Authors Meet Critics: “Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex,” Juana María Rodríguez

May 1st, 2024
12:00pm-1:30pm

Part of the Authors Meet Critics event series

Join us on May 1 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Rodriguez will be joined in conversation by Clarissa Rojas, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Milena Britto, Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Alberto Ledesma, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

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About the Book

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work’s stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

Panelists

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). In 2023, Dr. Rodríguez was honored by The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ with the prestigious Kessler Award, in recognition of her significant lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies.

Clarissa Rojas is a scholar activist, poet, mama, and movement maker. Her mother’s indigenous lineages in the Americas root her in the Arizona/Sonora deserts. Clarissa grew up in Mexicali/Calexico and San Diego/Chula Vista where her family migrated. She lives in Oakland in unceded Huichin and is faculty in Chicanx Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Davis. Clarissa co-founded INCITE! and has authored and co-edited multiple articles, special issues, and books on violence and the transformation of violence, including Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence and most recently her writing appears in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Abolition Feminisms.

Milena Britto is an Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on gender, race, literature and strategies of legitimation in the cultural field. She is also a curator, publishing editor, and has worked in several positions of cultural public policy.

Alberto Ledesma (moderator) is Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. He grew up in East Oakland and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from UC Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnic studies in 1996 and is a former faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a lecturer in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He has held several staff positions at UC Berkeley, including director of admissions at the School of Optometry, and writing program coordinator at the Student Learning Center. He is the author of the award winning illustrated autobiography, Diary of A Reluctant Dreamer.

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Elijah Anderson: Black Success, White Backlash, and the “N-Word Moment”

February 20th, 2024
12:00pm-2:00pm

Since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, large numbers of Black people have made their way into settings previously occupied only by whites. While many whites supported these changes, many others felt that their own rights were being abrogated by Black inclusion. Moreover, Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that can make life exhausting for people of color—and it has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement.

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Join us on February 20, 2024 for a lecture by Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University. Lunch will be served.

About the Speaker

Elijah Anderson is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, and one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States. His publications include Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner (1978; 2nd ed., 2003); The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life was published by WW Norton in 2011. Anderson’s most recent ethnographic work, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. Additionally, Professor Anderson is the recipient of the 2017 Merit Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and three prestigious awards from the American Sociological Association, including the 2013 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award, the 2018 W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the 2021 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement. And, he is a Stockholm Prize Laureate in Criminology.
This event is sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, Center for Ethnographic Research, Othering and Belonging Institute, Social Science Matrix, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Graduate Program, Center for the Study of Law and Society

For more information about the event, please contact: Barbara Montano at bmontano14@berkeley.edu or 510-664-4324.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Barbara Montano at bmontano14@berkeley.edu or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

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Defensive Nationalism: Explaining The Rise Of Populism And Fascism In The 21st Century

February 6th, 2024
4:00pm-5:30pm

Why have atavistic political ideologies taken hold in the most technologically advanced societies? Please join us on February 6, 2024 at 4:00pm as Professor Beth Rabinowitz, Associate Professor, Political Science, Rutgers University – Camden, will discuss her recent book, Defensive Nationalism: Explaining the Rise of Populism and Fascism in the 21st Century, and the powerful thesis that the irrationalism and hatred that marked the early 20th century has resurged in the 21st. In turn, our response to violent instability and fracture requires a clear-eyed understanding of the explosive politics of both eras.

Moderated by Steven K. Vogel, Director of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at UC Berkeley.

Presented by the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative (BESI).

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About The Book

Why have atavistic political ideologies taken hold in the most technologically advanced societies? In her new book, Defensive Nationalism, Beth Rabinowitz argues that the irrationalism and hatred that marked the early 20th is recurring in the 21st centuries, and for the same reasons.

Combining Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement” with Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of innovation, the book traces how the explosive politics of both eras stem from the very technological changes that brought humankind to its highest levels of sophistication. In the mid-19th century, it was railroads, steam ships, automated printing presses, and telegraphy; in the mid-20th century, turbo jets, container ships, satellites, and computers. These magical modern innovations seemed to hold the promise of global peace and prosperity. But the mid-century liberal trust in international cooperation was quickly eclipsed by something much darker. The new economies of speed and scale created by the Industrial and Digital Revolutions dislodged the moorings of societies. Countries were made vulnerable to global economic crises, existing systems of production were uprooted, mass migrations accelerated, and uniquely modern forms of mass media threatened the social and political order. These same changes also produced never-before-seen modes of international terrorism—anarchist bombings and assassinations in the late-eighteen hundreds, and Islamist suicide bombings and beheadings in the late-nineteen hundreds. Political actors were able to capitalize on the growing disorientation and fear. Nations began to turn inward as left-wing populist and right-wing proto-fascist movements took hold across the United States and Europe. An era of “defensive nationalism” had commenced.

