Tuesday, May 5, 2026, 9 am-7 pm
What is the relevance of the academy to achieving social justice? What does it mean to be a social change scholar? How can the academy be (re-)made to reflect the diversity and complexity of society, where students and communities have active voices and roles in shaping the pedagogy, research approaches, and policy production of the research university? For fifty years, ISSI's Graduate Fellows Program (GFP has provided mentorship, training and support to doctoral students engaged in social change scholarship.
Our symposium features the current first-year Graduate Fellows sharing their work in progress. Each panel includes one respondent. The event concludes with a keynote and reception.
Ricky N. Bluthenthal, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and Chair of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California (and GFP alum!), will deliver the inaugural Distinguished Lecture on Community-Engaged Research: "Centering the disadvantaged: Reflections on community partnership and solidarity in research with people who use drugs."
Dr. Bluthenthal's keynote will be followed by a reception to celebrate our 50th anniversary!
Sponsored by: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Thank you to our keynote cosponsors: Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Department of Sociology, School of Public Health, and School of Social Welfare.
Program
Find linked presenter bios, abstracts, and keynote speaker and respondent bios below the program info.
9am-4pm (in person only) @ 2111 Bancroft Way #104, Berkeley, CA
No registration required for the 9-4 sessions
9-9:30: Coffee, tea, fruit, pastries
9:30-11: Panel 1
Producing Containment: Understanding the Structural Drivers of Cardiovascular Disease Exposures in Dallas and Wilcox Counties, Alabama by Larissa Benjamin
Multigenerational Perspectives on Psilocybin Mushrooms Among Urban Native Communities: Collective Continuance, Sovereignty, and Healing by Marlena Robbins
Respondent: Tianna Bruno, Assistant Professor, Geography, UC Berkeley
11-11:30: Coffee, tea, fruit, pastries, snacks
11:30-1: Panel 2
Knowing Race, Managing Inequity: The Logic of DEI in San Francisco Government by Jessica Kari Law
Governing Possibility: The Necessity of Unhealthy Housing in Alameda County, CA by Robert Ortiz Stahl
Respondent: Savannah Shange, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz
1-2: Lunch
2-4: Panel 3
Climate change (mal)adaptation and a racialized politics of abandonment on Guåhan: Militarizing coastlines now and then by Kieren Rudge
What Grew There: African Diaspora, Black Belonging, and the Spatial Politics of Black Los Angeles and Little Ethiopia by Alexandra Gessesse
The Spatial Politics of Disorder: Planning, Race, and Space in Chinese Garden Park in Oakland’s Chinatown by Lisa Ng
Respondent: Diana J. S. Martinez, Assistant Professor, Architecture, UC Berkeley
5-7pm @ The Faculty Club
5-6: Keynote (hybrid)
Centering the disadvantaged: Reflections on community partnership and solidarity in research with people who use drugs by Ricky Bluthenthal
Please register for the keynote here
6-7: Reception
ISSI gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Asian American Research Center, College of Letters and Sciences, and the Graduate Division, which makes it possible for us to give modest stipends to our Fellows. Your gift will enable us to increase these stipends.
Abstracts
Producing Containment: Understanding the Structural Drivers of Cardiovascular Disease Exposures in Dallas and Wilcox Counties, Alabama
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States, and in a concerning reversal of decades of public health progress, rates of CVD have started to rise. This alarming trend is exacerbated in rural populations, especially in the Southeastern US with a disproportionate burden of CVD experienced by Black rural residents. Although public health tends to center lifestyle interventions and the social determinants of health, little is known about what is fundamentally driving these socially and geographically patterned trends, persisting for decades despite interventions. Through 30 in-depth interviews with community leaders and activists in two rural counties in Alabama, this paper investigates the relationship between rural experiences of disinvestment and cardiovascular health risks. Based on thematic analysis of interviews and viewing racial capitalism as a structural determinant of health, the paper interprets local experiences with industrial pollution, population and economic decline, access to healthcare and other health promoting resources, and crumbling infrastructure as CVD exposures resulting from investment priorities over time. Decisions not to invest in particular public goods, combined with communities that are socially and geographically marginal, leave community members feeling contained spatially and materially with limited access to necessary health resources, producing conditions for premature illness and death. Suggestions from community leaders and findings from this research can be used to improve community- and regionally focused interventions to eliminate health disparities and improve population health.
