AY 2019 - 2020 Research Working Groups

AY 2019 - 2020 CRG Research Working Groups

Critical University Studies

CONTACT: rzfanshel@berkeley.edu

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...

Towards the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research and Practice

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.

Therefore, we...

Indigenous Americas

The Indigenous Americas Working Group is an interdisciplinary workshop for scholars in various disciplines to engage current scholarship in Native American and Indigenous Studies, workshop their own works-in-progress, host NAIS scholars on campus, and generate important conversations about contemporary art and politics in NAIS. While grounded in the histories and geographies of the hemispheric Americas and the complex terrain of tribal and settler-colonial national formations, the group is also interested in transnational circuits of indigenous mobility and comparative global...

Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice

The Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice working group seeks to:

1) continue cultivating a community and healing space for women of color and individuals dedicated to exploring the intersections of critical theory, intersectional identities, and health justice for all

2) integrate critical race theory and social justice into medical education and public health practic

3) educate and engage in other forms of healing (non-Western and indigenous) that are prevalent among communities of color and/or marginalized communities...

Black/Girlhood Imaginary

As a Black feminist collective of doctoral students, we critically engage theoretical frameworks and qualitative analytics in order to conceptualize our framework of the Black/Girlhood Imaginary. In order to continue to investigate this imaginary—this rupture birthed out of Black feminism (Collins, 1990)—we will use this working group as an opportunity to work through our framework and to hear from others about our points of intersection.

As a working group, we seek to wrestle with our understanding of Black girlhood and open a conversation between the fields of education,...

Caribbean Women Political Thought

Caribbean Women Political Thought working group focus on the works of Caribbean women scholars intellectual legacy and knowledge production on coloniality, modernity, Blackness, indigeneity, colonization, imperialism, failure of national movement and neo-imperial and colonial practices across the Caribbean. In the United States and Europe, the works of Caribbean male scholars are much more widely circulated. The works of Stuart Hall, CRL James, Edouard Glissant, CLR James, Frantz Fanon and etc. are widely known. We aim to draw attention to the literary and scholarly works that Caribbean...

(Decolonizing) Museums

In May 2016 a group of artists and activists occupied the Brooklyn Museum to protest two exhibitions that normalized displacement in Palestine and Brooklyn. Following calls in academic and activist spaces, organizers founded the collective action group Decolonize This Place and developed a seven-point plan for decolonizing museums.

Our working group, Decolonizing Museums, takes decolonizing work as an object of inquiry, rather than a goal. Drawing on case studies from museums around the world, this working group will focus on the fraught histories embedded...

Color of New Media

This working group seeks to add new voices, and new lenses, to the new media studies “conversation,” in order to diversify and broaden the scope of that conversation. The overarching goals of this group are: to share resources on issues of race/ethnicity/nation and new media; to foster the creation of new scholarship on these issues; and to nurture fellowship and social networking among scholars, particularly scholars of color, working in the field of new media studies. As a group, the Color of New Media has always been interested in sharing and popularizing scholarship by or about...