Center for the Study of Women

Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network (SEACRN): Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice
2017-04-28 - 2017-04-29 | Darren Starr Screening Room, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, Los Angeles, 90095
A two day symposium featuring screenings of short films and roundtable discussion.
Featured filmmakers:
Thi Nguyen Trinh (Hanoi Doclab, Vietnam), Anocha Suwichakornpong (Thailand), Nia Dinata (Kalyana Shira Films, Indonesia), Shireen Seno (Philippines)
Featured scholars:
Brian Bernards, Peter Bloom, Arnika Fuhrmann, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Mariam Lam, Philippa Lovatt, Cheng-Sim Lim, Bliss Cua Lim, Sudarat Musikawong, and Fatimah Tobing Rony

Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
2017-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Rolfe 2125
This talk focuses on the ways that feminist scholars have negotiated the complicated, conflicted, and contradictory terrain of friendship. It offers fresh perspectives on feminists’ invested, reluctant, and selective uses of the nation; reflects on how the arts contribute to conversations about feminism, dissent, resistance, and solidarity; and unpacks the details of transnational dissident friendships.
Featuring the editors of Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
Elora Halim Chowdhury
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Associate Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies Department, College of Liberal Arts Affiliate faculty, Asian Studies Department; Asian American Studies Program
Affiliated Researcher, Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
Liz Philipose
Independent Scholar
Liz Philipose is an educator whose research focuses on consciousness, the human condition in modernity, and potential catalysts for social transformation. Her interests have taken her into academic work and a tenured professorship in the fields of feminist philosophy, international politics, and cultural studies.

CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag: "Polar Environmental Discourses: Film, Politics, and Oil in the Anthropocene," Lisa Bloom
2017-04-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Rolfe 2125
Polar Environmental Discourses: Film, Politics, and Oil in the Anthropocene
Bring your lunch and join CSW Research Affiliates for a brown bag research presentation!
RSVP ONLINE
Taken from a book project titled Polar Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: Imagining Climate, Lisa Bloom brings together issues in critical climate change scholarship to examine aspects of feminist and environmentalist polar art in the work of Brenda Longfellow. Focusing on oil drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, this paper invites us to think about how conventional narratives about oil production and consumption, science, gender, and race, as well as attitudes towards nature, technology, and the wilderness are being reimagined through interactive documentaries in the early 21st century.
Lisa Bloom is the author of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the first critical book on the Arctic and Antarctic in the US written from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. Her other books include an edited anthology titled With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press,1999) and Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity. (Routledge, London, 2006). She is currently a Research Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA. Her forthcoming book is titled: Imagining Climate: Art and Visual Culture of the Polar Regions in the Anthropocene.

"Contexts of Crisis: Danger, Opportunity, and the Unknown," History Graduate Students Association Conference
2017-04-14 | Young Research Library, UCLA
Keynote Speaker: Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, Department of History, UCLA

Disability as Spectacle
2017-04-13 - 2017-04-14 | Luskin Conference Center
Keynote Addresses:
ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, Professor of English & Bioethics at Emory University

DJ KURS, Artistic Director for Deaf West Theatre

KAREN NAKAMURA, Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies and
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley

UCLA’s Disability Studies program announces a two-day conference on Disability as Spectacle (April 13-14, 2017). Disability’s representation in current popular culture, academic discourse, and political rhetoric raises important questions about how disability is depicted and which disabilities are excluded or rendered invisible in this new cultural landscape. How does our current moment’s heightened awareness of disability produce benefits and/or disadvantages in other social, political, or economic spheres? The conference theme encourages scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists to think critically about disability’s representations and invites them to share ideas about the future of disability rights and Disability Studies as this historically marginalized community continues to make advances in mainstream culture.
This conference aims to stimulate a discussion around how society constructs, reacts, and embraces or rejects visible and invisible disabilities in the public sphere. As representations change in popular and political culture, scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists will need to confront a changing milieu in which (some) disabilities are de-stigmatized while others are prevented from participation.
The film and television industry’s role in disability’s changing status makes Los Angeles an ideal location to reflect upon disability as spectacle.

