The Center for Race & Gender sponsors on-going research initiatives that investigate specific areas of inquiry related to racial and gender justice. CRG also hosts research working groups to support faculty and/or graduate students to sustain interdisciplinary critical research on topics related to race, gender, and their intersections. Working groups create productive intellectual exchange among members, facilitate deeper understandings of the identified research topic, and catalyze innovative ideas about the research area.
The deadline for working group applications for the 2013-2014 academic year is May 9, 2013. More info here: http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/deadline-research-working-group-proposals
Download the Working Group Application Details
Download the Working Group Application Form
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2012-2013 CRG RESEARCH INITIATIVES:
2012-2013 CRG RESEARCH WORKING GROUPS:
- Critical Methodologies
- Criminal Justice Working Group
- Decolonial Feminisms Working Group
- Health and Healing Beyond the Bio-Medical Industrial Complex
- immigration / (im)migrant (il)legality
- The Listening Group
- Muslim Identities & Cultures
- Popular Music in Chicana/o Cultural Studies
- Race and Yoga in the U.S.
- Reproductive Justice and the Future of Reproductive Rights
- Transnational Mixed Asians In-Between Spaces
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AB540 Undocumented Student Research Project
From 2011-2012, a collaboration of UC Berkeley partners launched a research initiative to explore the topic of improving the campus climate for undocumented students at Berkeley. The initiative includes community building efforts among undocumented students to decrease isolation, an engaged research project that collects critical data about the experiences and insights of undocumented students at Berkeley, a narrative writing course to collect qualitative data, and sharing the results of research findings.
Fall 2012 will see a release of the findings from our research, a launch of an anthology produced by students who participated in the writing course, support for queer undocumented student organizing initiatives, and a symposium on the politics of (im)migration.
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This working group begins from an understanding of the hierarchies within social science research methods which delegitimize the qualitative methods that address equity and social justice, and speak from “epistemologies of the wound” as Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez explains. Meetings will offer participants opportunities to collaboratively gather a knowledge-base of race, class, gender, and queer-based epistemological issues, particularly in the field of educational research.
While quantitative methods serve an uncontested value in research, critical qualitative methodologies bring a complexity and nuanced understanding of the formations of power that define the material reality of marginalized communities. The aim of this group is to contribute to the epistemological diversity on-campus by supporting efforts to engage emerging qualitative research methods, and stimulate future research collaborations. We welcome students and community members at any stage of their research projects. Throughout the semester, our meetings will workshop participants’ written work and include dialogue on participant-selected readings pertaining to critical methodologies in qualitative research including, but not limited to, critical race methods, decolonizing methodology, counter storytelling, participatory action research, auto ethnography, and oral histories/herstories.
If you would like more information, please contact critmethodologies@gmail.com.
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Criminal Justice Working Group (4th year)
The Criminal Justice Working Group is a community of graduate students across academic disciplines interested in or actively engaged in researching issues related to the criminal justice system in California and in the United States. We serve as a networking site, connecting our members and others to criminal justice resources on campus and within our community, and as a research sounding board, hosting workshops for members' research in whichy they present working ideas or papers and get feedback.
We have grown to include twenty-seven students spanning departments as varied as African American studies, sociology, history, social welfare, law, and public policy. This coming year, we will continue to have members regularly present on works in progress for feedback, serve as a networking hub for criminal justice activities and events on campus and in the community, create a formal reading group, expand campus outreach efforts, and organize panels.
Read more about the Criminal Justice Working Group in the Fall 2010 issue of the FaultLines. For further information, contact Nicole Lindahl at nicolelindahl@gmail.com and Tobias Smith at tobiasjsmith@gmail.com.
