2022 - 2023 CRG Forum Series
Bios reflect speakers' status at the time of their presentation at the Center for Race and Gender.
"Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal"
04.25.2023 | 4:00 - 5:30 PM | 554 SSB
with Charles H.F. Davis III (Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education; Director of the Campus Abolition Research Lab, University of Michigan).
In the wake of the ongoing state and state-sanctioned violence disproportionately impacting racially and other minoritized communities, municipalities as well as colleges and universities have begun considering the reformation of how police departments are allocated public resources, trained, and perform their everyday duties. However, and despite the demands of campus and community organizers and grassroots collectives, many have simply continued the longstanding pattern by postsecondary institutions of performative and non-performative gestures that fall short of meaningful divestment from the institution of policing. Further, despite their history of extraction and exploitation, universities have continued to refuse redistributing their resources in service of building strong communities that improve the material conditions in which made marginal people live, work, and learn.
In Conceptualizing Campus Abolition, Dr. Davis will explore how the university’s entanglement with and perpetuation of the carceral state creates the conditions that render always already vulnerable communities subject to state and state-sanctioned violence. More specifically, Dr. Davis will draw upon theories from the Black radical tradition, decolonization and settler colonialism, and ethnographic study of the Carceral University to consider the otherwise possibilities for higher education to reimagine itself as a life-affirming institution. Rather than reinforcing the notion that universities and prisons sit in opposition to one another, whereas the former is presumed to be a domain of solutions while the other is seen as a consequence of society as the domain of problems, Dr. Davis invites us to consider the ways carceral society is a product of the university’s negligence and betrayal of its promise to serve the public good.
Hosted by Critical University Studies, a CRG Research Working Group. Co-sponsored by the Chancellor’s Independent Advisory Board on Police Accountability and Community Safety (IAB), Berkeley School of Education, Center for Race & Gender, Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies, ESPM Graduate Diversity Council, and the Black Studies Collaboratory at UC Berkeley.
LISTEN - Click to hear "Conceptualizing Campus Abolition and the Movement to Resist University Expansion and Urban Renewal"
"CRG Visiting Scholars Showcase"
04.06.2023 | 4:00 - 5:30 PM | 691 SSB
Join us for an afternoon as our Visiting Scholars share their works in progress.
- Marijke Bassani (Human rights Lawyer, Ph.D. Candidate, Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales (Australia))
- Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz (Ph.D. Candidate in Welfare Law, Department of Culture and Society, Linköpings Universitet (Sweden))
- Rachel Rosenbloom (Professor of Law, Northeastern University and Faculty Fellow, Northeastern University Center for Law, Equity and Race)
Welcoming the Unwelcome: Reclaiming space as the Indigenous ‘Other’. A Black Rainbow Homecoming
Through an Intersectional Indigenous Queer lens, Marijke Bassani discusses the invisibility, and hypervisibility, of Indigenous LGBTQI+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy Australians within the community and legal system (Domestic/International). Marijke will be sharing some of the key themes that emerged during her fieldwork in remote Indigenous communities located within the Cape York Peninsula of Australia. These themes include: An Indigenous resistance to subscribe to existing LGBTQI+ labels and definitions; A preference for decolonial and Indigenised terminology and; The use of gender pronouns including misgendering within Indigenous Cape York cultural contexts. Marijke’s discussion will highlight the importance of cultivating space for Indigenous peoples to both self-determine, and assert sovereignty over, their own genders, sexualities and bodies—rather than just their lands. Join Marijke in calling for both #Bodiesback and #LandBack!
Temporary Legality and Local Border Regimes in the Welfare State of Sweden
In this talk, Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz will briefly present their Ph.D. project which explores the implications of the shift to temporary protection status in Swedish asylum legislation since 2015. This shift has given shape to a form of temporary legality where it is no longer sufficient to examine only national immigration law to understand the implications of temporary protection. As temporary legality is formalized by the state but shaped and administered locally by municipalities, Sofi traces how temporary legality devolves regulations of more permanent asylum protection locally through a number of ‘integration’ requirements. These requirements in practice take on new forms of bordering that function through a multitude of welfare actors, economic and social contexts, and racialized ideas of refugeeness that vary locally.
Race, Borders, and Birthright Citizenship
Rachel Rosenbloom’s work traces the history of efforts to restrict the scope of constitutional birthright citizenship since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. This project provides a new perspective on contemporary calls to limit the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, situating them within a longer history of restrictionist efforts that emerged from anti-Asian movements in California and other western states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Contextualizing birthright citizenship restrictionism within the shifting dynamics of racialized and gendered borders, it also considers the relationship of these debates to the legal developments that have shaped Black and Indigenous citizenship in this period.
Temporary Legality and Local Border Regimes in the Welfare State of Sweden
In this talk, Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz will briefly present their Ph.D. project which explores the implications of the shift to temporary protection status in Swedish asylum legislation since 2015. This shift has given shape to a form of temporary legality where it is no longer sufficient to examine only national immigration law to understand the implications of temporary protection. As temporary legality is formalized by the state but shaped and administered locally by municipalities, Sofi traces how temporary legality devolves regulations of more permanent asylum protection locally through a number of ‘integration’ requirements. These requirements in practice take on new forms of bordering that function through a multitude of welfare actors, economic and social contexts, and racialized ideas of refugeeness that vary locally.
Race, Borders, and Birthright Citizenship
Rachel Rosenbloom’s work traces the history of efforts to restrict the scope of constitutional birthright citizenship since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. This project provides a new perspective on contemporary calls to limit the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, situating them within a longer history of restrictionist efforts that emerged from anti-Asian movements in California and other western states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Contextualizing birthright citizenship restrictionism within the shifting dynamics of racialized and gendered borders, it also considers the relationship of these debates to the legal developments that have shaped Black and Indigenous citizenship in this period.
Listen - Click to hear "CRG Visiting Scholars Showcase"
"Bodily Defiance and Immigrant Detention"
02.23.2023 | 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT | Zoom Webinar
A conversation with Nayan Shah (Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California).
Event organized by CRG's Director, Professor Leti Volpp, and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. The CRG Angel Island Forum Series was designed to accompany "A Year on Angel Island," organized by the Arts + Design Initiative and the Future Histories Lab.
Listen - Click to hear "Bodily Defiance and Immigrant Detention"
Watch - Click here to view recording.
"Criminalizing Migration and Indefinite Detention: Chinese at Angel Island and McNeil Island Prison "
02.02.2023 | 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT | Zoom Webinar
A conversation with Elliott Young (Professor of History, Lewis & Clark).
Event organized by CRG's Director, Professor Leti Volpp, and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. The CRG Angel Island Forum Series was designed to accompany "A Year on Angel Island," organized by the Arts + Design Initiative and the Future Histories Lab.
LISTEN - Click to hear "Criminalizing Migration and Indefinite Detention: Chinese at Angel Island and McNeil Island Prison"
WATCH - Click here to view recording.
"Angel Island: History and Movement "
01.26.2023 | 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT | Zoom Webinar
A conversation with Erika Lee (Regents Professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities; Director, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota; and Bae Family Professor of History, Harvard University (as of July 2023)).
Event organized by CRG's Director, Professor Leti Volpp, and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. The CRG Angel Island Forum Series was designed to accompany "A Year on Angel Island," organized by the Arts + Design Initiative and the Future Histories Lab.
LISTEN - CLICK HERE TO hear "Angel Island: History and Movement"
WATCH - CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING.
"Archipelagos and Specters: Refugee Settlers and Climate Refugees"
10.20.2022 | 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT | Zoom Webinar
A conversation with Neel Ahuja (University of California, Santa Cruz, and University of Maryland), author of Planetary Specters: Race, Migration and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (UNC Press, 2021), and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (University of California, Los Angeles), author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022).
Hosted by CRG's Native/Immigrant/Refugee - Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Department of Ethnic Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Native American Studies, and the Department of Rhetoric.
LISTEN - CLICK HERE TO hear "Archipelagos and Specters: Refugee Settlers and Climate Refugees"
WATCH - CLICK HERE TO VIEW RECORDING.
“Crossed by the Border: Migration and the Crisis Imaginary”
09.22.2022| 4:00 – 5:00 PM | In Person, 554 Social Sciences Building
What is Critical Race Theory and why is it the sudden target of fierce right-wing attacks?
A conversation with Debarati Sanyal (Professor of French, UC Berkeley), Cristiana Giordano (Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Davis), and Rhiannon Welch (Associate Professor of Italian Studies, UC Berkeley) focused on migration and the Mediterranean.
Hosted by CRG’s Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, and the Institute of European Studies.
LISTEN - Click to hear "Crossed by the Border: Migration and the Crisis Imaginary"