Scope Lab Workshops
2017-04-10 17:30 - 2017-06-05 19:30 | 3261A Broad Art Center, UCLA, UCLA, Los Angeles
Scope Lab is a workshop series focused on exploring code as a creative medium with which to understand and represent diverse perspectives. These studies are framed by the questions: “Whose perspectives are represented?”, “Who has access to the tools to learn and express themselves?”, and “How do we design tools and projects that are more inclusive?”. Each workshop will consist of hands-on programming exercises, a lecture and discussion, and projects developed collaboratively. We will be using a software platform called p5.js, which is an open source JavaScript framework that makes creating visual media with code on the web accessible to artists, designers, educators, and beginners. For questions or to sign up, please write to scopelab@p5js.org.

WHO IS SCOPE LAB?
Scope lab workshops are free and open for all UCLA students. Workshops may be attended on a drop-in basis, but we do encourage students to come to the entire series. No prior coding knowledge is necessary, all levels of experience are welcomed and encouraged.
Scope Lab is led by Lauren McCarthy, Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts Department and Miriam Posner, Director of the Digital Humanities Program, with Graduate Researchers Stalgia Grigg and Christina Yglesias. Collaborating groups and departments include UCLA Computer Science, VoidLab (a feminist student collective in the Design Media Arts Department), UCLA Arts Software Studio, and the NYU Ability Project.

The workshops will occur biweekly on Monday evenings, from 5:30-7:30pm at the Broad Art Center, room 3261A (New Mars).
April 10 | Uncertainty and Experimental Data Visualisation
Miriam Posner (Digital Humanities) and Lauren McCarthy (Design Media Arts)
April 24 | Experimental Language Design
Alessandro Warth (Computer Science)
May 8 | Feminist Artistic Strategies in Online Spaces
VoidLab
May 22 | Multiperspectival Experimental Data Visualisation
Miriam Posner (Digital Humanities) and Lauren McCarthy (Design Media Arts)
June 5 | Designing for Accessibility and Disability
Claire Kearney-Volpe (NYU Ability Project)

FURTHER READING
Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Feminist Data Visualization
Shaka McGlotten, Black Data
Johanna Drucker, 3DH Visualizations
Johanna Drucker, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display
Mimi Onuoha, Missing Data Sets
Mushon Zer-Aviv, If Everything is a Network, Nothing is a Network
Melissa Gregg, Inside the Data Spectacle
Kim Gallon, Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities

Scope Lab is supported by a grant from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Black Milk: Colonial Foodways and Intimate Imperialism
2017-04-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Charles E Young Research Library Conference Room
All CSW events are Fragrance-Free. Learn more about our event accessibility policy.

Part of Dishing: Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat. Video now available on YouTube!

A talk by Diana Garvin, PhD in Italian Studies, Cornell University
This talk will use original Italian and Ethiopian sources to examine breastfeeding in the colonial marketplace as a key plank in the social construction of race and racism in the colonies. Specifically, I will examine the Italian Fascist regime’s propagandistic newsreels and unpublished photographs of Ethiopian markets in Addis Ababa, Harrar, Quórum, and Asmara in relation with postcolonial oral histories and architectural studies of these spaces.
While breastfeeding represented a significant arena of political struggle over the care and nourishment of future generations in the colonies, contemporary historical studies rarely examine this practice as a primary component of imperial foodways. This stance builds on Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ assertion that food confuses physical borders between the self and racial others. My talk contributes an intersectional approach to the discipline by using breastfeeding in the marketplace to investigate the Fascist regime’s twinned seizure of food and women’s bodies, a mode of cultural erasure that bell hooks refers to as “eating the other.”
Interweaving the voices of vendors, customers, architects, and government officials in this image-based study of Ethiopian marketplaces not only helps to untangle the filmic decisions and techniques that directors used to construct race and racism through mass media, but also offers a more cohesive portrait of women’s daily lives in Italian East Africa under Fascism. Ultimately, I contend that the marketplace provided a powerful symbolic arena for forming, shaping, and perpetuating the racial thinking that defined Ethiopian and Italian people, markets, and foodways in terms of black and white.
Diana Garvin holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Cornell University. Her dissertation, “Feeding Fascism: Tabletop Politics in Italy and Italian East Africa, 1922-1945,” draws on Gender Studies, Colonial Studies, and Material Culture Studies and analyzes food as the physical evidence of power negotiations between individual women and the State in Italy and in former Italian East Africa (modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia). Garvin conducted her research at over 25 museums and archives, including the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, the Biblioteca Gastronomica, the Archivio Barilla, and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Garvin’s work has been supported by the AAUW American Fellowship (2015), the Julia Child Foundation Scholarship (2014) and the AFS Sue Samuelson Award for Foodways Scholarship (2013). Thanks to the support of the CLIR Mellon Fellowship, she spent the 2015-2016 academic year conducting research in Italy for her second project on colonial foodways and East African women’s domestic work in Italian homesteads.
Garvin’s research has been published in Critical Inquiry and the edited volumes, Doing Research To Improve Teaching And Learning, Representing Italy through Food, Communicating Italian Food, and Food and Material Culture: Proceedings of the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. In addition to her publications, Garvin directed the conference, “The Language of Food: Exploring Representations of the Culinary in Culture,” at Cornell in 2012. Prior to her graduate work at Cornell, Garvin taught at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Associazione Italo-Americana in Bologna, Italy, and at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France. In 2006, she received her A.B. in Romance Studies (Italian, French, Spanish) from Harvard University.
Her favorite Italian proverb is “O mangi questa minestra o salti dalla finestra,” – “Eat this soup or jump out the window.”

