Gender/Sexuality Workshop
In the Gender/Sexuality Workshop, we take a broad view of the study of gender and sexuality, placing it into conversation with studies of race and ethnicity, immigration, religion, labor, work, development, social theory, crime and punishment, culture, aging and the life course, social movements, education, medicine, and other subfields. The group was formed by Sociology graduate students in 2009 to create a space for graduate students and faculty to discuss their work on gender and sexuality as well as to support and connect students. The group has expanded to include folks from Anthropology, Education, Italian, ESPM, etc., and we welcome UC Berkeley graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars from any discipline. We meet in person several times throughout the semester to workshop papers, conference submissions and invited talks.
To join the group, email cssc@berkeley.edu (from your berkeley.edu email) with a brief description of your research.
Black Spirituality and Aesthetics: Jamaica and the Black Diaspora
This project, led by Nadia Ellis, investigates the relationship between Black spirituality and aesthetics with an emphasis on Jamaican cultures in their dynamic relation to the diaspora. Exploring early twentieth century studies by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, and George Eaton Simpson, as well as contemporary works by artists and writers including Kapo, Kei Miller, and Zadie Smith, Ellis traces religious influences in the aesthetic effects of Black literary and expressive cultures. The project examines various kinds of texts—archival, contextual, ethnographic, and expressive—to consider the influence of religious perspectives and metaphysical worldviews on questions of subjectivity, labor, gender, sexual expression, and politics in this Caribbean nation, a place of compelling interest and some consternation for social theorists and artists alike. . Probing aesthetics of the minor, expansive accounts of materiality and life on the edge, Ellis centers texts and performances that provide a Black diasporic orientation toward global precarity, one that values propositions of ongoingness nourished by long histories of metaphysical approaches to the world.