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Included-Variable Bias and Everything but the Kitchen Sink

February 22nd, 2024
12:00pm

Join us on February 22 at 12pm for a talk by Sharad Goel, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. This talk is part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.

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Abstract

When estimating the risk of an adverse outcome, common statistical guidance is to include all available factors to maximize predictive performance. Similarly, in observational studies of discrimination, general practice is to adjust for all potential confounds to isolate any impermissible effect of legally protected traits, like race or gender, on decisions. I’ll argue that this popular “kitchen-sink” approach can in fact worsen predictions in the first case and yield conservative estimates of discrimination in the second. To illustrate these ideas, I’ll draw on examples from healthcare and criminal justice.

About the Speaker

Sharad Goel is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He looks at public policy through the lens of computer science, bringing a computational perspective to a diverse range of contemporary social and political issues, including criminal justice reform, democratic governance, and the equitable design of algorithms. Sharad is the founding director of the Computational Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary team of researchers, data scientists, and journalists that use technology to drive social impact. Prior to joining Harvard, Sharad was on the faculty at Stanford University, with appointments in management science & engineering, computer science, sociology, and the law school. Sharad holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, as well as a master’s degree in computer science and a doctorate in applied mathematics from Cornell University.

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Traumatic Repercussions: Black Women and Obstetric Racism

March 7th, 2024
2:00pm

Join us on March 7, 2024 at 2pm for an in-person lecture, “Traumatic Repercussions: Black Women and Obstetric Racism,” by Dána-Ain Davis, Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on a member of the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology.

This talk will chart the way two Black reproducing bodies are shaped by obstetric racism. Davis will share the birthing experiences of two women and think through their medical encounters by considering how Black bodies are degraded, ushering them toward mistreatment. Here, Davis argues that obstetric racism produces traumatic repercussions weighed down by disposability, neglect, and medical abuse.

The talk will be moderated by Andrew Wooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the Medical Anthropology Program, the Department of Sociology, the Maternal, Child, and Adoloescent Health (MCAH) Program in the School of Public Health, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for Social Medicine, the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, and the Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster in the Othering and Belonging Institute.

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About the Speaker

Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center. Most recently, she is the author of Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press 2019), which received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology and The Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology.

Davis has been engaged in social justice, particularly reproductive justice and racial justice for over 30 years and has been widely recognized for her scholarship, community work, and activism. Most recently, Davis was awarded the 2023 Gender Equity Award from the American Anthropological Association. She has worked with a number of national reproductive justice organizations and initiatives, including the New York State Governor’s Task Force on Maternal Mortality and Disparate Racial Outcomes. Davis is also a doula and co-founded the Art of Childbirth with doula/midwife Nubia Earth-Martin, offering free birth education workshops that incorporate artistic expressions in Yonkers, New York.

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Matrix on Point: Surveillance and Privacy in a Biometric World

February 15th, 2024
4:00pm-5:30pm

Facial recognition system identifying people on city street.

As governments and businesses begin to use more forms of biometric identification – including fingerprints, facial recognition, and voice recognition, among others – it’s easier than ever to recognize a person. What implications do these technologies have on the future of privacy and surveillance? In this Matrix on Point panel, experts will evaluate how biometric identification might change our understanding of the relationship between people, private industry, and their government.

The panel will feature John Chuang, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information; Lawrence Cohen, Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies and the co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program; and Jennifer Urban, Clinical Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where she is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and a co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. The panel will be moderated by Rebecca Wexler, Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Law, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and the UC Berkeley School of Information. This will be held in-person at Social Science Matrix (820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley).

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Panelists

John Chuang is Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. His research and teaching span the areas of climate informatics, biosensory computing, and incentive-centered design. He leads the BioSENSE Lab in studying brainwave authentication using passthoughts, affective biosensing, embodied decision-making, and privacy of ubiquitous sensing. His earlier work investigated strategic cybersecurity investments, incentives for peer production, and scalability of multicast trees. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and graduated summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Lawrence Cohen is a scholar of religion and a medical anthropologist. Much of his work has focused on the norms and forms of political life in India, attending to questions of old age and the place of the family in the decolonization of knowledge; to the sexual and gendered logics of “backwardness”; and to the mediation and regulation of markets in human organs as sites to think about ethics as public culture. For the past decade he has studied contending models of biometrics and big data in the control and governance of economy and society, with a focus on India’s massive “Aadhaar” identification project.

