CURRENT RESEARCH WORKING GROUPS
Academic Year 2025 - 2026
Bad Asians (formerly Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities)
CONTACT: lena_chen@berkeley.edu, esakuma@berkeley.edu
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?
Black Visual Culture
CONTACT: ssanzodavis@berkeley.edu
As public interest in “Black art” has grown, there has been a concurrent increase in interest in thinking through mediums more critically. This proliferation has given rise to the questions: What is the category of “Black art?” How does blackness appear across media or geographies? How are conceptions of gender illuminated through visual production and representations? The Black Visual Culture working group is an interdisciplinary research group that supports graduate students interested in viewing and analyzing Black diasporic visual production. Through engaged dialogue, members explore blackness, abstraction, figuration, and (non)representation as they appear in media such as photography, painting, sculpture, and film. The group also questions the category of “Black art” and explores ongoing conversations on the role of the “Black artist” through critical engagement with scholars in Black Studies and Visual Media. Theoretical explorations include Black Aesthesis, Black Feminisms, Afro-Pessimism, and Black (non)Ontology.
Death of the Author
CONTACT: pfeijo@berkeley.edu, caleb_murraybozeman@berkeley.edu, jaemin.yoo@berkeley.edu
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.
Disability, Racial Capitalism, and Empire
CONTACT: ashley_zhou@berkeley.edu, taramadhav@berkeley.edu
The Disability, Racial Capitalism, and Empire working group is a central space on campus for graduate students, faculty, and other community members who research, study, write about, experience, and resist disability and debilitation under the co-constitutive regimes of racial capitalism and empire. It strives to provide members with a space to become more engaged and critical activists in the field of Disability Justice. The Disability Justice movement resists the rights-based discourse of disability and instead turns to the movement for the liberation of oppressed and marginalized groups around the world, particularly those in the Global South and Black and Indigenous communities, whose subjugation is linked to debility produced by empire (Puar, 2017). We “focus on [dis]ability as a system and disability as a relation to power rather than as identity” (Kim & Schalk, 2021). As such, our attention and analyses examine and critique systems of power that construct disability in concert with other forms of oppression. We lift up the work of communities that do not always couch their resistance as part of a disability politic, but regularly resist marginalization and debilitation in the everyday. We strive to create an accessible, equitable, and praxis-oriented space whereby the group’s collective commitment to liberation scholarship is bolstered through a welcoming, uplifting, and most importantly equitably accessible academic environment.
Film Practice as a Social Science Method
CONTACT: rahel.fischer@berkeley.edu
Our interdisciplinary research group, composed of scholars across the social sciences and humanities, proposes an extended investigation into the ways filmmaking practices reflect, complicate, and expand on traditional research methodologies, engendering an interdisciplinary approach to our objects of study within the social sciences. The methodological frameworks we draw on include the lenses of feminist theory, Black studies, and postcolonial studies, which provide critical insights into the power dynamics of representation and knowledge production in visual media.
Museum as Method
CONTACT: hannahjasper@berkeley.edu, piper_prolago@berkeley.edu
The Museum as Method working group aims to provide an intellectual home for Berkeley graduate students engaged in emerging and exploratory conversations surrounding museum decolonization, practicing theories, and new socially engaged practices, in conversation with established interdisciplinary curators in the greater Bay Area. In our current political climate, public institutions that provide spaces that ground and center educational and generative intellectual curiosity are essential. Though historically wrought, the contemporary museum is a space where academic research and public engagement meet. The Bay Area alone is home to a wide range of museums—over fifty in San Francisco, over twenty in Berkeley, and upwards of thirty in Oakland. UC Berkeley Art History Graduates can be found at the leading institutions in the Bay Area, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Oakland Museum of California. The Museum Studies Working Group aims to provide a deeper understanding of museum practices, foster thoughtful collaboration, and support meaningful engagement with museums across the Bay Area.
Philippine and Filipinx Studies
CONTACT: piper_prolago@berkeley.edu
The Filipinx & Philippine Studies Working Group provides a regular meeting space for graduate students to discuss new and critical scholarship in Filipino/Filipino-American/Filipinx and Philippine studies. We bring these fields together through interdisciplinary collaborations among our working group members whose own backgrounds derive from various disciplinary topics. With existing on-campus resources, the working group will continue to participate in and collaborate with other Townsend working groups, cultural and social issues-based research centers, local Filipinx American organizations, U.S.-wide Philippine studies initiatives, and cross-campus scholarly networks with Filipinx American and Philippine-based researchers. It is our aim to foster support for intellectual interrogation, student research, and recent publications while developing ties across our professional networks, scholars in humanities/social sciences, and interdisciplinary departments.
Race, Ethnicity and Social Movements
CONTACT: kurdi_aj@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)
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 Cultural Studies
CONTACT: miguel_samano@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)
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.
Social Welfare in an Era of Polycrises: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Capitalism
CONTACT: tsacks@berkeley.edu
As an interdisciplinary field of social science and an applied helping profession, social welfare and social work are often charged with supporting marginalized populations in times of acute crisis and chronic structural vulnerability. Social work scholars and practitioners intervene in countless sites of inquiry and practice ranging from mental health clinics, the child welfare system (aka family policing system), support for immigrants and climate refugees, victims of commercial sexual exploitation, etc. In spite of the field’s diffusion, it coheres around the primacy of stratification based on race and gender (and intersecting categories) as well as capitalist extraction. At present, we face multiple and simultaneous threats including the climate crisis, increasing inequality, authoritarianism, genocide and expansion of carceral logics. Obviously, these are global challenges that uniquely impact people in their local contexts. This group will explore how the field of social work can step into the void created by these polycrises to organize affected populations, advocate for policy changes that may mitigate harms, and theorize about social work’s strengths and limitations amid these crises.
Transpacific and Asian American Art
CONTACT: enfair@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)
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.