a discussion between Nikki Jones and Clarence Ford, based on Professor Jones’ new book, The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. In the book Professor Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco’s historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them toward a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

Dwinelle 117, Academic Innovation Studio

Co-sponsored by Center for the Study of Law and Society, Center for Race and Gender, American Cultures Center, Berkeley Underground Scholars

---

March

---

Friday, March 1 | 5 - 7pm

The Latinx Research Center presents:

"Making Ohlone Visible," Art Exhibition Opening of New Work

Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Corrina Gould

The Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way

---

Thursday, March 7 | 4:00-5:30pm

Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues Colloquia Series: 

Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents: The Southwest North American Region Since 1540

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, ASU Regents' Professor; Presidential Motorola Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization; Founding Director Emeritus, School of Transborder Studies; Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change; Emeritus Professor of Anthropology of the University of California, Riverside

Spanish and English have fought a centuries-long battle for dominance in the Southwest North American Region, commonly known as the U.S.-Mexico transborder region. Covering the time period of 1540 to the present, the book provides a deep and broad understanding of the contradictory methods of establishing language supremacy and details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions were not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodating and many times forcefully imposed.  Such impositions created arcs of discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multilayered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages—even the invention of a locally-created trilingual dictionary. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work integrates the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the Funds of Knowledge concept—each contributing  creative contemporary discontents to monolingual impositions and approaches.

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

Co-sponsored by: American Indian Graduate Student Association, Latinx Research Center, American Indian Graduate Program, Native American Studies, Native American Student Development

---

Tuesday, March 12 I 4:00-5:30pm

ISSI Graduate Fellows Program Colloquia:

When Did Black Americans Lose their Indigeneity?: Antiblackness, Indigenous Erasure, and the Future of Black-Indigenous Relations on Turtle Island

Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe), Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies & the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA

This talk will analyze moments of solidarity between Black and Indigenous peoples throughout U.S. history. It will also argue for a new way of thinking and talking about people of African descent on Turtle Island, and how this might look going forward.

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

Sponsored by: ISSI Graduate Fellows Program

Co-sponsored by: Joseph Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, Center for Research on Social Change, American Indian Graduate Student Association, American Indian Graduate Program, Native American Studies, Native American Student Development

---

Wednesday, March 13 I 4:00-5:30pm

ISSI Colloquia Series:

Lives, Not Metadata: Possibilites and Limits of Mapping Violence

Monica Muñoz Martinez, Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University

This talk will be based on a digital research project, Mapping Violence, for which Martinez is the primary investigator. The project takes the shape of a digital archive that documents cases of racial violence in Texas from 1900 to 1930. The research is stored in a database and will be displayed as an interactive map that recovers lost and obscured histories of racial violence. The project’s recovery efforts shift longtime patterns followed by historians. Mapping Violence aims to expose interconnected histories of violence, the legacies of colonization, slavery, and genocide that intersect in Texas. Although often segregated in academic studies, these histories coalesced geographically and temporally, and in some cases the same agents of violence moved across the state targeting different racial and ethnic groups. Historians have also tended to segregate studies of vigilante violence from extralegal violence at the hands of police. This project rethinks the limits of archival research, historical narrative, and methods for presenting findings to public audiences. In this talk, Martinez will explore some of the fundamental questions about the possibilities created when history and the digital humanities converge. How does one visually represent a history of loss on a digital platform? How can a digital project accommodate the needs of academic and public audiences?

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

---

Thursday, March 14 | 3:30 - 5pm

The Latinx Research Center presents:

Lecture on Transmodernity and Decoloniality

Enrique Dussel

The Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way 

---

Tuesday, March 19 | 12-1:30pm

Center for Research on Social Change Colloquia series presents:

The Uncivil Polity: Race, Poverty and Civil Legal Justice

Jamila Michener, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Cornell University

Civil legal institutions protect crucial economic, social, and political rights. The core functions of civil law include preventing evictions, averting deportations, advocating on behalf of public assistance beneficiaries, representing borrowers in disputes with lenders, safeguarding women from domestic violence, and resolving family disputes (e.g. child support, custody). Civil legal protections are especially critical to low-income women of color. In 2016, seventy-two percent of civil legal aid beneficiaries were women and over 50 percent were people of color. To date, civil legal institutions have remained largely invisible in the discipline of political science. This paper investigates the democratic repercussions of civil legal institutions. Drawing on data from in-depth qualitative interviews, we examine how experiences with civil legal processes affect political attitudes and action among racially and economically marginal denizens.

