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 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 “Intersectional Ecologies” working group aims to investigate the intersections between race, gender, and alternative ecological futures. Positioned at the crossroad between academic research and spatial practice, the group studies the role of Western technical rationality in producing and maintaining racist, heteropatriarchal, and ecocidal forms of oppression. Within “sustainable” development, narratives of “resilience,” and growth paradigms, practices of hygienism, eco-modernism, and green neocolonialism have offered technological fixes to environmental destruction while...
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;...
As places of exception and mass incarceration, the camp constitutes a space set apart outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Camps are intimately related to the era of colonization and its attendant processes of invasion, occupation, disruption and relocation. They are nodes of state power and spatial manifestation of a society that periodically splinters into distinct categories based on belonging or non-belonging. This working group centers its focus on the space of the camp, in an interdisciplinary context, to explore how its ‘architectures’ have operated to shape, detain and...
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...
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...
Asian American Feminist Theory is a graduate student–led working group oriented around contemporary theorizations of Asiatic femininity. In the wake of ongoing violence that has laid bare the particular vulnerabilities of Asian American women, we aim to foster an energetic conversation around questions of race, gender, sexuality, materiality, aesthetics, visual culture, and embodiment posed by Asian American feminist theorizing. We welcome undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty from all disciplines to join us for regular meetings, guest talks, and collaborative projects....