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Decolonial Feminisms Working Group (3rd year)
The Decolonial Feminisms Working Group meets this semester with a focus on decolonial projects happening here at Berkeley. We would like to create a workshop-style forum where graduate students and other scholars can present their works-in-progress to share how they engage the decolonial in their thinking. Given that there are many decolonial conversations, some of them epistemology-centered, or feminism-centered, or queer-centered, happening along with other feminist and critical approaches, the sense of the decolonial may not always be legible across theoretical or disciplinary borders. Therefore, one goal for us would be to practice both reading and posing our research problems and questions from/within a decolonial feminist stance. That is, through a rigorous engagement with decolonial feminist texts and each other's research, we aim to develop an attentiveness to the following: How is the research aligned with decolonial feminist thinking? What genealogies of decolonial feminist thought are being invoked? How is the methodology informed by decolonial feminist theories? What is the decolonial "turn" or intervention being offered? What is there to be gained and/or lost as our scholarship engages the possibility of decolonial feminisms?
Please join us in a welcoming meeting on Thursday, March 7 at 10:00am in the CRG Conference Room, 6th Floor, Barrows Hall. For more information please contact Wanda Alarcón at wanda.alarcon@berkeley.edu or Pedro DiPietro at pdipietro@berkeley.edu.
Read more about Decolonial Feminisms Working Group in the Fall 2011 issue of FaultLines.
For more info, please see our website: http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/decolonial-feminisms
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Health and Healing Beyond the Bio-Medical Industrial Complex
Working from the notion that healing is a place of balance and wholeness, this working group examines the various ways that the medical industrial complex perpetuates colonial legacies in relation to the mind, body, and spirit. As such, we centralize subjects who are multiply located in interlocking systems of oppression. Moreover, this group will confront the fact that discursive notions of race and gender are historically tied to scientific and medicalized discourses of superiority and inferiority, which are consequently used to control bodies through genocidal acts (i.e. forced sterilization of women of color, medical testing of racialized bodies in the U.S.). This group considers the idea that health and healing are multi-dimensional states of being and therefore require multiple modes of inquiry and reference: the individual and communal as affected by social, political, economic and cultural structures. By exploring historical foundations of medicalized racism and sexism and the medical industrial complex this group will bring together multiple western and “alternative” (particularly those indigenous to different parts of the world) knowledge about wellness practices and practitioners.
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immigration / (im)migrant (il)legality
A group of graduate students met through the Summer 2012 to write and discuss critical scholarship on the politics of (im)migration.
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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.
For more info, please visit: http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia
or contact Hatem Bazian at hatemb@berkeley.edu
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Whether teaching in a classroom or discussing research around a seminar table, faculty and graduate students are presented with situations grounded in their own emotional and lived experiences of sensitive and, at times, difficult subject matter. For scholars working with, teaching on, and researching complex issues such as identity, creative expression, socio-political conflicts, etc., there lacks a space in which one can safely discuss personal responses to these issues without feeling the pressure of intellectual critique.
The Listening Group seeks to create such a space, inviting its members to talk through these issues on a personal level as well as practice listening with an openness and equanimity that fosters clear communication. We feel that by supplementing our rigorous intellectual pursuits with less formal conversations on how we respond to these issues, we can respond more appropriately in class when our students express opinions or ask questions on sensitive subjects, as well as think more clearly about our own research.
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Muslim Identities & Cultures (2nd year)
The Muslim Identities and Cultures (MIC) working group studies Muslim identities and cultures from multiple standpoints including but not limited to: race, gender, queer (of color) theory, nationalism, critical cultural geography, etc. Our primary objective is to study the impacts of '9/11' on Muslim individuals and communities through these lens, as well as the "racialization" of Muslims in the United States and abroad. In particular, we have been researching the intersections of "anti-terrorist/terrorism" initiatives around the world. We are interested in how these intersections represent Muslim identitities, especially those of Muslim women. This theme is, however, not foreclosed; we explore in a way that allows time and space for different inquiries and analyses, as is apparent in our history of activity. The promotion of inter and transdisciplinary/departmental research is our priority, for we believe that it is precisely through diverse discourses that we can discuss Muslim identities and cultures as well as their worldings. For more information, please contact Saima Akhtar at sakhtar@berkeley.edu.