Jennifer M. Urban is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and a co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. In March 2021, Urban was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to be the inaugural Chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency Board. Prior to joining Berkeley Law, Urban founded and directed the USC Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law. Before that, she was the Samuelson Clinic’s first fellow and an attorney with the Venture Law Group in Silicon Valley. She holds a B.A. in biological science (concentration in neurobiology and behavior) from Cornell University, and a J.D. (with law and technology certificate) from Berkeley Law.

Rebecca Wexler is Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Wexler’s teaching and research focus on data, technology, and secrecy in the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on evidence law, trade secret law, and data privacy. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, NYU Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Berkeley Technology Law Journal, as well as in peer-reviewed computer science publications. Wexler will serve as senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Spring 2023, and as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School in Fall 2023.

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Authors Meet Critics: “Terracene,” by Salar Mameni

March 4th, 2024
4pm-5:30pm

Please join us in-person on Monday, March 4, 2024 from 4-5:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Terracene, by Professor Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies. Professor Mameni will be joined by Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz; Sugata Ray, Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley; and Stefania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

This panel is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory, the Art Research Center, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, the Department of Art History, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative.

About the Book

In Terracene, Professor Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.

Panelists

Salar Mameni

Salar Mameni is an Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies and an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. He has published articles in Resilience, Signs, Women & Performance, Al-Raida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Fillip Review and Canadian Art Journal. Salar’s first book, Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” I propose the term “Terracene” in order to think the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. Terracene engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change.

Mayanthi Fernando is a Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014), which alternates between an analysis of Muslim French politics, ethics, and social life and the contradictions of French secularity (laïcité) that this new Muslim subjectivity reflects and refracts. Her second book discusses the secularity of the post-humanist turn that asks whether “natureculture” – a reversal of the distinction between nature and the human – might be extended to “supernatureculture.”

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art and Architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies and Director of the South Asia Art Initiative and the Climate Change Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray’s recent books include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; awarded the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion and the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (coedited; 2020). He is currently writing a book on the question of the animal and animality in the early modern period and co-editing Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (2024).

Stefania Pandolfo is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the “cures of the jinn”, and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.

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Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice

February 8th, 2024
2:00pm

Please register to join us on Wednesday, February 8 at 2:00pm Pacific for a hybrid (in-person and online) talk, “Understanding Land-based Psychological Trauma in Light of Epistemic Justice,” by Dr. Garret Barnwell, South African clinical psychologist and community psychology practitioner.

REGISTER HERE

This event will be presented both online and in-person. A Zoom link will be sent to all registrants prior to the event.

Abstract

The places we live are inseparably connected to who we are. Our relationship with these spaces we come into being through is somewhat foundational to our knowing and being in the world. They shape who we are, and we, in so many ways, shape them, inscribing them with personal meanings and finding social coordinates in them. In this talk, Barnwell uses vignettes to describe how this takes place, emphasizing that these bonds are most evidently seen when threatened. Basing his insights on several years of clinical experience and critical psychology theory, he draws attention to how people’s psychological relationship to place is threatened through grievous acts of epistemic injustices — violence directed at knowledge and speech. These forms of epistemic injustice include the silencing, misrecognition, threats, and killings of land defenders, as well as systematized land dispossession in the name of capitalist expansion and mining. Decolonial and critical psychologies teach us that the language we come into being, which privileges certain politics, ways of knowing and being in the world in relation to such places, has a bearing on subjectivity — what can be said and what is unsayable, and, thus, unactionable. He will describe how such forms of epistemic violence threaten these psychological bonds and produce psychological trauma. Around the world in these extractive zones, Indigenous and land-based resurgent movements play a critical role in defending against epistemic injustices for the flourishing of life. In conclusion, Barnwell draws attention to how such resurgent groups use different forms of land dialogues and speech as integral parts of community resistance and psychological healing.

