2025 Ethnic Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium

2025 Ethnic Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium

by Keith Miyake Announcements Events

Let Me Define My Terms: An Undergraduate Research Symposium

May 19, 2025

UCR Alumni Center

This symposium will showcase how undergraduate students are conducting meaningful research on race, gender, and sexuality. It empowers students to effectively communicate the significance of their work within academic circles and, crucially, within the broader context of American society. Ten undergraduate participants will present original research or creative activities related to ethnic studies on the topic of their choosing.

This one-day symposium will feature a keynote speaker (TBA) and three moderated panels of undergraduate research papers.

 

Applications now open for the 2025 Ethnic Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium

 

UCR students of any major are encouraged to apply. There will be a $500 stipend awarded to all presenters. Applications are due March 28, 2025.

To apply, you must complete the application form linked above. In addition to your basic information, you will be asked to submit the title of your proposed presentation and a 250–350 word abstract. The abstract is a short description of what your proposed symposium presentation will be about. This should include the topic of research, some brief context, the questions or problem you will address, your central argument or thesis, the significance of your research, and the conclusions you will arrive at. It is alright for you not to know exactly what your argument or conclusions might be in the final presentation, but you should provide as much information as possible. A strong symposium paper will include a thesis, supporting evidence, conclusion, and larger significance. Because they are written with an intention of sharing with a live audience, it is helpful to read the essay aloud to ensure it follows the conventions of oral presentation. ­­­­

 

Colloquium: “Sleepless: Racial patterns of Sleep Hygiene in a County Jail” by Michael Lawrence Walker

Colloquium: “Sleepless: Racial patterns of Sleep Hygiene in a County Jail” by Michael Lawrence Walker

by Keith Miyake Events

Join the UCR Department of Ethnic Studies for our colloquium speaker series:

“Sleepless: Racial patterns of Sleep Hygiene in a County Jail”

By Michael Lawrence Walker

Monday, February 24
1:00-2:00 p.m.
INTS 1109 (note the room change)

Problems associated with sleep hygiene are among the more unexamined issues in carceral organizations. We know that poor sleep hygiene is associated with increased risks for developing mood disorders, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other physiological problems. In this study, I use ethnographic data from a Southern California county jail system to show: (a) poor sleep hygiene is endemic penal living; (b) jail mental health staff were ill-equipped to address the interplay of sleep hygiene and mental health for penal residents; (3) the jail as an organizational setting patterned resident dreams into themes; and (4) carceral organizations stratify poor sleep hygiene across racial groups. I offer the outline of a sensitizing scheme for the sociology of dreams.

 

Michael Lawrence Walker earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of California, Riverside. In 2017, he joined the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he is the Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts in the Department of Sociology. He is the author of Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail, which won the 2022 C. Wright Mills Book Award and the Charles H. Cooley Award for Best Recent Book. Walker’s research focuses on race relations, social exchange, punishment, identities, and time. His current project is a book length examination of the socioemotional landscape of law enforcement work.

Colloquium: “The Mer-Warrior: A Fantastic Afro-Nostalgic” by Jalondra A. Davis

Colloquium: “The Mer-Warrior: A Fantastic Afro-Nostalgic” by Jalondra A. Davis

by Keith Miyake Events

Join the UCR Department of Ethnic Studies for our colloquium speaker series:

“The Mer-Warrior: A Fantastic Afro-Nostalgic”

By Jalondra A. Davis

Monday, February 10
1:00-2:00 p.m.
INTN 3023

In contrast to mainstream representations of the mermaid as an innocent, hyperfeminine girl-culture waif, a hypersexualized, commercialized object, or, more rarely, a tempting, predatory, carnivorous siren, Black mermaid stories, narratives, and performers offer entirely different dimensions to this fantastical figure that are remarkably consistent across literary, visual, and other popular culture. Building upon Badia Ahad-Legardy’s concept of afro-nostalgia, this presentation will focus on the mermaid as a warrior figure, and the way in which Black storytellers and creatives center the kinds of histories usually used to exclude blackness from fantasy landscapes—captivity, enslavement, and ongoing racial violence—as actually especially entitling Black communities to mermaid stories.