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Popular Music in Chicana/o Cultural Studies
The Popular Music in Chicana/o Cultural Studies Working Group invites participants to join in a conversation dedicated to exploring Chicana/o scholarly engagement with popular music and sound. Our approach is inherently multi-sited and transdisciplinary yet may be unified, preliminarily, under several related questions: What is Chicana/o music? Where do we "hear" it? What is the relationship between Chicana/o cultural studies, popular music, and the so-called "emerging" field of sound studies? What are their respective methods and concerns? Recent publications such as: Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S. -Mexico Border (2011) by Alejandro Madrid, Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (2012) by Deborah Vargas, and the recent wins by the band Quetzal and musician Lila Downs at the Grammy Awards tell us that Chicana/o music is alive and well in the public arena and in the academy. Yet, we suggest that there is a significant sonic dimension that remains underexplored in Chicana/o cultural studies. At heart, this group is an invitation to consider a constellation of questions stemming from imagining: What does Aztlán sound like?
Please join us for a welcoming meeting on Wednesday, March 6, 2013 at 10:00am in the CRG Conference Room, 6th Floor, Barrows Hall. For more information please contact Wanda Alarcón, wanda.alarcon@berkeley.edu
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Race and Yoga in the U.S. (2nd year)
This across campus working group will examine the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and age in relation to the practice of yoga andother mind-body disciplines. in addition to viewing yoga through the lens of intersectionality and Women of Color / Third World Feminism, this group will focus on somatic theories and explore the curriculum, pedagogy, and praxis of yoga programs. The group will explore yoga programs offered in non-traditional spaces, such as prisons, schools, and rehabilitation facilities, and in more traditional spaces, such as studio settings. The primary purpose of this working grouop is to bring race, gender, class, sexuality, and age to the forefront of discourses surrounding yoga in the U.S. The broader implications of such a conversation will be to critique activist work that does not account for the specificities of lived experiences and to develop strategies that foster useful methods of community intervention. For more info, please contact Tria Andrews at tria.andrews@berkeley.edu.
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Reproductive Justice and the Future of Reproductive Rights
Currently, there are students and faculty interested in the theory and practice of “reproductive justice,” or the right to have children, the right to parent and the right to not have children. Advocates and academics from various disciplines will explore meta‐questions that have long plagued efforts to secure reproductive rights for, and eliminate reproductive oppression of, marginalized and vulnerable groups. We plan to build on the foundation already set by a small community of students, faculty and community members interested in or actively engaged in researching issues related to reproductive justice. The group currently reads articles of interest related to exploring the relationship between a broad concept of reproduction and social justice.
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Transnational Mixed Asians In-Between Spaces (3rd year)
In traditional Ethnic Studies categories, mixed race has been marginalized, misappropriated, tokenized or simply left out. In order to allow for a collaborative environment given the use of essentialized racial categories and lack of scholarship on the experiences of mixed race people, the purposes of the working group are as follows: to create an interdisciplinary space for mixed race studies dialogue and to provide a safe space for scholars to discuss issues of mixed race identity. This working group will also serve as a space for scholars doing work on this topic to present work on current projects and to discuss collaboration on future research projects. We also plan to compose panels for conferences such as the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in November and the Association for Asian American Studies Conference next spring. Some of the group members' research interests include mixed race identity and the US Census, mixed race youth in political activism, Amerasian studies (Okinawan, Vietnamese, and other sites of US military involvement in Asia), transnational discourse, the Asian diaspora in Latin America and the effects of conquest and colonization on indigenous Asian peoples. A few of the theories the group is interested in exploring are Grounded Theory, Critical Race Theory, Racial Formation Theory, Mestizaje/Borderlands theory (Anzaldua) and theories of hybridity and the third space (Bhabaha). Overall, as a result of the discussions in the working group, we hope to encourage and promote research on this topic, to solidify a legitimate space in academia for the study of mixed race/bi-cultural/transnational peoples and to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and research areas to collaborate on future research in this area. For more info, please contact Kevin Escudero at kescudero@berkeley.edu.
Read more about our Spring 2012 conference, Crossing Lines: Praxis in Mixed Race/Space Studies, in the Spring 2012 issue of FaultLines.
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Past CRG Research Working Groups
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| CRG 2013-2014 Working Group Application DETAILS.doc | 85 KB |
| CRG Working Group Application Form.doc | 70.5 KB |
