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 Black Feminism(s) Working Group is a collective of graduate students from across disciplines that utilize a Black feminist framework in their research. Our areas of interest include but are not limited to 19th-20th-century Black women’s history, diaspora theory, gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, literature, labor, globalization and capital, spirituality and religion(s), social movements, slavery and memory, new media and performance.
As discourses concerning the complex histories of gender, feminist thought and theory are negotiated within the academy, and in...
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).
The Radical Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Compositionworking group asks the questions:
How can our classrooms be places for radical change-making?
How, as teachers, can we intervene in the systemic hierarchies and oppression that play out in our classroom environments and beyond?
How can the methods we use for teaching, the systems we use for assessment, and the presence we hold in and out of the classroom work toward building more just futures?
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...
The primary purpose of the Black American History Seminar is to provide a space to talk about and engage with African American history. Regular meetings will provide opportunities to network with those who study African American history, those who are working on projects related to African American history, and those who want to learn more about African American history. Our group will meet regularly to discuss new books and articles, as well as emerging trends in various subfields of African American history from the colonial period up to the present. Geographically, our focus will be on...
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...
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...