Autonomous Imaginaries' primary focus is to create a community of members and practicing artists from the Bay Area, graduate students, and faculty from the neighboring institutions Berkeley, SFSU, and CCA that collectively reflect on the contemporary production of images from a critical and decolonial point of view. The group, which includes BIPOC female-identified and non-binary people, will promote historically, culturally, and geographically situated autobiographical archives and propose a methodological framework that problematizes extractive cultural knowledge in visual representations. The group will question contemporary photographic practices through encounters with methodologies centering on horizontal dialogue. The group's mission extends beyond identifying and unlearning extractive and oppressive storytelling practices in photography and research. It also aims to cultivate space for resistance stories of joy, leisure, and rest. The funded proposal will be a transformative starting impulse to form a research group of visual and transdisciplinary artists. This group, with its critical and creative approach, will address concerns about their representations and those of their communities, inspiring significant change in the field. Beyond creating spaces for conversation, our purpose is to incorporate our group research into a printed publication. We believe that your potential contribution to this publication will be invaluable, adding depth and diversity to our collective understanding of decolonial visual representation.
The Death of the Author (DotA) is an experimental reading and writing group that aims to foster a different relation with theoretical texts, both as its readers and as its writers. Our meetings encompass a long process of slow reading of each text, and encourage deep engagement and discussion over canonical works of critical theory. The goal of this process is to open-up new ways of understanding works whose meanings have been ossified through academic convention, and to do so not only at the content-level, but also the affective one. We approach slow reading as a decolonial process, one that destabilizes imposed structures of academic production. In reading texts that investigate not only intersecting systems of oppression but also the possibilities of alternative imaginaries, this group centers questions of race and gender as a critical site of theory for the past, present, and future. Our meetings serve as a space to bring together students and faculty across disciplines in an effort to rethink our relation to academic pressure, reconnect with different modes of textual engagement, and consider the criticality of our own writing processes.
As an interdisciplinary network of scholars and artists, the Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities working group invites critical engagement with questions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, colonialism, and labor through the lens of performance studies and visual and media studies. We examine how performances of Asian America and diaspora on stage and in everyday life are impacted by histories of migration and imperialism. We use sexuality as a lens to understand connections between exclusionary policies of the past and the recent surge in anti-Asian violence.
Sessions include presentations of work-in-progress, reading groups, guest artist talks, film screenings, and workshops. The working group will also be an opportunity to collaborate on public programming, including a symposium and performance series. Coming from within and beyond Berkeley, our members represent a wide range of fields, including American Studies, Art History, Art Practice, English, Geography, Political Science, and Performance Studies.
Our central questions include:
How does the erotic enable us to navigate histories of pain and reappropriate narratives of violence?How do community and artistic archives offer counter-narratives to mainstream visual representations of Asian sexuality?How do Asian sex workers disrupt the binary notion of simply conforming to or resisting racial scripts?
Recent years brought a revival of social movements aimed at achieving racial and ethnic justice in both the United States and elsewhere around the world. Movements whose primary focus is not racial or ethnic justice, but focus on topics such as climate change, youth empowerment or gender and sexual equality also started to pay more attention to racial and ethnic inclusivity in both their agenda-setting and mobilization strategies. The research group aims to bring together graduate students and faculty interested in how race and ethnicity structures the formation, recruitment, agenda-setting and tactical choices of social movements, as well as how social movements shape, strengthen or challenge racial and ethnic categorizations via collective identity formation and social and political reform. The working group has an interdisciplinary approach welcoming scholars from any discipline, relying on qualitative, quantitative or mixed approaches, utilizing any kind of data collection methods (surveys, interviews, participant observation, archival research).
Relational Latinx and Asian American Studies is a multi-disciplinary graduate student-led working group that will explore the aesthetic, political, and social practices of Latinx and Asian American communities as mutually entangled, a matter of linked fates. In anticipation of incipient demographic realities in the state of California and on campus, which has committed to achieving Hispanic-Serving Institution (HIS) status by 2026, but also in the wake of COVID-related anti-Asian violence—this group centers methodologies of relational racialization within the humanities and humanistic social sciences to probe some of the pressing research topics and issues of the moment.
Potential areas of focus include: the disclosure of the brown commons, feminist theories of the flesh, minor transnationalisms, solidarities with Afro-descent and Indigenous peoples, racialized intimacy, the racing of place, and the political recuperation of aesthetic categories such as the beautiful, among other topics. We welcome undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines, as well as tenure-track and contingent faculty to join us for regular reading discussions, manuscript workshops, guest talks, and collaborative projects.
Transecological Imaginations is conceptualized as a working group that bridges spatial theory and transformative practices to imagine equitable futures. Transecological ethics is an embodied relation to place which is attuned to histories of difference in all its forms, especially the ones that challenge binaries such as nature/culture, female/male, etc. This framework aims to resist a planetary future centered on anthropic exceptionalism that hierarchizises life according to colonial, racial, and gendered forms of violence and perpetuates precarious life. We attempt to conjure a postanthropic vision to build a future where justice dwells.
We will focus on a building at the intersection of Turk and Taylor streets, in the Tenderloin neighborhood, San Francisco. This crossroads was the site of a queer grassroots uprising against police brutality, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966. The riot at Compton’s was spearheaded by street youth and gender-nonconforming people three years before the Stonewall Riot in New York. Today, the three-story building is operated as a “halfway house” by GEO Group, a for-profit prison company. Our goal is to research the material necessary to collaboratively envision a speculative design proposal that decarcerates the historic building and resurfaces its legacy of resistance.
This working group aims to create a conceptual forum in the Bay Area for those interested in topics and questions in the fields of Asian American and transpacific art. In drawing together the terms “Transpacific” and “Asian American,” we aim to interrogate, challenge, and build from the conceptual assemblage of spatial relations, imperialism, racialization, and diaspora connoted by these disciplinary idioms. Inspired by the recent Asian American Art Initiative at Stanford, as well as drawing on long standing interest at Berkeley in Asian American Studies and transpacific cultural studies, and work done in the Bay Area by previous generations, the group will help build collaborative research and artistic networks, for graduate students and others, to further engagement with these important and still understudied areas of art. Topics of interest span a broad range, including art history, film & media studies, literary studies, diaspora studies, gender and sexuality, postcolonial theory and decolonial thought, and more. The group will meet roughly once a month, with additional meetings for field trips and talks with curators and artists. We seek members from academia, museums, the art world, and the community with interest in this topic.