 

Jalondra A. Davis is an Assistant Professor of English at UC Riverside, has published on speculative fiction in various venues, including Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Studies, Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood, Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her monograph manuscript, Merfolk and Black Being in Water, analyzes the historically specific worldbuilding of Black literature, art, and performance featuring human-aquatic hybrids, with a focus on how such narratives interrogate Western modernity, humanism, and the Anthropocene. A current Hellman Society of Scholars Fellow with an Ethnic Studies Ph.D. from UCR, she also hosts the Merwomanist Podcast.
Colloquium: Indigenous Futures: Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro and New Voices in the California Central Valley by Nancy Morales

Colloquium: Indigenous Futures: Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro and New Voices in the California Central Valley by Nancy Morales

by Keith Miyake Events

Join the Ethnic Studies Department for our colloquium speaker series:

“Indigenous Futures: Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro and New Voices in the California Central Valley”

By Nancy Morales

Monday, December 2, 1:00–2:00 pm in INTN 3023

Based on a five-year Native ethnography with participant observation of fifteen Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro events, and twenty-four interviews with 1.5 (U.S.-raised) and second generations (U.S.-born) of Mixtec and Zapotec women and queer youth, Morales argues for more expansive definitions of Indigenous governance, such as tequio (community labor) to account for the political participation of Indigenous women and Indigiqueer youth that challenge static nationalist notions of Indigeneity.

Nancy Morales is an Indigenous (Zapotec) feminist scholar-activist and Native ethnographer. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara in June 2023 and is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is currently working on a short documentary and book manuscript, Oaxacan Pride: Women and Indigiqueer Youth’s Struggles for Sovereignty.

You can download a PDF flyer here.

Colloquium: Unbroken Spirit: The Rise of the Pelican Bay Short Corridor and California SHU Prison Hunger Strikes by Angélica Camacho

Colloquium: Unbroken Spirit: The Rise of the Pelican Bay Short Corridor and California SHU Prison Hunger Strikes by Angélica Camacho

by Keith Miyake Events

Join the Ethnic Studies Department for our colloquium speaker series:

“Unbroken Spirit: The Rise of the Pelican Bay Short Corridor and California SHU Prison Hunger Strikes”

By Angélica Camacho

Monday, November 4, 1:00–2:00 pm in INTS 3023

The 2011 and 2013 Pelican Bay and California SHU prison hunger strikes marked the beginning of a contemporary prisoner-led movement that would expose the brutality and corruption of the California Department of Corrections. I argue that the theorizing emanating from this historical prisoner and family-led movement provides us valuable insights for anti-prison organizing that can help us transform our way out of over 50 years of tough-on-crime legislation. Additionally, these hunger strikes remind us of the strength and power wielded by a common insurrectionary and unbroken spirit. Whereas even after years of being submitted to one of the most repressive sites in the world, incarcerated people adamantly refused to collaborate with their captors. Instead, they chose camaraderie across racial and geographical lines, reclaiming their bodies, and weaponizing their words to craft new possibilities for the future.

Angélica Camacho (Ph.D., Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside, 2017) is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Studies at San Francisco State University. Her current research documents the 2011-2013 Pelican Bay California prisoner hunger strikes and the subsequent uprising of their families in opposition to the conditions of confinement in Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Colloquium: X es mi Amor: On Latino Queer Spaces and Preserving the Mundane

Colloquium: X es mi Amor: On Latino Queer Spaces and Preserving the Mundane

by Keith Miyake Events

Join the Ethnic Studies Department for our colloquium speaker series:

“X es mi Amor: On Latino Queer Spaces and Preserving the Mundane”

By Reynaldo Rivera

Monday, October 14, 1:00–2:00 pm in INTS 3023 (Please note the room change)

Reynaldo Rivera is a photographer whose work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, and Berlin. His photos are in the permanent collections of MOCA, LACMA, and The Getty Museum (L.A.), and of MoMA and The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC). He is the author of Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City (2020), which the Los Angeles Times called “an alluring yet candid record of interconnected communities.”