Co-sponsored by:

UCLA Division of Social Sciences
UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Food Studies Graduate Certificate Program
UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies
Iris Cantor—UCLA Women’s Health Center
UCLA Department of Italian

Kathryn Everly, "The Modern Woman Soldier and Gender Crisis during the Spanish Civil War"
2017-04-06 14:00 - 16:00 | Lydeen Library, 4302 Rolfe Hall, UCLA
Kathryn Everly is Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture at Syracuse University. She published Catalan Women Writers and Artists: Revisionist Views from a Feminist Space with Bucknell University Press in 2003 and History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel with Purdue University Press in 2010. She received the Florence Howe Award for feminist scholarship in a foreign language field awarded by the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association, as well as a research grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. She has published several book chapters and articles in various journals including Letras peninsulares, Hispanic Journal, and Catalan Review.

Words About Women Matter: Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word Contest
2017-03-08 06:00 - 20:30 | Kerckhoff Hall Art Gallery, UCLA
25 selected contestants will each have up to 5 minutes to perform original poetry or spoken word, tell a personal story, do a comedy routine, or sing an original song that relates to the theme of “women of the world — learning, laughing, resisting, renewing.” Competition open to all UCLA Students, Staff, and Faculty.
This event is open to the UCLA Community, as well as family and friends. Suggested entrance fee is $10, which includes dinner and entertainment. The audience will select the winners.
Awards: Cash prizes! First place: $75. Second and Third places: $50. All contestants will also designate an international women’s organization to share in the door proceeds.
Deadline: to enter, submit the attached for by email to Chiao-Wen Lan (chiaowen@ucla.edu) by March 2 at 11:59 PM. Contestants selected to participate will be notified by March 6 at 6 PM. Only submission per person
Sponsored by: Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health, Center for the Study of Women, UCLA International Institute, Reproductive Health Interest Group, Art & Global Health Center, and the Word on Wednesday

Sharra Vostral, "Testing Tampons: Toxic Shock Syndrome, Feminist Advocates, and Absorbency Standards"
2017-02-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Kerckhoff Hall Grand Salon, UCLA, Los Angeles
Part of CSW’s Feminism + the Senses Lecture Series
RSVP ONLINE: HTTP://WWW.CSW.UCLA.EDU/VOSTRAL
During the 1980s in the aftermath of Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS), the Centers for Disease Control recommended that women use the least absorbent tampons possible, yet manufacturers did not label boxes with reliable information. This talk examines the establishment of the Tampon Task Force, the contested “syngina” synthetic vagina lab apparatus to test tampon absorbency, and the regulation of female-specific tampon technologies. The legacy of these efforts is the standardization of absorbency ratings as well as product labeling, and evidence of the importance of feminist health activists’ involvement within policy negotiations.
Sharra Vostral is an Associate Professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, where she is affiliated with both Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies. Her research centers upon the history of technology, specifically gender, and histories of medical devices and health. Her book, Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology examines the social and technological history of sanitary napkins and tampons, and the effects of technology upon women’s experiences of menstruation. Her current research explores the 1980 health crisis of Toxic Shock Syndrome and its relationship to tampon technologies.
She received her Ph.D. in History at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed her M.A. in American Studies at St. Louis University, and earned honors in Comparative Religion at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before coming to Purdue, she was an Associate Professor in Gender & Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Supported by the Estrin Family Lecture Series Fund

