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...
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...
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-...
The Indigenous Sound Studies working group aims to highlight Indigenous politics in music and sound. Our members come from various backgrounds to create an Indigenous-centered dialogue on issues of anti-colonial practices, sovereignty, identity, and knowledge production in sound. Our discussion spaces are intended to be collaborative and constructive for understanding the multiple frictions of...
The Critical Aesthetics Working Group (CAWG) aims to create cross-disciplinary dialogue to explore the capacity of aesthetics as a geographic methodology reorganizing questions of time and intensifying sensibilities to space, matter, image, and sound. CAWG aims to support the creation of sensorially dynamic and immersive media, and theorize geography through experimental spatial engagements. CAWG hopes to cultivate critical digital literacy...
The Ecologies of Difference working group is a collaboration of place-based thinkers dedicated to employing the many lessons learned from critical black feminist ecology, political ecology, queer ecology, postcolonial theory, and indigenous criticism in order to develop fieldwork methods and modes of writing...
The Critical University Studies (CUS) Working Group convenes monthly to foster a scholarly community that contends with issues of race, gender, class, dis/ability, sexuality, and other forms of minoritization within and through higher education. We interrogate how colonialism, white supremacy, antiblackness, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist accumulation are constitutive to the formation and maintenance of universities, and how to disrupt their powerful hold. Our goals are...
The Black Geosonicologies Working Group explores the racialization of sound and how it is mediated, contextualized, and experienced through place-based orientation. We draw from...
To ethically and effectively examine race, gender, and other marginalizations, it becomes necessary to seek out radical subaltern approaches that challenge the power relations and epistemologies inherent in these research processes. This research group intends to reverse this narrative and practice by supporting a diverse group of researchers and practitioners who are trying to explore the liberatory potential of alternative methodologies. Through shared readings and discussion, we intend to learn about the history, theories, methodologies, and methods of collaborative and community-based...
Racism, not race, causes health disparities. This truth, powerfully realized in Dorothy Roberts' Fatal Invention, guides our work. Our working group’s founding members are medical students and masters students, two of us women of color and three of us members of the Freedom School, united by a common goal: to place justice and anti-racism at the center of our practice of medicine. We have studied and inquired further via medical schools and the Freedom School about how the misuse of race and racism in medicine targets our own communities and women of color.