Recent and Upcoming Art Shows featuring Prof. Gerald Clarke

Recent and Upcoming Art Shows featuring Prof. Gerald Clarke

by Keith Miyake Events Faculty News

2024 has been a busy year for Professor Gerald Clarke! Here are some of Professor Clarke’s recent and upcoming shows:

Gerald Clarke: The Door is Open (May 24 – September 1, 2024, Breck Create, Breckenridge, CO)

Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees (September 7 – December 29, 2024, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA)

Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art (January 12 – July 13, 2025, PST ART, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA)

 

Professor Clarke will also be giving a lecture in October:

Portland Monuments Project Symposium (October 11 – 12, 2024, Converge 45, Portland, OR)

 

Prof. Clarke’s Artist Statement (via Breck Create)

I aspire not to romanticize the subjects or content of my work. I strive to “keep it real” and have found that my best works are inspired by my personal experiences. Beer cans, branding irons, and gourd rattles represent aspects of my reality. These materials reflect who I am and not how the mainstream might understand the contemporary Native American experience. They represent my community as well: a community that struggles with various issues but that also laughs, loves, and continues to evolve.

While my work may not appear “traditional,” it is part of a continuation of creative responses to the world that the Cahuilla have exercised since ancient times. I believe the strict adherence to traditional materials and authentic forms has been forced onto Indigenous expression by Euro-American belief systems that view art and culture through a monetary lens. The result is a narrow conception of Native American art that imposes an eighteenth-century aesthetic and transforms it into a commodity.

As you view my work, I ask that you do not simply compare or contrast it to “traditional Native American art,” but that you understand my work exists within a spectrum of Indigenous expression that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary. I’m proud and humbled to contribute to the Indigenous Intellectual Tradition. I am not simply a contemporary artist that happens to be Indian. I am a Native American artist. I am a Cahuilla artist.

Desert X 2023: A contemporary art exhibition featuring the work of Professor Gerald Clarke.

Desert X 2023: A contemporary art exhibition featuring the work of Professor Gerald Clarke.

by Keith Miyake Events Faculty News

Desert X is an international contemporary art exhibition that takes place in desert locations and features site-specific installations by acclaimed artists from around the world. The exhibition is produced by The Desert Biennial, a California-based not-for-profit organization with a mission to present public exhibitions of art that engage with the desert, the environment, and indigenous communities. Eleven artists from Europe, North America and South Asia will present poetic and immersive works that span sculpture, painting, writing, architecture, design, film, music, performance and choreography, education, and environmental activism in the exhibition curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-Curator Diana Campbell.

The exhibition examines social and environmental themes with a focus on the changes that give form to a world increasingly shaped by climate crisis, globalism, and the political and economic migrations that follow in their wake. In the exhibition, which builds on social and environmental themes explored in earlier editions, newly-commissioned works make visible, as instruments of self-awareness and devices of wonder, the forces that we exert on the world: how we design our environments, how we live, and the messages we send that reinforce systems that might or might not be beneficial for us. From the local to the global, from schools and roads to global trade routes that define the ebb and flow of goods and many things in-between, infrastructure has subsumed creative ways of being that are inconvenient to forces of power.

Desert X 2023 features the work of Professor Gerald Clarke, who presents a unique piece called Immersion. The installation takes the form of a traditional Cahuilla coiled basket or ‘chi-pat-mal’ scaled to become a giant game board. The goal of reaching the center can only be achieved by correctly answering questions relating to the traditions and histories of the Cahuilla Indians and other sovereign cultures. By gamifying history Clarke sublimates prejudice. At the same time, he reminds us how unattainable these same goals have become for those for whom such knowledge has been forcibly withdrawn.

The exhibition will be on display at sites across the Coachella Valley from March 4–May 7, 2023. Don’t miss this opportunity to see the work of Professor Gerald Clarke and other world-renowned artists. Visit desertx.org for more information.

New Report: Advancing Equity for Undocumented Students and Students from Mixed-Status Families at the University of California

New Report: Advancing Equity for Undocumented Students and Students from Mixed-Status Families at the University of California

by Emily Hue Events Faculty News

A new report from the UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity (UC PromISE), co-led by Ethnic Studies Prof. Jennifer Nájera, establishes that immigration policy is disrupting the educational experiences and wellbeing not only of undocumented students, but also those students who are citizens from mixed-status families.