CO-SPONSORS:
The Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health
The Institute for Society and Genetics
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities

Thinking Gender 2017: "Imagining Reparations"
2017-02-09 11:00 - 2017-02-10 18:30 | UCLA Faculty Center, Los Angeles, CA
Thinking Gender, Imagining Reparations
27th Annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference
February 9-10, 2017
UCLA Faculty Center

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Featuring:
“For the Texas Bama Femme: A Black Fem(me)inist Reading of Beyonce’s ‘Sorry’”
12:00 PM, February 9
California Room
Plenary address by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Respondent: Shana Redmond, UCLA

“Re-writing the World”
10:45 AM, February 10
California Room
Plenary workshop with Nalo Hopkinson
Professor of Creative Writing, UC Riverside
Award-winning author of Brown Girl in the Ring

FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAM AVAILABLE HERE
This year’s conference theme, Imagining Reparations, engages contemporary social, scholarly, and literary movements that push to reimagine and retheorize what freedom, justice, health, and care can look like. Historically, reparations have taken financial form with governments recognizing victims of perceived injustice by awarding them money. Such practices have depended on and have defined the law and dominant ideas of justice within states and empires. By contrast, marginalized groups today are reframing reparations as capable of addressing historical and ongoing abuses, evident in law itself and manifest in biological, environmental, educational, technological, institutionalized, political, and diplomatic violence. The daring to imagine new forms of reparative justice emerges from raced, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities, which inform movements that devastate the binary between theory and practice in their struggle to be whole. A broad and intersectional investment in reparations challenges the assigning of rights and privileges in the past, and it is an important tool in recasting the structures that impact our daily lives.
Thinking Gender 2017, Imagining Reparations, takes a cue from movements that conceive of violence and reparative justice intersectionally with consequences that shape and are shaped by gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, etc. We invite presentations of work from across disciplines that embodies this intersectional ethos and, in particular, envision reparations through the lens of gender and sexuality. Conference sessions will include ample time for discussion of work, emphasizing dialogue discussion, writing as important modes of conference participation, and exploring their potential as feminist, decolonial tools for learning and action. Imagining Reparations aims to create cohesion among a broad range of disciplinary engagements, theoretical stances, and practical applications by providing space for thinking together about the role of the academy in theorizing tools for collective liberation from gendered and racialized violence.
Thank you to our Event Co-Sponsors:
Division of Social Sciences
Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Division of Humanities
Critical Race Studies Program
Department of African American Studies
Disability Studies Program
Institute of American Cultures
Latin American Institute Program on Caribbean Studies
Department of English
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
Department of Comparative Literature
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies
LGBT Resource Center

Native Healing and Justice from California to Hawai'i: A Public Dialogue
2017-01-30 12:00 - 14:00 | 5391 Public Affairs, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Featured speakers:
Katherine Irwin, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Wayde Lee, Director, Kahua Ola Hou
Karen Umemoto, Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
with an introduction by Randall Akee (Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies, UCLA) and a response by Jessica Schwartz (Assistant Professor, Department of Musicology, UCLA)
This event will feature a discussion of Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto’s new book, Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies (University of California Press, 2016). Along with Wayde Lee, a Hawaiian practitioner of restorative justice practices, Irwin and Umemoto will explore schooling and poverty, gender socialization and trauma in K-12, and community responsibility and state policing in Hawai’i and elsewhere.

Insurgency at the Crossroads: A Book Talk by Aisha Finch
2017-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Anderson School Collins A201, UCLA, Los Angeles
Professor Aisha Finch, discuss her new prize-winning book, RETHINKING SLAVE REBELLION IN CUBA, with Lisa Brock, George Lipsitz and Ula Taylor—three incredibly dynamic speakers and brilliant historians who have spent much of their lives unearthing and making sense of social movements.
In Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, Aisha Finch traces the emergence of a dynamic resistance movement of slaves and free people of color in nineteenth-century Cuba. Drawing from the largely unexplored testimonies in the Cuban National Archive, this book focuses attention on the hundreds of enslaved people who forged a radical, alternative vision of freedom in Cuba’s plantation countryside. Demonstrating that black slave women and non-elite slaves were critical to shaping and organizing this movement, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba offers new ways to think about slave mobilizations, black political struggles, and histories of rebellion.
Lisa Brock is the founding director of the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College and scholar of Black internationalism and editor of and contributor to the groundbreaking book, Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution.
George Lipsitz teaches Black Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Barbara and author of a dozen books on race, social movements, urban culture, and inequality, including A Rainbow at Midnight, Footsteps in the Dark, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, A Life in the Struggle, Time Passages, and How Racism Takes Place. He is the chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
Ula Taylor teaches at UC Berkeley in African American Studies, has produced groundbreaking scholarship on the history of Black women, Black feminist praxis, and nationalism. Her books include the highly acclaimed The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey; (with J. Tarika Lewis and Mario Van Pebbles) Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film; and her forthcoming, Making a New Woman: Women and the Nation of Islam, 1930-1975.
Co-sponsored by: The Departments of African American Studies and Gender Studies