About the Speaker

Dr. Garret Barnwell is a clinical psychologist working as a psychotherapist and community psychology practitioner. He is most interested in different forms of accompaniment and resistance to extractivism for the flourishing of all life. Barnwell was an expert on the landmark youth-led #cancelcoal climate case launched against the South African government’s plans for new coal-fired power. He is also a member of the American Psychological Association’s Climate Change Advisory Group. Barnwell’s writing includes several expert reports, special issues, and a book, Terrapsychology: Further Inquiry Into Self, Place and Planet (with Prof Craig Chalquist). He is a research associate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

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Hugo ka Canham: Riotous Deathscapes through the Watchful Ocean

December 5th, 2023
4:00pm-6:00pm

Presented by the Program in Critical Theory, the Series in Black / Africana Critical Theory stages a slow sequence of conversations across Africana Studies, Black Study, and Critical Theory. Rather than a form of triangulation that aims at resolution, the series stays with tension across these lines of thought, in provisional forms of critical contemplation that might help us meet our current condition. Seminars center on open discussion of a recently published or pre-circulated piece.

This seminar centers on Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes.

Hugo ka Canham is a Professor at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa. He thinks along the fault lines of Black studies, African feminism, African queer theorisations, and a planetary perspective. He is invested in dismantling the binaries between the human and the natural, multispecies world, within an emerging transdisciplinary rubric of Black Planetary Studies. His latest book, Riotous Deathscapes is published by Duke University Press and copublished by Wits University Press. He is working on a book provisionally titled Treading Queer Waters.

In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham presents an understanding of life and death based on indigenous and black ways of knowing that he terms Mpondo theory. Focusing on amaMpondo people from rural Mpondoland, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Canham outlines the methodologies that have enabled the community’s resilience and survival. He assembles historical events and a cast of ancestral and living characters, following the tenor of village life, to offer a portrait of how Mpondo people live and die in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death. Canham shows that Mpondo theory is grounded in and develops in relation to the natural world, where the river and hill are key sites of being and resistance. Central too, is the interface between ancestors and the living, in which life and death become a continuity and a boundlessness that white supremacy and neoliberalism cannot interdict. By charting a course of black life in Mpondoland, Canham tells a story of blackness on the African continent and beyond.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Institute for International Studies, the Irving Stone Chair in Literature, the Marion E. Koshland Chair in the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Social Science Division, the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, the Social Science Matrix, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

For information about ADA accessibility, please visit bit.ly/3sCykIR .

For more information abou tthe content of these events, please email critical_theory@berkeley.edu.

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Author Meets Critics: Andrew Garrett, “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall”

January 19th, 2024
3:30pm-5:00pm

Book cover - a person prying the K off the wall of a building

Please join us on January 19, 2024 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, by Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Professor Garrett will be joined in conversation by James Clifford, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz; William Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology; and Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot), a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer, and author of Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California. Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

Co-Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, Department of Linguistics, Department of Ethnic Studies, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, and Native American Studies.

About the Book

In January 2021, at a time when many institutions were reevaluating fraught histories, the University of California removed anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber’s name from a building on its Berkeley campus. Critics accused Kroeber of racist and dehumanizing practices that harmed Indigenous people; university leaders repudiated his values. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber’s work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his university’s failed relationships with Native communities. Garrett argues that Kroeber’s most important work has been overlooked: his collaborations with Indigenous people throughout California to record their languages and stories.

The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall offers new perspectives on the early practice of anthropology and linguistics and on its significance today and in the future. Kroeber’s documentation was broader and more collaborative and multifaceted than is usually recognized. As a result, the records Indigenous people created while working with him are relevant throughout California as communities revive languages, names, songs, and stories. Garrett asks readers to consider these legacies, arguing that the University of California chose to reject critical self-examination when it unnamed Kroeber Hall.

Panelists

Andrew Garrett is Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics, where he directs the California Language Archive. His research and teaching are in historical linguistics (especially Indo-European historical linguistics) and in language documentation and revitalization (especially involving Indigenous California languages). From the Linguistic Society of America, he has received the Best Paper in Language Award (2015, for “Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis”, coauthored with three students) and the Kenneth L. Hale Award (2023, for “outstanding work on the documentation of a particular language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken”). Since 2001, he has collaborated with the Yurok Tribe on the documentation and revitalization of the Yurok language, preparing a short pedagogical grammar Basic Yurok in 2014.

James Clifford is Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. He the author of books that explore the intersections of anthropology, literature and art: The Predicament of Culture (1988); Routes (1997); and Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century (2013). In the latter work, he writes at some length about Kroeber, Ishi, and the colonial legacies of ethnography museums.

