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 more than four decades, ISSI's Graduate Fellows Program has provided mentorship, training and support to doctoral students engaged in social change scholarship.
This one-day symposium features the current first-year Graduate Fellows sharing their work in progress. Each panel includes one respondent.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 11 am - 5:30 pm
2111 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA #104 (in-person only)
Program
(abstracts and respondent bios are below, and presenter bios are linked below)
11-11:30: Coffee/tea/pastries
11:30-1: Panel 1
“Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá:” Young Returnees’ Challenges to (Re)Integrating in Oaxaca and Jalisco, Mexico by Adriana P. Ramírez
When Immigration Law Hurts: The Lasting Effects of Legal Violence on Mexican Immigrants’ Citizenship Trajectories by Mitzia E. Martinez Castellanos
Respondent: Erin Hamilton, Professor of Sociology, UC Davis
1-1:45: Lunch
1:45-3:15 Panel 2
The Melancholy Commodity: Objectifications of Race and Historical Injury in Afro-Brazilian Movement Arts by Jesús Gutiérrez
Enactment of Care, Labor & Devotion: Black Women Teaching for Liberation by Makaela Jones
Respondent: Courtney Morris, Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley
3:15--3:30: Snacks
3:30-5:30: Panel 3
Big House on the Block: How Prison Proliferation Impeded Racial Desegregation by Ángel Mendiola Ross
Crisis Management: Deconstructing Dominant Narratives of the Bay Area’s Black Housing Crisis by juleon robinson
How Does Housing Supply Impact Asian American Segregation? by Taesoo Song
Respondent: Tony Roshan Samara, Associate Director of Political Strategy, Right to the City Alliance
Sponsored by: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
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
“Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá:” Young Returnees’ Challenges to (Re)Integrating in Oaxaca and Jalisco, Mexico
Over the past two decades, a growing number of Mexican migrants—including children and young adults—have voluntarily or forcibly returned to Mexico from the United States. The literature indicates that (re)integration is challenging for returnees due to unclear state policies, inconsistent implementation of national programs, and anti-foreigner sentiment in schools and other institutions. Additionally, returnees’ accents, nationalities, and socio-economic statuses often lead to discrimination. However, few studies have systematically investigated how the process of othering and discrimination affects the sense of self among child and young adult return migrants in Mexico. This study asks: How do the challenges young return migrants face in (re)integrating into Mexican society impact their sense of self? Drawing on 98 semi-structured interviews with children and young adult returnees in Jalisco and Oaxaca, as well as 17 interviews with employees of relevant organizations, my findings reveal that the receiving community constructs an “us vs. them” boundary by identifying and acting upon markers of difference. This boundary facilitates discrimination against young returnees and their families, which in turn undermines returnees’ sense of self and hinders their (re)integration. These findings illustrate the reach of the U.S. crimmigration system, which affects not only individuals but also families, as well as youths' interpersonal relationships in a new country that is unprepared to welcome them.
When Immigration Law Hurts: The Lasting Effects of Legal Violence on Mexican Immigrants’ Citizenship Trajectories
Mitzia E. Martinez Castellanos
Socio-legal scholarship emphasizes the profound impact of deportability and exclusion from legal status on unauthorized immigrants, shaping their health, education, and financial outcomes. However, it often overlooks how these forms of legal violence affect how immigrants exercise, or refuse to exercise, fundamental aspects of U.S. citizenship. Drawing on in-depth interviews with formerly unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the broader San Francisco Bay Area, this study examines how past experiences of unauthorized status and repeated encounters with legal violence influence their legal attitudes and their motivations for, or hesitations around, naturalization. I identify three distinct responses to legal violence—defiant, reformist, and assimilative—that reflect divergent conceptualizations of U.S. citizenship. These findings show that the adjustment of status process does not neutralize the effects of legal violence but instead shapes how immigrants critique, navigate, or embrace the very status they were excluded from. These results underscore the need for a more nuanced understanding of the role of legal violence in producing and augmenting racial inequality for Mexican immigrants both before and after they adjust their immigration status.
The Melancholy Commodity: Objectifications of Race and Historical Injury in Afro-Brazilian Movement Arts
This paper revisits classic anthropological concerns with the commodification of African diaspora aesthetics in light of a renewed scholarly focus on how commodity processes can concretize or objectify historical injury and thereby ontologize race. Drawing on ethnographic research with practitioners of capoeira, candomblé orisha dance, and maracatu in both Brazil and the United States, I show how artists and teachers simultaneously “clothe” practitioners with movement forms that transmit the memory of enslavement while preserving a genealogical “pain” that is experienced as an incommunicable interior essence. I unpack the increasingly prevalent dualist conception of personhood (inside vs. outside) through which many interlocutors reconcile commodification pressures with ongoing beliefs in bodily inheritance, without denying the presence of nondualist, fractal or analogistic ontologies in closely related Afro-Brazilian religious traditions. Far from reducing racial identity to a mere commodity, transnational Afro-Brazilian arts economies instead reveal a tragic ambivalence: commodification augments the visibility of Black cultural heritage yet forces teachers and students alike to market a pain they insist can never be fully shared. This tension underscores how bodily form, visuality, and moral authority converge to produce proper heirs of intergenerational trauma, while also gesturing to the ethical and economic dilemmas through which commodification both stabilizes and constrains the transmission of racial “substance.” Ultimately, my findings propose that objectification might function as a double bind, at once enabling the social intelligibility of historical injury and rendering its inheritance vulnerable to external market processes.
