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
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Sep 24: Native American Pedagogies in Remote Teaching

Sep 24: Native American Pedagogies in Remote Teaching

by Emily Hue Events

Native American Pedagogies in Remote Teaching: An Initial Discussion led by Prof. Wesley Leonard

Thursday, September 24 at 2:30pm to 4:00pm

More info

Please join the Reclamation and Native American Communities Faculty Commons for an informal discussion on implementing Native American and other Indigenous pedagogies in the current context of remote teaching. Through a series of informal presentations and discussion, we will consider how we can beneficially draw from Indigenous educational traditions in how we design and teach our courses. The final part of the session will turn to a discussion of ideas for a possible 2020-2021 series of events on this topic.

Indigenous pedagogies might be defined as those that emerge from and center the peoplehood, cultures, values, and intellectual traditions of Indigenous communities in relation to the particular places those communities come from. Though pedagogical methods vary across Native American and other Indigenous communities, common are approaches that focus on the whole individual in relational contexts and on the related idea that knowledge is produced and interpreted in the context of relationships. Specific examples of Indigenous pedagogies include teaching through storytelling and through engagement with land.

Registration required:  https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUocO2hrjsiG9SJepFFuHMRAH3OhKte_

June 16: Tranformative Justice Book Discussion

June 16: Tranformative Justice Book Discussion

by Emily Hue Events

Join ETST’s Critical Antiiviolence Research and Action for its monthly Transformative Justice book discussion, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom

June 16, 5-6:30pm pt.

Register here:https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIlfuqqqjoiH9PDzQ91a75Kt34Ip7sRr-VH

If you would like to be on CARA’s listserv to receive information on events, email CARA at criticalantviolence@gmail.com