AY 2020 - 2021 Research Working Groups

AY 2020 - 2021 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...

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...

Language Revitalization

The Language Revitalization Working Group (LRWG), co-hosted by the Linguistics and Ethnic Studies departments, focuses on discussing theories, methodologies, and applications of language revitalization (LR) in a variety of world contexts. This working group was originally initiated by the members of the Spring 2019 LING251 class on Indigenous Language Revitalization which was listed in Linguistics, core to the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization, co-taught by faculty from Linguistics, Ethnic Studies, and Education, and attended by students from Linguistics;...

(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...

Critical Environmental Justice Lab

The Critical Environmental Justice Lab at UC Berkeley was established in the Fall of 2017. Currently, its participants include: Michael Mascarenhas (coordinator), and Alejo Garcia Aguilera, Ataya Ceespooch, Mindy Price, Katherine Wolf – PhD graduate students in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management (ESPM), and Jenny Rempel, and Ella Belfer – PhD students in Energy and Resources Group (ERG). The CEJ Lab’s purpose is to provide a space for students and faculty to cultivate a deeper understanding of the social and environmental relations that articulate at the...

Digital Ethnic Studies

Digital Ethnic Studies is an undergraduate and graduate student-led working group that is oriented around critical issues and questions related to digital media and technology. Our focus on technology considers how interconnectivity with digital logics, practices, and infrastructures substantially transforms Ethnic Studies discourses around bodies, communities, histories, power, and movements. Drawing from multiple disciplines and fields, our diverse scholarly backgrounds bring together a wealth of knowledge across geographies, histories, and cultural traditions. Thus, this working...

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...