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

Co-sponsored by: Institute for Governmental Studies, the Department of Political Science, and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans

---

Tuesday, March 19 | 4-5:30pm

Citrin Center on Public Opinion Research presents:

American Opinion on Immigration: Implications for Policy

A Panel Discussion with Morris Levy, University of Southern California; Cecilia Mo, UC Berkeley; Cara Wong, University of Illinois; Moderated by Laura Stoker, UC Berkeley.

Social Science Matrix Conference Room, 8th floor Barrows Hall.

Co-sponsored by: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

---

April

---

Monday, April 1 I 12 -1pm

The Latinx Research Center presents:

Latinx Labor in California

Ivón Padilla-Rodriguez, Lilia Soto, and other special guests

The Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way 

---

Tuesday, April 2 I 11:30am 

Canadian Studies Colloquium

Restaurants and Reconciliation: The Representation of Indigenous Foodways in Canada

L. Sasha Gora, Visiting Scholar, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Why are there so few Indigenous restaurants in Canada? Toronto has over 8,000 restaurants, but until October 2016 only one offered Indigenous cuisine. Since then, three more have opened, and others across the country. By narrowing in on restaurants, L. Sasha Gora’s talk will survey the relationship between food and land in Canada and emphasize the historic role of food as both a weapon of assimilation and a tool of resistance. She will also discuss how contemporary Indigenous chefs are cooking a lot more than just dinner.

223 Moses Hall

Co-sponsored by: Joseph Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues

---

Tuesday, April 2 I 4 -5:30pm

Cultural Capital, Systemic Exclusion and Bias in the Lives of Black Middle-Class Women: A Conversation

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

---

Thursday, April 4 I 3:30-5:00pm

Berkeley Center for Social Medicine presents:

Book Manuscript Workshop: Side Effects: The Transnational Making and Unmaking of AIDS Politics in China

Yan Long, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley

With respondents: Seth Holmes, Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley, and Vincanne Adams, Professor of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, UC San Francisco.

Registration is required for this free event.

This special event will bring together three faculty affiliates of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, as well as the audience, for a focused discussion of one chapter, "Seeing Like a Project: Gay Men’s Success as Subcontractors," of a book manuscript by Yan Long, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. During the event, Vincanne Adams and Seth Holmes will share their reflections on and suggestions for the manuscript, and then there will be open discussion of the chapter. All attendees are asked to read the chapter in advance (it will be emailed to you after registration).

Side Effects: The Transnational Making and Unmaking of AIDS Politics in China (Oxford University Press) examines how transnational AIDS institutions expanded political participation while producing and exacerbating participatory inequality, which ironically strengthened the authoritarian apparatus of governance. The manuscript tackles this paradox through analyzing how transnational AIDS institutions set in motion both the surge and decline of China’s AIDS movement between 1989-2013. Chapter 9, "Seeing Like a Project: Gay Men’s Success as Subcontractors," analyzes how transnational AIDS projects expanded the governance jurisdiction of health departments to include gay men as a new member of the governed, delineating the former's role to allocate resources among and exert influence over the behavior of the latter as deserving subjects and qualified targets. Gay men’s organizations played a critical brokerage role in changing male homosexuality from being a moral anathema for the state to dismiss, to being a health problem for the state to acknowledge, measure and act on. 

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This event has been postponed; new date TBA

CRG Thursday Forum Series

Narratives of Progress and Protection, Contradiction and Refusal: Indigeneity, Gender and Citizenship

"Made For Your Benefit:" Protection, Prohibition and Refusal on Tohono O'odham, 1912-1934 -- Fantasia Painter, PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies and Graduate Fellow, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, UC Berkeley

Gender Progress as a Pillar of Mexico's Post-agrarian Citizenship -- Raquel Pacheco, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz

691 Barrows Hall

Sponsored by: Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley

Co-sponsored by: Joseph Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues

Location is wheelchair accessible and open to the public

---

Wednesday, April 10 I 3:30-5pm

Marijuana Legalization as Frontier Capitalism

Erica Lagallisse, Postdoctoral Fellow, Internatonal equalities Institute, London School of Economics

