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...
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...
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,...
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;...
In traditional Ethnic Studies categories, mixed race has been marginalized, misappropriated, tokenized or simply left out. In order to allow for a collaborative environment given the use of essentialized racial categories and lack of scholarship on the experiences of mixed race people, the purposes of the working group are as follows: to create an interdisciplinary space for mixed race studies dialogue and to provide a safe space for scholars to discuss issues of mixed race identity. This working group will also serve as a space for scholars doing work on this topic...
This working group brings together faculty and students from U.C. Berkeley and a local high school to research the impact of school disciplinary practices on racial/ethnic minority students. We explore whether alternative forms of discipline, founded on restorative justice principles, are a viable and healthy alternative to traditional paradigms. In the Fall of 2009, 13 students from a local high school participated in a seminar designed and facilitated by members of the working group. Students in the seminar became familiar with the history of discipline within...
The Decolonial Feminisms Working Group is working on a series of research questions and praxical projects related to decoloniality and feminisms through reading discussion, collective research projects, and the organizing of conferences and convenings. We were formed in the fall of 2008 in response to an invitation by Prof. Maria Lugones, Center for Philosophy and Interpretation of Culture (CPIC), Binghamton University, to work collaboratively on questions of decolonial feminisms. We began a dialogue with CPIC, participated in a transnational video conference with...
This working group seeks to think through specific techniques of knowledge production at work around US military bases/facilities, especially those that enable "spaces of containment" and "spaces of exception" to be maintained and sustained through the discourse of liberalism. The members of this group will read a list of texts and articles (see below) influenced by the works of Giorgio Agamben (1998) and those who have expanded on his concept of the "the camp" in order to extrapolate a better feminist model which addresses the inextricable links between race and...
Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and cultural workers, we engage the topic of Afro Asian alliance from a variety of perspectives, including: Afro Asian/Third World political history; theories of joint racialization; Buddhism and the African American community; Black/Asian portrayals in popular culture; musical and artistic exchanges; Black and Asian/American community interaction; interracial adoption; martial arts; and mixed raced identity. By including members already involved with Afro Asian projects in San Francisco and Oakland, we seek to bring...