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...
The Race and Yoga Research Working Group examines the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, able-bodiedness, and age in yoga. In addition to viewing yoga through the lens of intersectionality and Women of Color / Third World Feminisms, this group focuses on somatic theories to explore the praxis of yoga programs. Race and Yoga explores programs offered in yoga studios and other non-traditional settings, such as prisons. Although statics on annual income, educational level, and the ratio of female to male yoga practitioners in the United States are readily available, there is a...
The Reproductive Justice Working Group's primary goal is to co-create an environment in which participants can deepen their understanding of reproductive justice and develop practical ideas for integrating reproductive justice into their research and practice.
Using intersectionality as a primary analytic frame, this group will explore the implications of race, class, and gender across research areas including: how weight bias, race, and gender stereotypes affect Black women in health care settings; how long‐term incarceration affects Black men and their relationships to their families and community; how sociological factors, explain the absence, presence, and severity of implicit racial bias; how the national context of France shapes the anti‐racist efforts of nonprofit organizations; and finally, how racial struggles and the suppression...
The Pacific Imperialisms working group focuses on the interconnected racial and gendered geographies of Pacific spaces from Latin America and California to the western US-Canada borderlands and Alaska, and across the sea to the Pacific Rim of East Asia, the Philippines, and Hawai’i and the rest of the South Pacific. We will build a common core understanding of the different ways in which imperial powers have overlapped and succeeded each other in the Pacific, and how spaces that are locationally distant and racially differentiated have actually been co-produced through Pacific...
Deconstructing Research Methodologies of "Undocumented" Research working group will interrogate the limits, methods, and frameworks of scholarship and research on undocumented subjects, and experiences of erasure produced by US scholars. The team will consist of primarily undocumented doctoral students, and migrants, positing the research as both academic and community-based. The participation of the Berkeley (un)documented graduate student community in examining research methods about (im)migration provokes a new form of critical engagement with texts that further contend arguments...
In our working group we will examine critical fabulation, a term coined by Saidiya Hartman in her 2008 article “Venus in Two Acts,” and its implications for literary and cultural genres and aesthetics, including science fiction and fantasy, memoir, afrofuturism and nonWestern cosmology. The question animating our group will be: How have black women cultural producers and historians mined the etymological entanglement of “genre” and “gender” through critical fabulation, exploring the limits and possibilities for the present? Through creative works that challenge the racial homogeneity of...
The Asian American and Asian Diaspora (AAADS) Working Group is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students working across diverse methods, theories, and populations. As opposed to taking the category of “Asian American” for granted, we seek to explore the complex matrices of identity, history, and community that produce racialized and gendered communities. We also seek to form a supportive community in which graduate students may collaborate, assist and participate in the growth of each other’s work.
The CRG Social Movements Working Group (SMWG) is an interdisciplinary space for graduate students and faculty members who teach, research, and/or write about various types of social movements (immigrant rights, climate change, LGBTQ, etc.) and aspects of them (protests, coalitions, discourses, time and space, etc.). The working group is open to scholars who utilize multiple types of data (e.g. interviews, field notes, surveys, archives) and social science research designs (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods).
We are a group of graduate students and community practitioners who conceptualize trauma as a symptom/proximal manifestation of exposure to structural and interpersonal oppression e.g. colonialism, capitalism/economic racism, patriarchy, etc, and acknowledge individual and community-level capacities to heal from oppression. As a working group, we wish to create a safe space to share our own ideas, work-in-progress, and theoretical frameworks in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the larger implications of trauma on groups of people. We will explore how systemic forms of...