Visiting Scholars / Visiting Student Researchers from 2016 - 2020
Bios reflect scholars’ status at the time of their appointment at the Center for Race and Gender.
Mohamed Nawab Osman
MOHAMED NAWAB OSMAN
VISITING SCHOLAR (FALL 2019)
In fall 2019, Mohamed Nawab Osman, was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at CRG working with Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP). is an assistant professor and coordinator Malaysia Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) – Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include the domestic and international politics of Southeast and South Asian countries, transnational Islamic political movements and counter-radicalization. Nawab has written various papers, books and journal articles relating to his research interests. Some of these articles have been featured in prominent journals such as Southeast Asia Research, South Asia, Terrorism and Political Violence, Indonesia and the Malay World and Contemporary Southeast Asia. Several of his opinion pieces have been featured in leading dailies such as The Straits Times, India Express, The Nation (Thailand), Jakarta Post, Manila Times and Today’s Zaman (Turkey). Nawab is a frequent commentator on political Islam, terrorism and Southeast Asian politics on CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera and Channel News Asia. Nawab is a social activist and serves as the President of Critical Xchange, an organization that seeks provide a mutually beneficial platform for Muslim citizens and incoming expats to exchange news, views and skills with the local Singaporean community. He also sits in the board of Association of Muslim Professionals. In 2014, he was nominated to attend the inaugural Young Southeast Asian Leader’s Initiative, a program initiated by President Barack Obama. He also attended the inaugural YSEALI workshop in Singapore as a mentor. He is the editor of Pathways to Contemporary Islam: New Trends in Critical Engagement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Jacqueline Cáraves
JACQUELINE CÁRAVES
VISITING STUDENT SCHOLAR (AY 2018-19)
Jacqueline Cáraves is a genderqueer Latinx activist scholar who was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She earned her B.A. in Latin American & Latino Studies and Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2010. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies with a concentration in Gender Studies.
Her research takes an intersectional lens to understand the way in which gender works as a structure of power to discipline and police Queer and Trans people of color. Her dissertation work uses a community based mixed methods approach which includes surveys, interviews and participant observation, and focuses on the experiences of Trans and gender non-conforming Latinxs in Southern California and the role of family and spirituality in serving as spaces of empowerment and resistance.
Her research has been funded by the American Association of University Women, Institute of American Cultures at UCLA, Jean Stone Dissertation Research Fellowship, and The Latino Center for Leadership Development and Southern Methodist University’s John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies.
Sora Han
SORA HAN
VISITING SCHOLAR (AY 2018-19)
Sora Han is Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, the School of Law, and African American Studies at UC Irvine. She also is core faculty of the Culture and Theory Ph.D. program. She is currently working on two books: Slavery as Contract, which brings together poetics, contract law and afro-pessimist theory to think beyond the property metaphor of slavery; and Mu, the First Letter of an Anti-Colonial Alphabet, an experimental text on the “anagrammatic scramble” (Mackey) of abolitionism. Her most recent publications on this new line of research are “Slavery as Contract,” published by Law and Literature (2016), and “Poetics of Mu,” forthcoming from Textual Practice
Alisa Bierra
ALISA BIERRIA
VISITING SCHOLAR (AY 2017-18)
Alisa Bierria is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Alisa is also the founder and coordinator of the Feminist Anti-Carceral Policy & Research Initiative, an initiative hosted by the Center for Race & Gender at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University. She is also a member of a number of community based projects, including Survived and Punished, a national project that develops policy, legal advocacy strategies, and community education and organizing materials that challenge the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
With a specific focus on black women’s agentic practices, Alisa’s dissertation, Missing in Action: Agency, Race, & Recognition, contends that philosophical accounts of intentional action must incorporate an analysis of sociality, relations of power, and recognition. She is a recipient of the Stanford University Diane J. Middlebrook Prize for Graduate Teaching, and has years of experience writing, teaching, and organizing on issues of gender violence and redress. Other research interests include feminist/queer carceral studies, black feminist and feminist of color theory, social ontology, and popular culture.
