CRG sponsors on-going research working groups on various topics related to the intersections of race and gender. Working groups made up of faculty, graduate students from UCB and neighboring institutions, as well as independent scholars, form around a common topic and meet regularly to further research and understanding of the topic area.
The Criminal Justice Working Group, 2009-2010
The United States now incarcerates over two million people, more individuals per capita than any other country in the world. The impact of incarceration is disproportionately concentrated along class, race, and gender lines. UC Berkeley no longer houses a department of criminology and offers few courses or other dedicated forums to discussion of criminal justice policy. In order to fill this gap, and to bridge a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, five graduate students from four different departments at UC Berkeley have formed a working group to engage with criminal justice issues on campus. Our core members meet every other week to exchange ideas and connect each other to the array of criminal justice policy projects in which we are each involved. We seek to create a supportive research community, with questions of race and gender placed at the center of our conversation. We look forward to planning a few lunchtime discussions in the coming year – to work on bridging academic and practitioner boundaries around questions of criminal justice policy, and on identifying viable points of policy intervention. For further information, contact Keramet Reiter at keramet@berkeley.edu.
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Discipline and Restorative Justice in Schools Working Group, 2009-2010
This working group brings together faculty and students from U.C. Berkeley and a local high school to research the impact of school disciplinary practices on racial/ethnic minority students. We will explore whether alternative forms of discipline, founded on restorative justice principles, are a viable and healthy alternative to traditional paradigms. In the Fall of 2009, 30 students from a local high school will participate in a seminar designed and facilitated by members of the working group. Students in the seminar will become familiar with the history of discipline within education at the same time they are trained in qualitative methods and documentary film production. During the Spring of 2010, the group will begin video documenting student encounters with the school's disciplinary apparatus, one that includes a restorative justice oriented youth court class. With the continued support of the Center for Race and Gender, faculty and students will analyze this data during the 2010-2011 academic year and produce a written report that discusses any observed differences in outcomes between traditional disciplinary practices and those rooted in restorative justice principles. In addition, the students will produce a documentary that explores the ways in which racial/ethnic minority students understand, experience and navigate school discipline. For more information, or to become involved, contact Jose Arias at ocelatl@berkeley.edu.
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Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project
The Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project focuses on a systematic and empirical approach to the study of Islamophobia and its impact on the American Muslim community. Today Muslims in the U.S., parts of Europe and around the world have been transformed into a demonized and feared global "other," subjected to legal, social, and political discrimination. Even at the highest levels of political discourse, the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections, Islamophobia took center stage as a sizeable number of Americans expressed fear that Barack Obama, the first African American president, is somehow a closet Muslim. Newspaper articles, tv shows, books, popular movies, political debates, and cultural conflicts over immigration and security can readily produce ample evidence of the stigmatization of Islam within dominant culture. The challenge for understanding the current cultural and political period centers on providing a more workable and encompassing definition for the Islamophobia phenomenon, a theoretical framework to anchor present and future research, and a centralized mechanism to document and analyze diverse data sets from around the U.S. and in comparison with other areas around the world.
More info:
Project Goals
Defining "Islamophobia"
Download Fall 2008 issue of Faultlines, featuring articles on CRG 2008 conference, Islamophobia
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Past CRG Research Working Groups
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