Enactment of Care, Labor & Devotion: Black Women Teaching for Liberation
Since the desegregation of schools, Black children have been punished for not assimilating to White supremacist, heteropatriarchy in their traditional U.S. school context. For those Black children who grow up to become teachers, there is a synergy between their teaching experiences and (mis)treatment of Black children. For decades, Black women have mobilized education as a means for social mobility and are grappling with a double bind in their misrepresentation. This qualitative study utilizes semi-structured interview data to explore the beliefs and standpoints of Black women teachers (BWT) as they seek to dignify BIPOC children. Through a frame of anti-Blackness and Black feminist liberation, many Black women conceptualize a loving gaze and politicized praxis as they prioritize racial healing. Some BWT embody radicalism and collective love in their pedagogy, which creates spatial havens for youth empowerment amongst constant threats of pathologization and exclusion. Not only do these actions manifest what the literature calls Black educational fugitive space, but also, they orient Black children towards an Afrocentric futurity and politicized consciousness. Based on interviews with six BWT working in the Bay Area, California, I question how they conceptualize their teaching practices and positionality as ways of enacting freedom and resisting anti-Blackness. I find that these enactments challenge mainstream ideologies in teacher education and complicate notions of belongingness in school reform efforts.
Big House on the Block: How Prison Proliferation Impeded Racial Desegregation
Scholars have long studied the causes and consequences of ethnoracial segregation and mass incarceration in the U.S. because of their entanglement with durable inequality. Yet few studies directly explore the relationship between prison proliferation and segregation. While many associate prisons with rural areas, the majority of the over 1,600 state and federal adult prisons today are located within metropolitan areas, including over 500 in suburban areas. Cities and suburbs with prisons also have higher levels of segregation than those without. In this paper, I ask: To what extent do prisons serve as segregating forces in the communities where they are located, either increasing segregation or impeding desegregation? Drawing on over 50 years of Census, survey, and administrative data, I leverage the generalized synthetic control method to estimate the causal effect of prison openings on residential segregation. I find that as racial segregation trended downward after 1970, prisons increased macro-segregation and worked against neighborhood desegregation—albeit with heterogeneous effects. My findings suggest that prison proliferation, a late twentieth-century racial project, is an overlooked redirection of the state’s segregating efforts outside the housing domain, with implications for scholarship on the carceral state, racial inequality, and the places impacted by the prison boom.
Crisis Management: Deconstructing Dominant Narratives of the Bay Area’s Black Housing Crisis
Dominant narratives of the Bay Area housing crisis often refer to an acute event, such as a supply shortage caused by the machinations of the market. For working-class Black communities, however, the housing crisis has been an interminable condition of life in the region. Despite the overarching policies of clearance and containment that have shaped these Black housing geographies for a century, dominant narratives of the crisis have positioned these communities as “problems,” blighted,” or an impediment to a stable housing landscape. Many scholars have grappled with the discursive power of “crisis” to create opportunities for new political narratives and policies to reorganize urban space, but this work rarely engages with the critical role of race in shaping how crisis narratives are produced and experienced. This paper explores the relationship between race and regional discourses of housing crisis, paying particular attention to the ways crisis narratives facilitate the cyclical displacement of working-class Black housing. Specifically, this research juxtaposes think tank reports, city planning documents, and local media narratives with a set of oral histories, or counternarratives, recorded with working-class Black renters recently displaced from a now-demolished public housing complex in North Richmond, CA. Drawing on these counternarratives, I argue that dominant discourses of the housing crisis simultaneously obscure and reinforce the systemic dislocation of Black housing in the Bay Area. These counternarratives provide the foundation for the radical policy and organizing work necessary to put Bay Area Black housing geographies on stable ground.
How Does Housing Supply Impact Asian American Segregation?
In recent decades, many American cities have experienced significant growth in their Asian American populations, accompanied by increasing racial segregation between Asian and non-Hispanic White populations. Prior research has typically framed this trend as a case of self-segregation among Asian Americans or, more recently, as a consequence of White flight—where White populations move out of areas undergoing racial transition due to the growth of Asian populations. However, limited attention has been given to the role of urban planning and housing policies in shaping Asian American residential patterns, despite growing evidence of their critical role in influencing racial segregation. Increasingly, research links racial segregation with restrictive local land use regulations and planning processes that inhibit the construction of new housing and raise housing costs, particularly in predominantly White, middle-class suburbs. While Asian Americans are disproportionately concentrated in expensive housing markets with limited new development, research on these exclusionary local housing policies often neglects their specific impacts on this group. This gap in the literature raises an important question: How do uneven housing supply patterns across suburbs influence Asian American residential patterns and their racial segregation from other groups? This study answers this question by analyzing longitudinal census data from 1980 to 2019, finding that Asian American segregation is increasingly attributable to suburban housing dynamics. The findings call on researchers and policymakers to recognize how housing development patterns contribute to emerging forms of segregation in American cities, extending beyond the traditional Black-White binary.
Respondent Bios
Erin Hamilton is professor of sociology at UC Davis and an affiliate of the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research, the UC Davis Global Migration Center, and the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas. She studies when, why, and how people migrate, and with what consequences for migrants, their families, and the communities they leave and enter. She is currently working on research projects on legal status, deportation, family and child migration, and migrant health. Professor Hamilton is the author of numerous policy briefs and academic articles and is the co-author of Population Health in America and The Returned: Former U.S. Migrants’ Lives in Mexico City.
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a social anthropologist and the author of To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix
Tony Roshan Samara has been involved with the housing justice movement for over a decade and is currently the Associate Director of Political Strategy at the