Scholarship for Black Lives
ISSI and its constituent centers are curating an event series during 2020-21 to highlight research on systemic racism and anti-racism as well as scholarship that asserts that Black lives matter.
Check back as additional events will be added.
Fall 2020
Joint Conference on Right-Wing Studies and Research on Male Supremacism
Tuesday, August 4 - Thursday August 6
Complete details and registration for this online conference are available here.
Keynote Talk: Revealing White Supremacy, Dr. Crystal Fleming
Tuesday, August 4 | 1:00pm – 2:30pm PT
Dr. Crystal Marie Fleming is an internationally recognized expert on racism and anti-racism who empowers audiences to confront and challenge white supremacy. She is the author of How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide and Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France. Dr. Fleming’s talk addresses the urgency of expanding our collective understanding of white supremacy beyond extremism like neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Drawing on her expertise and empirical research on white supremacy in the U.S. and Europe, Crystal shows how white supremacy is deeply tied to European colonialism, patriarchy, modern capitalism and the destruction of our ecosystem.
Co-sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center
Keynote Panel: The Far-Right in 2020: Supremacist and Authoritarian Mobilization in the United States and Europe, Dr. Terri Givens and Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal
Thursday, August 6 | 12:10pm – 1:40pm PT
Dr. Terri Givens and Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal will speak to present-day white and male supremacist mobilization and discourses on the far-right in the United States and Europe, from the Boogaloo Bois and anti-lockdown protests to misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism on college campuses.
Terri Givens is the CEO and Founder of the Center for Higher Education Leadership. She is the author/editor of many books and articles, including Legislating Equality: The Politics of Antidiscrimination Policy in Europe and Voting Radical Right in Western Europe. Her forthcoming book, Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, is scheduled for publication in February 2021.
Lawrence Rosenthal is Chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, part of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Rosenthal co-edited Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party and The New Nationalism and the First World War and is author of the forthcoming Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism (New Press) that will be released September 8, 2020.
Wednesday, September 16 | 4:00-5:00pm PT
Confederate Monuments Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg: Plantation Museums in Southern Heritage Tourism
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Stephen Small, Interim Director, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and Professor, African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Some of the most prominent public debates on slavery in the United States at the present time revolve around Confederate monuments, related iconography and the legacies of the Civil War. But these are just one component of a far more extensive infrastructure of sites dedicated to a distorted and mythological memory of slavery, the Confederacy and Southern history. This involves a vast heritage tourism industry across the US South, comprising plantation mansions, work structures and a wide range of other buildings, including slave quarters and slave cabins. What are these sites, where are they located, how do they function and what messages do they convey? In this presentation I describe and evaluate these sites and their proponents in Louisiana and articulate how they form a continuum with racist, right-wing and extremist groups that promote white supremacy. I also identify less prominent structures and groups that fundamentally challenge these “heritage” sites and groups.
Sponsored by Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Thursday, September 24 | 12:00pm - 1:30pm PT
The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
In her recent book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Co-sponsored by Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, African American and African Diaspora Studies, Native American Studies
Wednesday, September 30 | 12:00pm - 1:30pm PT
Abortion Rights in 2020 and Beyond: Threats and Resistance
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
The legal right to abortion is under threat, despite the recent Supreme Court decision in June Medical Services v Russo, a decision that protected the rights of women in Louisiana to get abortions without an undue burden. The right wing has successfully eroded reproductive rights through a number of tactics, including framing abortion as “Black genocide,” yet people continue to have abortions, within, despite, and beyond legal limits. Khiara M. Bridges, co-author of the reproductive justice law professors' amicus brief in June Medical Services v. Russo, will examine race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Carole Joffe, co-author of Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, will draw on interviews with patients, abortion providers, and clinical staff to reveal the compound indignities, inconveniences, and impossibilities posed by the patchwork of restrictions on provision and coverage. She will also discuss the determination and dedication of those both seeking and working to provide legal abortions. Jill E. Adams, Executive Director of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, will focus on how people are choosing and resorting to self-directed and community-directed care to circumnavigate the structural inequities in healthcare access yet still having to contend with the systemic racism of the criminal legal system.
Sponsored by Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies
Co-sponsored by Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice; Center for the Study of Law and Society; Berkeley Law's chapter of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice
Wednesday, October 7 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm PT
From the Edge of the Ghetto: The Quest of Small City African-Americans to Survive Post-Industrialism
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
This talk draws from a study based on interviews with 103 working class and low-income African Americans from Ypsilanti, Michigan, a city of approximately 30,000 residents (about 6,000 of them African American). It explores how they make sense of work and work opportunity in a city that decades ago was the site of considerable industrial opportunity. That city sits on the borders of a thriving post-industrial small city as well as in the vicinity of Detroit, perhaps one of America’s strongest urban examples of declining post-industrialism. Accordingly, these residents discuss work opportunity while being uniquely situated between geographic sites of opportunity and demise. A strong gender distinction emerged in how they discuss their vision of future employment opportunities and their perceived places within them. Consequently, the talk presents a case for how configurations of race, class, and gender surface for lower-income African Americans in their struggle to come to terms with post-industrialism.
Sponsored by Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Co-sponsored by Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
Tuesday October 13 | 5:00pm-6:30pm
Redefining Health Policy in 2020 and Beyond: Racism, Social Movements, and Well-Being
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Jamila K. Taylor, PhD, Director of Health Care Reform and Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation
Janene Yazzie, Co-founder and CEO of Sixth World Solutions
Mari Lopez, Organizer, National Nurses United / California Nurses Association
The Covid19 pandemic has revealed racism as the public health crisis facing the United States. Health disparities are also shaped by employment, immigration, housing, land use, and many other systemic issues and institutions. The United States government's response has largely been reactive; this event is an opportunity to focus on redefining health policy in ways that go beyond debates about testing or restaurant re-opening. Drawing on their experience of working for change at the grassroots, three visionary leaders will engage in a conversation about health policy that would encompass the social and structural changes we need to promote good health.
Sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and National Nurses United / California Nurses Association
Friday, November 13 | 12:00pm - 1:30pm PT
Empirics of Justice: Tracking the Carceral Continuum in Urban America
Zoom Webinar | Register here (free)
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Co-sponsored by Graduate School of Education, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Center for Race and Gender, Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley
