2011 - 2012 CRG Student Research Grantees

MEGAN ADAMS (Fall 2011)
Department:  History

Project Title:  Public Servants, Public Employees, Public Enemies, Organizing the Chicago Police, 1952-1984

My dissertation, “Public Servants, Public Employees, Public Enemies: Organizing the Chicago Police, 1952-1984,” uncovers a history of labor militancy and activism within the Chicago police department. Historians have identified the police as a powerful force in shaping the postwar “urban crisis,” yet little is known about police as historical actors in their own right. Questions of identity, and particularly race and gender, were central to the development of Chicago police labor politics. Arguing that the unionization of unique categories of city workers redefined municipal labor politics in the late twentieth century, my dissertation examines the intersection of racial and gender politics of the police they began to assert their demands as workers. Black police challenged the discriminatory practices of one of the city’s most racist institutions. Police wives and policewomen clashed over the police department’s gender policies. Meanwhile, majority-white police organizations challenged longstanding loyalties within Chicago’s Democratic Machine and reconstituted themselves as a new political entity in the city.

NATALEE BAUER (Spring 2012)
Department:  Education

Project Title:  (Re)Interpreting Pygmalion: Understanding the Disciplinary Race/Gender Gap in US Middle Schools

My research looks at the raced/gendered discrepancies in middle school disciplinary trends, and how these interactions are both informing and informed by student and teacher racialized identities. I am interested not only in the construction of black masculinity through disciplinary policies and practices, but more specifically I look at the unacknowledged reason behind such construction: the discursive co-construction of ideological whiteness through white femininity/females (given that 70-80% of all school teachers are white women). I argue that it is not important that students see schools as a site of whiteness (cf. Fordham & Ogbu and Prudence Carter), but rather that teachers understand schools as a site for whiteness. Further, I complicate the categorical binaries by looking at those who fall outside of the dichotomies of male/female and white/nonwhite, those who occupy a liminal territory– gender queer, perhaps even “race queer” or “racially transgressive.” For example, I look at students who are disciplined excessively due to their embodiment of masculinity despite being female, and teachers who enact and perform whiteness despite their phenotypic markers of nonwhiteness. From this vantage point I ask how teachers can interrupt the sociocultural reproduction of raced/gendered inequities through a practice of critical self-reflection and active disassociation from their inherent positions of power and privilege.

ZIZA DELGADO (Spring 2012)
Department:  Ethnic Studies

Project Title:  Third World Bodies vs. First World Ideologies: The Third World Liberation Front at UC Berkeley, 1969

This summer I will conduct between ten and fifteen video/audio interviews, which will be used for both my dissertation and a documentary I have been working on for the past five years. Upon completion, this film will document and analyze the Third World Strike and subsequent creation of the Ethnic Studies Department at UCB. Because today’s youth and emerging educators are attracted to multi-media educational tools, this film will be developed as multi-platform digital programming to serve as an excellent educational vehicle and interlocutor in the dialogue on social movements and public education. It will also be an integral part of the free on-line teaching tool I am developing, for educators interested in teaching Ethnic Studies in their classrooms. Last year I met almost twenty women who had participated in the movement for ES. Because all of the archives and collections I have used in my research, thus far, have been donated by men, I see these interviews as part of a critical intervention to diversify the historical narrative of this time period. Conducting these interviews will include the vital perspectives of women of color within the movement in both the documentary and my dissertation.

EMINE FIDAN ELCIOGLU  (Fall 2011)
Department:  Sociology

Project Title:  The Struggle for Home and Belonging: The Politics of Immigration in Arizona

My dissertation project explores the contemporary politics of immigration in Arizona, a state that has reinvigorated the bitter controversy around immigration and border policy. Using sociologist Kristen Luker’s (1984) study of abortion politics as an analytical and methodological model for my own fieldwork, I argue that conflicting political positions on immigration are built on opposing edifices of deep beliefs or “world views” about how the social world works. It is because these world views—about what US society is like and what it *should* be like—are called into question in immigration politics, that the topic has come to generate so much outrage. Through life history interviews with activists on both sides of the debate as well as ethnographic observation at the meetings, rallies, and other events organized around immigration politics, I explore the basis of this outrage. I try to bring to the surface the beliefs (particularly with regards to race, gender, family and belonging) that inform activists’ understanding of how US society has changed over the years, what kinds of problems it faces today, and how undocumented migration fits into the mix.

ARIKO IKEHARA (Spring 2012)
Department:  Ethnic Studies

Project Title:  Black-Okinawa: Mixed-Cultural Formation of African-Americans and Okinawans in Post-War Okinawa

My research examines the socio-cultural and historical formation of a black-Asian community that grew out of the US military occupation of Okinawa during the 1960s and the 1970s. It is a history and a legacy of African American soldiers and Okinawans in a town called Koza-shi, also known as “black town,” where a political alliance between these groups was formed during the height of the Black Power and anti-base/war movements. For this project, I wish to illuminate, not only the political history based on the 1970 Koza Uprising that made this city famous, but also the social-cultural formation that emerged out of this cohabitation of space. I argue that the social-cultural legacy continues in the present moment yet is absent from the public memory and the official discourse, due to certain social pressures to silence this history, and historical stigma and trauma that continue to haunt this city.

I explore how the notion of “blackness” and “black-Okinawan-ness” is apprehended, circulated, and expressed in Okinawa; in what forms and styles of black-Okinawa can be observed in contemporary Okinawa. I employ ethnography and archival research as the primary methodology, I attempt to map this continuum of socio-cultural manifestations expressed in contemporary Okinawa.

CAITLIN MARSHALL (Fall 2011)
Department:  Theater, Dance & Performance Studies

Project Title:  "Power in the Tongue"

On October 7, 1855, Harriet Beecher Stowe composed a letter to National Anti-Slavery Standard Associate Editor, Oliver Johnson, announcing the upcoming dramatic reading of her stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s attempt to reclaim the message and political work intended for her text in light of its migration to the minstrel and melodramatic stages, The Christian Slave was a mono-drama whose pathetic appeal was inspired by and pivoted on the virtuosic voice of one freeborn Philadelphia dramatic reader: Mary E. Webb. The biracial daughter of a fugitive slave and a Spanish (“Moorish”) gentleman, Webb was well trained in elocution, but valuable to Stowe for her “peculiar faculty of rendering the negro character and intonation”—a singular “power in the tongue” that gave Stowe’s Anti-Slavery stance full rhetorical force.1 In this dissertation chapter I will examine Stowe’s belief that “mixed” voices demonstrated the greatest elocutionary prowess, moral pathos, and political prerogative. How did a model and metaphor of vocal miscegenation contribute to and undercut understandings of freedom and sovereignty in antebellum America, and how did “power in the tongue” serve a larger democratic project?

WHITNEY PENNINGTON (Spring 2012)
Department:  Journalism

Project Title:  Historically Black

For her master’s thesis, she is producing a short documentary (presently titled *Historically Black*) about recruitment of non-black students at Texas Southern University, one of the nation’s largest Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In a recent effort to remain competitive with predominantly white institutions, many HBCUs have begun to set their sights on attracting non-black students to their universities. By chronicling Texas Southern’s efforts to diversify and its impact on the campus community, the film explores the changing role of HBCUs in post-segregated America and addresses what this might mean for the future of these deep-rooted institutions.

BRENDAN SHANAHAN (Fall 2011)
Department:  History

Project Title:  "Unalienable" Rights? Race, Gender and the Loss of American Citizenship Among US-Born Women, 1907-1931

Between 1907 and 1931 thousands of American-born women lost their citizenship without ever leaving the United States. Due to the little-known Expatriation Act of 1907 all American-born women who married noncitizens lost their citizenship until its repeal in 1922. However, due to prevailing racist attitudes, native-born women who married Asian-born men continued to lose their citizenship until 1931. Though women’s derivative citizenship (the assuming of one’s husband’s citizenship) has been largely overlooked in American history, scholars of gender and immigration have recently explored its political and legal history.

Entering into this discussion, my project explores three major questions. First, did American-born women know that they were losing their citizenship upon marriage to foreigners? To answer this question I will examine if automatic expatriation was discussed in major English-language and immigrant/ethnic newspapers of the period. Second, if this was the case, did the law affect marriage patterns among different communities? Third, if not, when and how did American-born women learn about their loss of citizenship and why did so many reapply for citizenship between 1936 and 1968? Throughout this project I will consider how this gendered, racialized policy influenced American-born women differently based on their ethnicity/race, class, and perceived sexual mores.