What Grew There: African Diaspora, Black Belonging, and the Spatial Politics of Black Los Angeles and Little Ethiopia
For over forty years, Ethiopians and Eritreans have been living in South Los Angeles, constructing what home and identity looks like outside of their homeland, alongside, and sometimes in opposition to, African Americans who have been in the United States for generations. This paper examines the placemaking practices of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in the historic corridors of Black Los Angeles–a diaspora arriving within a diaspora, making home in geography already shaped by its own histories of displacement, resistance, and survival. Drawing on over twenty interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research in Los Angeles, this paper explores the concept of Black Diasporic Acculturation: the ongoing, multidirectional, and spatially grounded process through which African migrants and African Americans mutually transform one another’s understandings of Blackness, membership, community, and belonging. At its center, it explores what happens when two communities of the African Diaspora, each shaped by their own histories, choose to build something together. The paper traces this process across two sites: the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church on Slauson Avenue, whose founding in the late 1980s was brokered through a coalition of Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants, members of the Bloods and Crips, and Father Amde Hamilton; and the commercial corridor on Fairfax Boulevard that the community had already named Little Ethiopia before the LA City Council formally designated it in 2002, marking it the first officially recognized African ethnic enclave in the United States.
Knowing Race, Managing Inequity: The Logic of DEI in San Francisco Government
Over the past few decades, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have become widespread as corporations, universities, and governments established offices that assess organizational practices and implement strategies to promote equity. Although DEI has been under attack since 2025, the framework remains a dominant methodology for understanding and addressing racial disparities, but it has not been properly theorized as such — as a framework with its own concepts and logics. “Racial equity” entails a certain way of conceptualizing its own problem space and, in doing so, implies certain plausible and effective solutions. One case of how DEI is being formulated is the San Francisco Office of Racial Equity (ORE). Created in 2019, the ORE has been leading a citywide effort to establish a racial equity framework through which city agencies will devise plans to reach equity in their respective work. Using in-depth interviews with city officials, bureaucrats, and consultants, as well as participant observation of equity-related work, I examine how the ORE, city departments, and experts understand the central concepts within “racial equity” and how that knowledge gets put into practice. I argue that the conceptual core of DEI is an approach I call race indeterminacy, a form of racial knowledge that is characterized by an extreme focus on race but with an ambivalence toward a settled meaning of it. This ambiguous conceptualization of race and racism straddles the line between the colorblindness and structural racism frames. I then argue that, in practice, this indeterminacy enables institutions to absorb scrutiny from both conservative and progressive forces and maintain legitimacy while still “doing” equity work.
The Spatial Politics of Disorder: Planning, Race, and Space in Chinese Garden Park in Oakland's Chinatown
This paper examines the historical development and contemporary underuse of Chinese Garden Park in Oakland’s Chinatown to understand how urban planning processes shape public space. Despite the proximity of Chinese Garden Park to the dense commercial district of Chinatown, the park remains largely empty. Throughout Oakland’s history, this plot of land has been renamed several times – from Harrison Square Park, to Harrison Railroad Park in 1960, to Chinese Railroad Park in 1986, and finally to Chinese Garden Park in 1993. Through an examination of planning ephemera and other archival documents, I argue that the name changes of Chinese Garden Park represent contestations of placemaking and urban governance within the Chinatown community, revealing how both municipal and community-level struggles expose processes of beautification – urban development strategies that construct “beauty” through the removal of racialized “blight” – as racial projects that uphold a white spatial imaginary and justify the continued displacement and marginalization of Chinese communities in Oakland. By situating Chinese Garden Park within broader patterns of urban change in the Bay Area, this paper highlights how planning practices used to manage racialized understandings of urban disorder contribute to uneven spatial outcomes and ongoing negotiations over public space in Chinatown.
Governing Possibility: The Necessity of Unhealthy Housing in Alameda County, CA
This paper examines how unhealthy housing in Alameda County, California, is constituted as a governable problem through what I call policywork: the socially-embedded, morally-charged, and institutionally-constrained labor of professionals through which health-negating housing conditions are rendered knowable and actionable. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with public health officials, tenant advocates, and policymakers, the paper traces how unhealthy housing (marked by uneven exposures to mold, lead, and extreme indoor heat) is shaped into an object of intervention available to documentation, legislation, and program implementation. Rather than treating policy as a neutral instrument for resolving inequities, I argue that policywork is a productive self-reference, whereby notions of progress and justice are reconfigured according to normative political processes, and policy fixes are themselves the means by which new problems and work are generated. Using cases including asthma and lead intervention programs and climate resilience initiatives, the paper demonstrates how this work proceeds through measures that can only yield partial, delayed, or contradictory effects that stabilize unhealthy housing as an enduring object of governance. Renters are thereby held in conditions that make them ill while those working to address these conditions remain reliant on the standard modes of response available to them, revealing policywork as an ongoing organization of possibility rather than resolution.