Advancing Equity for Undocumented Students and Students from Mixed-Status Families at the University of California features data from a survey of 2,742 UC undergraduate students and compares the experiences of three groups: undocumented immigrant students, U.S. citizen students with undocumented parents, and U.S. citizen students with immigrant parents who are permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Drawing lessons from undocumented student programs at the UC, it identifies areas of improvement that can aid all universities in advancing equity for all students impacted by immigration policies.

Download the full report on the research website:
https://ucpromise.uci.edu/reports/undocumented-and-mixed-status-families/

You are also welcome to join host a virtual panel discussion of the report on Tuesday, February 16, 2021 at 12pm (PST).

Register here: https://uci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hU8bkETbQfqZNB4IL9GPHQ

Oct 1: Teach-In on Antiblackness, the University and Policing

Oct 1: Teach-In on Antiblackness, the University and Policing

by Emily Hue Events

October 1, 2020 ~ Day of Action/Strike/Teach-in for Police Abolition 
Faculty, instructors, students and staff, please consider striking and joining these teach-ins in solidarity with the larger statewide call to take action to protest antiblack police violence.

ABOLITION & THE UNIVERSITY: TEACH-IN SERIES
~ organized by the Abolitionist Educators Network of Critical Resistance

Antiblackness, the University and Policing — October 1, 2020 
1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST)  | 4-6:00pm (EST) 

  • Moderator: Dylan Rodriguez  (UC Riverside)
  • Lester Spence (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Cathy Cohen (University of Chicago)
  • João Costa Vargas (UC Riverside)
  • Savannah Shange (UC Santa Cruz)This first teach-in addresses how the university has historically functioned to reproduce and sanction antiblackness and policing. This panel of scholar-activists discusses how antiblackness has been foundational to the structure, organization and policies of the university and has operated to police bodies, disciplines, knowledges, movements and activism, often under the cover of rhetorics that promote liberal multicultural inclusion and diversity.

Eventbrite: ucrcopsoffcampus.eventbrite.com

About the Abolition & the University Teach-in Series 
The unprecedented protests and grassroots organizing against antiblack police and white vigilante violence has generated demands to end systemic racism endemic across US political, economic, legal, cultural and educational institutions. This series aims to expand an understanding of abolition and its ongoing practices and potential to radically transform college campuses and universities as sites of struggle. This three-part teach-in series aims to support, deepen and proliferate abolitionist organizing on post-secondary educational campuses. While we don’t have all the answers, we call on students, faculty, staff and organizers who are engaging abolition at the site of the university and beyond to join us in this discussion.

Campus after Cops: Building Abolitionist Communities
–October 15: 1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST)  | 4-6:00pm (EST)

The second teach-in addresses what we mean by genuine campus safety for all and why we demand cops off campus. Participants will elaborate how we can implement and build models of security and care that meet the basic needs of our communities and educate and organize to prevent harm and violence before it happens. This webinar will introduce transformative justice (TJ) practices and how we can invest the resources of the university to begin to repair past harms and build learning communities that hold people accountable rather than punish, penalize and disavow the root problems inherent to the hierarchical and colonial culture of the university.

Abolitionist University: Education for Liberation?
–November 12: 1-2:30pm (PST) | 3-4:30pm (CST)  | 4-6:00pm (EST)

The third teach-in elaborates our collective vision of an abolitionist university. In a settler-colonial society, how can we establish an abolitionist university and how would its purpose be radically different from how the neoliberal university functions to reproduce a carceral society, racial capitalism and US imperial hegemony? How can we take collective action to transform the university into a gathering place for decolonization and collective liberation?

Co-sponsored by Scholars for Social Justice, American Studies Association, Riverside Faculty Association and the UCFTP collective

We will have simultaneous ASL/captioning and the sessions will be recorded and captions fixed and uploaded to the ASA Freedom Course YouTube Channel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~