With Moderator: Michael Polson, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Economy and Natural Resource Economics, UCB

Erica Lagalisse’s ongoing multi-sited ethnographic research of both medical(ized) and black-market marijuana production, distribution and consumption suggests that the legalization of marijuana functions as a form of frontier capitalism.  Traditional producers are not granted rights to the marijuana strains and products they have developed; their appropriation by elites constitutes a form of primitive accumulation.  This process is facilitated by traditional producers being cast as “violent” while new white, wealthy, corporate marijuana entrepreneurs are described as “safe” through constructed associations with medicine, purity, and “healing”—constructions of “health” are always political, class-making devices, brought to inaugurate class rights and the respectability of some at the expense of others. Social Science Matrix (820 Barrows Hall, 8th floor)

Sponsored by: Cannabis Research Center 

Co-sponsored by: Berkeley Center for Social Medicine

Social Science Matrix (820 Barrows Hall, 8th floor)

---

Thursday, April 11 I 11-2pm

---

Thursday, April 11 I 4-5:30pm

Center for Ethnographic Research Colloquia Series:

How to Do Ethnography When You Dislike Your Research Subjects? Fieldwork Within Right-Wing Groups in Italy

Martina Avanza, Senior Lecturer, Political Sociology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Ethnography does not seem to be suited for situations in which the ethnographer dislikes the group she or he studies. Some fieldworkers even think that ethnography without empathy is almost impossible to achieve. That is why scholars tend to do ethnography of left-wing or subaltern group mobilizations and to study the right from a distance, with an etic perspective.

Building on my experience as an ethnographer working on right-wing groups in Italy (the Lega Nord party and the “pro-life” movement), I will talk about the challenges of this kind of fieldwork and also about possible contributions not only to the field of right-wing studies, but also to the ethnographic literature. In particular, I will address issues of ethics and reflexivity that are particularly acute in this kind of fieldwork.

Co-sponsored by: Center for Right Wing Studies

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

---

Monday, April 15 I 12 -1pm

The Latinx Research Center presents:

New Research in History and Sociology

Pablo Gonzalez and other special guests

The Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way 

---

Thursday, April 18 I 4 -5:30pm

Center for Right Wing Studies Colloquia series:

The Extreme Gone Mainstream

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Professor of Education and Sociology; Director, International Training and Education Program, American University

Miller-Idriss explores how extremist ideologies have entered mainstream German culture through commercialized products and clothing laced with extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and nationalist coded symbols and references. Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of historical and contemporary images, as well as scores of interviews with young people and their teachers in two German vocational schools with histories of extremist youth presence, Miller-Idriss shows how this commercialization is part of a radical transformation happening today in German far right youth subculture. She describes how these youths have gravitated away from the singular, hard-edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated and fashionable commercial brands that deploy coded extremist symbols. Virtually indistinguishable in style from other clothing popular with youth, the new brands desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas and dehumanize victims.

Co-sponsored by: Center for German and European Studies

Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way

---

Wednesday, April 24 I 12 -1:30pm

Health, Healing, and Death: Contestations and Interventions, with respondent Tina K. Sacks, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Katie Savin, Ph.D Student, Social Welfare

"A Death by Any Other Name: When Are Health Disparities Calls for Assimilation to a Medicalized Norm?"

Savin examines the phenomenon of modern death; a death that takes place in institutions such as hospitals or nursing homes and is vulnerable to systemic bias that persists across the health care system. Modern death’s decision-making structures, such as advanced care planning and goals of care meetings, dictate critical decisions that can be informed by one’s culture, values, and historical and contextual relationship to accessing health care. Black patients and disabled patients (literature to date lacks an intersectional analysis on these two overlapping groups) have been identified for analysis because they tend to use more ‘aggressive’ care and less palliative care, especially in the final year of life. Existing research suggests that this is a disparity that must be addressed. Instead, Savin argues that these differences show that the medicalized norm of a good “quality of death” – and “quality of life” by extension – is not universally shared.