Multigenerational Perspectives on Psilocybin Mushrooms Among Urban Native Communities: Collective Continuance, Sovereignty, and Healing
Indigenous communities across the Americas have maintained relationships with psilocybin mushrooms for millennia, yet remain largely excluded from the governance, research, and benefit structures of the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. American Indian and Alaska Native communities carry the highest rates of substance-related overdose mortality, suicide, and historical trauma exposure of any population in the United States, while comprising approximately 4.7 percent of psychedelic clinical trial participants. This qualitative study employed constructivist grounded theory to examine how thirty urban Native adults across four generational cohorts, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z, make meaning of psilocybin mushrooms. Semi-structured interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 were analyzed through Kyle Powys Whyte's framework of collective continuance. Five cross-cutting themes documented a multigenerational arc from colonially installed prohibition through unguided experimentation toward deliberate healing, cultural reclamation, and sovereignty-centered governance frameworks. Findings demonstrate that psilocybin's therapeutic and cultural dimensions are inseparable for Indigenous participants, that the psychedelic renaissance is reproducing colonial patterns of extraction, and that collective continuance provides a more analytically powerful framework for understanding Indigenous health and healing than individual outcomes models.
Climate change (mal)adaptation and a racialized politics of abandonment on Guåhan: Militarizing coastlines now and then
Climate adaptation is crucial for islands as sea level rise, extreme storms, and other impacts become prominent. Further, communities throughout Oceania face compounding threats from the rapid military buildup of the region. In the U.S. territory of Guåhan (Guam), climate change and militarization are impacting an island with a longstanding military presence. However, while militaries are immense contributors to environmental destruction, the U.S. military is also engaged in coastal adaptation, implementing civil works such as seawalls and coastal road repairs. Adaptation is necessary, but here is another process through which the military exerts influence by shaping environments and infrastructures within and beyond bases. Building upon archival research and qualitative community-engaged methods, I explain how adaptation on Guåhan is structured in relation to the military. I trace shifting formations of coastal infrastructure development, militarization, and adaptation on Guåhan first in the post-WWII period and then through present-day processes to make two arguments: (1) the military’s relationship to Guåhan reproduces a racialized politics of abandonment exerted by re-shaping coasts in different ways across eras and (2) when analyzed across multiple spatial and temporal scales, it is evident that military-led adaptation on Guåhan is maladaptive by enabling further destruction and emboldening militarism.
Keynote Speaker and Respondents
Ricky N. Bluthenthal, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. He also holds the Flora L. Thornton Chair in Preventive Medicine. Since 1991, Dr. Bluthenthal has conducted community-partnered research on risk behaviors, drug use related health problems (i.e., HIV, HCV, overdose) and harm reduction efforts to prevent these health outcomes among people who inject drugs, men who have sex with men, and other disadvantaged populations. His studies have been funded by NIDA, NIAAA, NIMHD, and the CDC among others. Dr. Bluthenthal has published over 225 manuscripts in peer-reviewed scientific journalsDr. Bluthenthal received his MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, now the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. As a graduate student, Dr. Bluthenthal co-founded the syringe service program in Oakland, California, and was a founding board member of the National Harm Reduction Coalition.
Tianna Bruno is Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography. Throughout her work, she foregrounds Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. Her research also highlights the mutual experiences of degradation and survival between subaltern communities and their surrounding ecologies through the integration of Black geographies and critical physical geography, specifically analyzing trees. This research is currently focused on Texas and will soon expand to various sites across the Black diaspora. She earned a PhD in Geography from the University of Oregon. Her work has been published in Local Environment, Professional Geographer, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
Diana Martinez is an architecture historian and Assistant Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley. Her research on the architecture of the United States empire focuses on the built environment of the Philippine Islands. Trained as an architect, she received her MArch and PhD from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Martinez's first book, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the United States' Imperial Project in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025) exposes the immense impact of a single (hybrid) material on the United States colonial venture in the Philippines. She is currently working on the manuscript for a second book, Master Plans: The Colonial Roots of Urban Renewal, which places Daniel Burnham’s 1905 Plan for Manila within a history of early 20th-century city planning.
Savannah Shange is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and also serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Her research interests include gentrification, multiracial coalition, ethnographic ethics, Black femme gender, and abolition. She earned a PhD in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania, a MAT from Tufts University, and a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her first book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area. Her work has also been published in journals such as Transforming Anthropology, Women and Performance, Cultural Anthropology, and Radical History Review.