MARISOL SILVA (Fall 2011)
Department:  Ethnic Studies

Project Title:  Impossible Subjects (of Study): Ethnic Studies in Arizona

Arizona House Bill 2281, known as the “Arizona ethnic studies ban,” went into effect on December 31, 2010. Even before AZ HB 2281 was signed, competing representations of the bill’s targeted communities, supporters, opponents, and implications headlined popular mainstream and alternative news media, prompting a multi-media response including interviews, blogs, cartoons, visual art, performances, op-eds, and open letters. Despite the contradicting interests of state officials, ethnic studies teachers, students, parents, activists, and communities, representations have been largely racialized as Mexican, gendered as male, and have emphasized adults (politicians, teachers, activists) over students. The impact of AZ HB 2281 on other ethnic studies programs, particularly Asian American, African American, and Native American studies, is unclear. Eclipsed from view are not only women leaders, scholars, and community activists, but the student youths being directly impacted by this legislation. This project proposes dissertation research travel to conduct preliminary fieldwork in Arizona to visit university archives, events, and organizations related directly to AZ HB 2281. The collection of primary materials from these sources will provide me with an initial set of political, cultural, and discursive texts to consider for further dissertation study and analysis.

APRIL SIZEMORE-BARBER (Fall 2011)
Department:  Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies

Project Title:  Over the Rainbow? Constituting Queerness and Performing Nation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

My Dissertation utilizes the popular post-apartheid discursive trope/ truism that “Homosexuality is UnAfrican” as a frame through which to read the value given to particular forms of identity affiliation in contemporary South Africa. Much political and scholarly work has been done to assert the existence of same-sex desire in both colonial and post-colonial Africa and yet the basic belief in the “truth” of this statement goes unchallenged in the everyday delimiting of African identity; as the dominant discourse in any countries, each time it is challenged, the recitation of the argument gains traction, against perceived “outsiders.” I read the phrase “Homosexuality is UnAfrican,” as a performative statement, that—when spoken by those with the authority to enact the erasure—reveals about the contemporary identity articulations on “being South African.” My analysis examines a number of performance sites where the sexual identifier of “homosexual/gay/lesbian” is put into play with the racial signifier of “African” and the national affiliation of “South African,” a triangulation that allows for the potential destabilization of each category, and for performances to emerge that engage old identities in new ways.

REGINOLD ROYSTON (Spring 2012)
Department:  African American Studies

Project Title:  Trending Ghana: Homeland, Diaspora and Digital Nationalism

My dissertation research examines notions of Ghanaian identity among diasporic actors and those living in the homeland, as constructed via new media — mobile phones, Web portals, Facebook, Twitter, and an emerging transnational news and entertainment industry. How does digital nationalism transform traditional divisions between diaspora and homeland? How is diaspora gendered in virtual and physical spaces? This summer I plan to track discourse around December’s upcoming Ghana presidential elections, a singular event that portends several interesting entry points for the discussion of race, gender and technology studies with individuals such as Nana Konadu, wife of former president Jerry Rawlings, running against the incumbent.

SUNNY XIANG (Spring 2012)
Department:  Comparative Literature

Project Title:  Asia's Unreliability: Literary and Historical Positings of the Asian Human, 1945-Present

My dissertation looks at literary and historical articulations of “Asian character” between 1945-present. In examining characterizations of Asians and Asianness in contemporary novels and in US foreign policy, I aim to limn the contours of Asia’s racial form, which I read as being defined in contradistinction to the morally endowed “human” of international law. Through my literary texts, I investigate how the unreliability of the Asian narratorial voice, in signifying both Oriental deception and human limitation, formally evokes the “Asian human” as literary effect. My interest in reading a literary archive in conjunction with government research and policy initiatives bespeaks a belief that Asian personality has been central to US foreign policy and is crucial to historicizing how Asia has become paradigmatic of modernity’s inhuman conditions. The CRG grant would fund archival work for my first chapter, which takes novelist Chang-rae Lee’s “model minority” narrators as a point of departure for exploring the US government’s burgeoning interest in Asian character between WWII and the Korean War. I am particularly interested in considering the male model minority and the female war refugee as different modes of consolidating the human that are both routed through the reified sign of Asia. In reading Lee’s unreliable Asian narrators within the context of the long Korean War, I hope to illuminate a gendered historiography of Asian’s racial form that is founded on both the moral economy of human rights and the humanistic ethos of literature.