Angela Aguilar, Ph.D Student, Ethnic Studies, and ISSI Graduate Fellow

"Envisioning 'Loving Care' in Impermanent Healing Spaces: Sacred and Political Organizing Toward Decolonial Health/Care in Oakland, California"

This paper explores a self-determined space of health and healing that centers ancestral and traditional medicine and spiritual practices as interruptions to the ongoing embodiment of colonization via structural inequity and medical violence. While ancestral and traditional (AT) medicine overlaps with what is conventionally known as alternative medicine, what sets AT apart in this work is the political orientation of the Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) - the organization that is the focus of this paper - and its network of AT practitioners: their intentional immersion in AT healing practices to address the impact of shared generational experiences of institutional oppression. The healing framework of clinic spaces is inextricably tied to histories of activism and organizing against multiscalar oppressions. Aguilar uses a transdisciplinary decolonial framework to analyze the HCC’s “ceremonial organizing” model to show how the space of the Clinic moves us to ask what counts as health, healing, and care on multiple scales beyond and including the individual body, as well as how the sacred-political healing space shapes a different approach to and experience of community organizing and social movement.

Duster Room, ISSI, 2420 Bowditch Street

---

Thursday, April 25 - Saturday, April 27

Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies

Sponsored by: Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies

The Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies is pleased to present the Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies. This interdisciplinary conference will feature dozens of new and established scholars from around the world whose work deals with the Right as a social, political, and/or intellectual phenomenon from the 19th century to the present day. Participants will have the rare opportunity to join an expanding network of scholars who focus on right-wing studies, facilitating the development of this interdisciplinary field and future collaborations that emerge from these connections.

Thursday, April 25 | 4:00-6:00 pm | Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Center, UC Berkeley
A keynote panel of experts, who will weigh in on the current state of the far right in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, will open the conference, followed by a reception. 

Friday, April 26 | 5:00-7:00pm | 370 Dwinelle Hall 
There will be a film screening and discussion of “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville.” 
Both of these events are free and open to the public. 

Friday, April 26 | 9am-4:30pm 
Saturday, April 27 | 9am-4:45pm
Panel presentations. If you plan to attend panel presentations, please check the conference website for locations and registration information.

Registration recommended. 

Co-sponsored by: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Department of History, Department of Sociology, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Institute of European Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Scholars Strategy Network, Southern Poverty Law Center,  Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

More information is available on the conference website.

---

Monday, April 29 I 12 -1pm

The Latinx Research Center presents:

New Research in Spanish and English Literatures

Génaro Padilla, Robert Reyes, and other special guests

The Latinx Research Center, 2547 Channing Way 

---

Tuesday, April 30 I 3:30-5pm

Parks as Places of Belonging, Access and Change with respondent Carolina Reid, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

C.N.E Corbin, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and ISSI Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley

"Enclosure-Occupations: Contested Productions of Green Space & the Paradoxes within Oakland, California's Green City"

Burger Boogaloo is an annual rock concert that has taken place in Mosswood Park since 2009. Every year a portion of the park is gated and closed off to the general public. Events like Burger Boogaloo are representative of a growing entertainment industry catering to the new influx of wealthy residents in Oakland and beyond. At the same time, Mosswood Park has struggled with homeless encampments which impact park use; it is emblematic of a city and state experiencing an increase in unsheltered residents as a result of a volatile gentrification process. Using observations, interviews, and municipal documents this work examines how residents are negotiating with the realities and the pitfalls of Oakland becoming a green city during the tech boom. This study focuses on a small but highly used green space in which tensions between park use and gentrification pressures are visible on the landscape. This paper looks at two types of enclosure-occupations: one from above, government sanctioned permitted events which allow for the temporary enclosure of park space for private events, and the other from below, informal extralegal encampments of unsheltered residents. While those who participate in these enclosure-occupations have vastly different economic, political, and social power, both enclosure-occupations simultaneously create openings for some while constricting public park access for others.

Joseph Griffin, Dr.P.H. Student, School of Public Health, and ISSI Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley

"For Us By Us: An Urban Park Redevelopment Process in Richmond, California"

Redevelopment of public space has been heralded as a way of promoting community health. However, the process of redevelopment is understudied, particularly the role of community members in that process. The history of community development has been described as being born in the liminal space between great need and great opportunity, largely carried by the intangible assets of community members. Co-production of knowledge between professional and local partners extends knowledge, and participatory processes often lead to action-oriented solutions. This paper analyzes redevelopment as a community-based participatory process through a case-study of the redevelopment of Elm Playlot in Richmond, California.   

Duster Room, ISSI, 2420 Bowditch Street

---

May