William F. Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology, studies the history and ethnography of Yucatan, Mexico, and Yucatec Maya language and culture, including early modern Spain and Spanish as a necessary step towards understanding the colonial formation of Yucatan and New Spain. He examines the organization and dynamics of routine language use (semantics, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and the social foundations of speech practices). He has studied ritual practice, comparative shamanisms, and the relations between religion and health care in rural Mexico. His most recent work concerns the colonial history of Yucatan and New Spain, with a special emphasis on missionization and the emergence of colonial discourse genres.

Leanne Hinton is professor emerita of linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her recent research has focused on language revitalization of Native American languages. She strongly supports interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics, and linguistic research that relates to community needs and interests, as well as to theory. Though retired, she remains active in research and consulting. Awards include the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award (2006), the Linguistics Society of America’s Language, Linguistics and the Public award (2012), The Hubert Howe Bancroft Award, presented by the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley (2018), and the “Honored One” award, presented by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, & Museums.

Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot) is a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer. He is a first language speaker of Karuk and a tribal scholar. Julian is a member of the Board of Directors of the Ink People – Center for Arts and the author of Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California.

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Nivedita Menon, “Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South”

November 15th, 2023
5:00pm-6:30pm

Please join us on November 15 at 5:00pm for a talk by Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Professor Menon will be joined in conversation by Poulomi Saha, co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

This event is presented by the Program in Critical Theory in collaboration with the Office of the Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences and the Institute for South Asia Studies. Co-sponsors (in addition to Social Science Matrix) include the UC Berkeley Department of English, the Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Center on Contemporary India, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender.

Register here to attend in-person or online.

About the Speaker

Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, is the author of Seeing like a Feminist (2012). Her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South, is forthcoming in 2023 (Permanent Black) and 2024 (Duke University Press). Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books are Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and (co-written) Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007/2nd Edition 2014). She also has two edited volumes Gender and Politics in India (1999) and Sexualities (2007); and a co-edited book Critical Studies in Politics. Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (2014).

Menon is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in India. She also has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.

Related Event

Nivedita Menon | The Saffron and the Star: Scripting Hindutva in Bollywood
(The 6th Bhattacharya Lecture on the “Future of India”)

November 14, 2023, 5 – 7 p.m.
Room 370, Dwinelle Hall, South Dr, Berkeley, CA 94720

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Elizabeth Joh: “Police Technology Experiments”

December 7th, 2023
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST

Join us on Thursday, December 7 at 12pm for a talk by Elizabeth Joh, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. Professor Joh’s talk, “Police Technology Experiments,” is presented by the Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS) and co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS).

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Abstract

Police Technology Experiments

To be a modern local police force means embracing new surveillance technologies that promise to amass the ever-enlarging universe of data around us and to produce actionable inferences about it. Whether described as using algorithms, artificial intelligence, or automated decision-making, all of these surveillance technologies involve some degree of computational analysis of data that creates new forms of knowledge and permits new types of policing. The usual way we discuss the use of these technologies, however, is limiting. Not only is it limiting, but it also obscures the human costs that are an inevitable consequence.

We should reconsider how we approach these new policing tools. This article makes one straightforward claim: algorithmic surveillance tools piloted by the police function as technology experiments on communities. These police technologies are experiments in the sense that they pose potential harms on those subject to the technology in the service of a theoretical but typically unproven benefit: more effective policing. With this framework, two observations follow. First, the model of technological experimentalism provides a more nuanced and comprehensive framework for understanding the use of algorithmic surveillance tools in policing. Second, experimentalism foregrounds both ethical considerations and group harms that are ill-suited to traditional legal analysis.

About the Speaker

Professor Elizabeth Joh is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. She is a leading expert on policing, privacy, and technology. She served as a member of the U.C. Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence (2020-21), and is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a Faculty Advisory Board member of the UC Berkeley CITRIS Policy Lab, and an appointed member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study committee on Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance. She has spoken on policing and technology issues to audiences including the Justices of the Washington Supreme Court, the Judicial Research Training Institute of the Supreme Court of Korea, and the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee (U.K.).

Professor Joh’s scholarship has appeared in leading law reviews including the Northwestern University Law Review, the California Law Review and the Stanford Law Review. Her writing for general audiences has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Politico, and the New York Review of Books. She is the co-host of What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law, a popular podcast about constitutional law and current events.

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