Alisa is co-editor of Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. Her writing can also be found in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy; Journal of Popular Music Studies; Left Turn Magazine; Shout Out: Women of Color Respond To Violence; What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation; The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex; Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology; Real Change Newspaper; The Feminist Wire; and Scholar & Feminist Online
Maria Faini
MARIA FAINI
VISITING SCHOLAR (AY 2017-18)
In 2017, Maria Faini completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory from UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on U.S. imperial culture; P.T.S.D., moral injury, and suicide; and veteran art practice. Her research interests are (broadly): art practice and performance, decolonial ethics, queer of color critique and affect theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and violence. Publications include pieces in Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies; Ada: A Journal of Gender, Technology, and New Media; and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She has written for Nation of Change and The Feminist Wire, was co-executive editor of nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal, and co-founder of IABA’s Life Writing SNS Network. She has been a 2016 Arts Research Center fellow at UC Berkeley and a 2016-17 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) fellow. She is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar for the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, a participant in UCHRI’s Exploratory Workshop on Experimentation, and working on a book project titled: The Art of Moral Injury: Decolonizing the Military Subject through Artisanal Destruction
Rhonda Itaoui
RHONDA ITAOUI
VISITING STUDENT RESEARCHER (AY 2017-18)
Rhonda Itaoui is in the final year of a PhD program in Social Sciences at Western Sydney University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Race and Gender’s Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project. Supported by the Australian Government Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship, her international PhD fieldwork explores the impact of globalized Islamophobia on the spatial mobility of young Muslims in the Bay Area, California and Sydney,
Australia. The findings of her Sydney case-study are featured in two recently published peer-reviewed articles: ‘The Geography of Islamophobia in Sydney: Mapping the Spatial Imaginaries of young Muslims’ and ‘Media Representations of Racism and Spatial Mobility: Young Muslim (Un)belonging in a Post-Cronulla Riot Sutherland’.
Rhonda is also a Summer Fellow at the UC Berkeley Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, collaborating with researchers from the Global Justice Program. Over the summer of 2017, she will develop an interactive Annotated Bibliography on Islamophobia in North America for students, researchers, policy-makers and community members to access and utilize for their own anti-Islamophobia efforts. Raised a first-generation Lebanese-Australian in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, she is passionate about researching ethnic/racial disparities, cultural/social geographies and segregation through a lens of intersectionality.
Rhonda discusses her research in this CRG podcast.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
EVELYN NAKANO GLENN
VISITING SCHOLAR (AY 2016-17)
Evelyn Nakano Glenn is Professor Emerita of Gender & Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies, and the Founding Director of the Center for Race & Gender, leading the CRG from its inception in 2001 to 2017. Her teaching and research interests focus on transdisciplinary methods, political economy of households, the intersection of race and gender, immigration, and citizenship. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Social Problems, Signs, Feminist Studies, Social Science History, Stanford Law Review, Contemporary Sociology, and Review of Radical Political Economy, as well as in numerous edited volumes. She is the author of Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Temple University Press), Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency(Routledge), Unequal Freedom,How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizen and Labor (Harvard University Press) Professor Glenn has recently published her newest book Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Harvard University Press) and the edited volume Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters (Stanford University Press).
Farid Hafez
FARID HAFEZ
VISITING SCHOLAR (AY 2016-17)
Farid Hafez, Ph.D. is a researcher at the University of Salzburg, Department of Political Science and was a visiting scholar at the CRG Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project. Hafez has been teaching at numerous universities in Austria and beyond (Indonesia, Turkey, Germany, USA). He has been Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2014 and is currently Botstiber Fulbright Visiting Professor for Austrian-American Studies. He is the editor of the Islamophobia Studies Yearbook and since 2015 co-editor of the European Islamophobia Report. He is affiliated to the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the Center for Race and Gender, working on Islamophobia in a Global Perspective. Hafez received the Bruno-Kreisky-Award for the political book of the year for his anthology Islamophobie in Österreich (Studienverlag 2009) co-edited with John Bunzl. He has more than 50 publications. His last publications include an anthology on young Muslims in Austria: “Jung, Muslimisch, Österreichisch. 20 Jahre Muslimische Jugend Österreich” (New Academic Press, 2016). Email: farid.hafez@sbg.ac.at. In 2017, Hafez and his colleagues have released the annual European Islamophobia Report, documenting the state of Islamophobia in Europe as of 2016. Listen to Hafez discuss the findings from the report in a CRG podcast.