CURRENT RESEARCH WORKING GROUPS
Academic Year 2026 - 2027
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 BAD ASIANS working group (formerly known as Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities) 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 have hosted exhibition tours, STUDIO VISITS (virtual artist-scholar dialogues on work-in-progress), mixers, film screenings, live performance showcases, and symposia.
“Asian (American)” is historically constructed through the myth of the model minority: quiet, submissive, and hardworking. As Eleanor Ty writes, this myth and “its stress on economic and professional success continues to influence the way Asian North Americans see themselves and are perceived by others.” Meanwhile, “Bad Asians,” as theorized by Eve Oishi, “challenge and resist the status quo because they have already been excluded from it or oppressed, silenced, or limited by it.” In many ways, the term is oxymoronic—this figure should not exist within dominant cultural logics. To be a “Bad Asian” in the U.S. is to occupy a space of illegibility—to act “un-Asian,” to appear “un-American.” Rather than retreat into silence or strive for legibility as “American,” this working group asks what are the “bad” performances, aesthetics, and figures that have allowed for Asian American transgression, creativity, and survival. In their unruly existence, Bad Asians confront the myths that have shaped and constrained them, instead insisting on the power of performance to unsettle dominant narratives and build radical coalitions.
This working group examines how performances of Asian America and diaspora on stage and in everyday life are impacted by histories of migration and imperialism and the connections between exclusionary policies of the past to the recent surge in anti-Asian violence. 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.
Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley
CONTACT: annafeign@berkeley.edu; jannamare_lue@berkeley.edu; neena.albarus@berkeley.edu
The Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley seeks to foster intraregional community and dialogue among graduate students, faculty, and staff members who identify with and/or are in solidarity with Caribbean peoples and support their self-determined futures. The Caribbean Studies Working Group emerges from a broader effort to build sustained, interdisciplinary, and interdepartmental engagement with Caribbean thought at UC Berkeley. Intellectually, we center the Caribbean as a site of theory and praxis and a commitment to the self-determination of Caribbean peoples. We engage with the work of foundational and emerging scholars, artists, and activists who explore topics such as sovereignty, environmental and climate justice, coloniality, repair, mutual care, and radical imagination. Our research across the working group explores topics such as disaster, infrastructure, extractivism, and repair; Blackness, embodiment, and illness; forced migration, care, and educational precarity; and the sonic and poetic ecologies of Caribbean life. Together, we ask: How do Caribbean communities contend with ongoing colonial, structural, environmental, and racial violence? What forms of knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking emerge in response? Broadly, we hope to foster a generative space that supports students, faculty, and community partners to develop work-in-progress and cultivate new projects across fields and institutions grounded in Caribbean intellectual and creative traditions.
Critical Asian Diasporas
CONTACT: vincent5tran@berkeley.edu, ethangeontokko@berkeley.edu, jiayi_lim@berkeley.edu
The Critical Asian Diasporas (CAD) Research Working Group brings together interdisciplinary scholars to interrogate foundational and emerging questions in diaspora and transnational studies through the lens of Asian historical, cultural, and political experience. Taking seriously the contested nature of diaspora as a concept, despite its assumptions about homeland, origin, and solidarity, CAD scrutinizes the very categories used to make sense of movement, belonging, and community across borders. A central concern is historiographical: how has the study of Asian diasporas been constructed over time, and by whom? Drawing on theorists who have shaped diaspora studies alongside scholarly treatments of specific Asian communities worldwide, CAD examines how the “diasporic turn” challenges both nation-states and diasporic communities themselves. Sessions attend to Asian populations within settler colonial formations, racial politics, and long-distance nationalisms, while also exploring how diasporic communities engage these discourses through art, literature, political mobilization, and public history. CAD likewise considers how homeland states reckon with their overseas populations and how diasporic experiences unsettle national narratives.
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.
Filipinx and Philippine 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.
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.
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).
Sexuality/Gender Workshop
CONTACT: atorrez1000@berkeley.edu
The Sexuality/Gender Workshop working group is an interdisciplinary community of artists, organizers, graduate students, and faculty working across the humanities and social sciences. Our participants include community LGBTQ+ organizers and educators as well as affiliates at Berkeley. The working group provides a space to discuss ethical research and representation of sexual and gender minorities in scholarship. We offer feedback on works in progress, host public programming, and collaborate with LGBTQ+ organizations.
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.