RAVE Teach-In: Resisting Violence Through Education
2016-11-30 17:00 - 19:00 | 100 Moore Hall, UCLA
Hate won. Now what? Come to the first-ever Teaching Rave organized by a group of UCLA faculty, who are committed to fighting the hate and violence of a Trump regime through a collaborative counter-movement between students, faculty, and staff on campus.
FEATURING A KEYNOTE PRESENTATION BY CHERRIE MORAGA!

Program:
Panel presentation: Professor Sarah Haley (Gender Studies) and Professor Cheryl Harris (Law School)
Keynote presentation: Cherrie Moraga, Artist in Residence, Stanford University
Open discussion with students facilitated by Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

Wednesday, November 30, 2016
5pm-7pm
100 Moore Hall

CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag: Gisèle Maynard-Tucker, "Women's Power, Sexuality, and Aging: A Multicultural View"
2016-11-30 11:30 - 13:00 | 1221 D Bunche Hall, UCLA
Bring your lunch and join CSW’s Research Affiliates for a brown bag research presentation!
Women’s Power, Sexuality, and Aging: A Multicultural View
by Gisèle Maynard-Tucker
In her research on rural Peru and urban Los Angeles, Gisèle Maynard-Tucker assesses the impact of the environment, culture, economics, and gender inequalities on the treatment of women as they age. Based on literary data, observations and other research, it seems that women acquire more respect in ethnic societies with age, while in Los Angeles aging becomes a curse because of the cult of youthfulness.
Gisèle Maynard-Tucker is a medical and applied anthropologist affiliated with the Center for the Study of Women (CSW) at UCLA since 1989. She holds a Ph. D. in anthropology from UCLA (1988) and has worked as an international consultant since the 1990s for development agencies such as WHO, USAID, World Bank, European Union, POPTECH, Development Associates, Academy for Educational Development and many others. She has conducted research and evaluation of health programs regarding family planning, reproductive health, maternal and child survival and HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa, India, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Her recent book examines women’s health in developing countries and is titled “Rural Women’s Sexuality, Reproductive Health and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development (Lexington Books, 2015).
Please RSVP online.

Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and the Fifth Taste Sensation, Umami
2016-11-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
Part of Dishing: Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat. Video now available on YouTube!

A talk by Sarah Tracy, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics

RSVP online!
In this talk, Sarah Tracy will discuss the material and immaterial dimensions of pleasure, pain, guilt, and regret around eating processed and prepared foods. She does so through the case study of self-identified MSG sensitivity – as archived in official FDA reporting channels and in online community forums, e.g. blogs, consumer advocacy groups, Reddit. These questions are in reference to broader discussions of the gendered moral economies of food provision and preparation, and that casual privilege called eating/dining out. Who’s worrying about what to eat – and how “good” it is? Going down? Going through? Coming out? These and other abiding concerns are a kind of emotional labor that has, historically, been feminized in the U.S.
Sarah Tracy is an historian of the recent past, and of the United States in the world. Her work draws on feminist science and technology studies (STS), food studies, post-colonial theory, sensory history, and critical histories of capitalism.
Tracy’s dissertation is called, “Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and Umami, the Fifth Taste Sensation,” and it examines two interrelated objects: the global commodity and flavour enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), and umami (roughly translated from the Japanese as “delicious”), the fifth basic taste that MSG is understood to confer. This project situates umami within translations of the life sciences between Japan and the United States, and shows how the metabolics of taste are inseparable from global capitalisms. It brings feminist STS into conversation with sensory history, cultural history, and post-colonial studies to foster cross-disciplinary insight into how foods mediate value, health, class, race, happiness, and violation.
Tracy maps how MSG explodes our categories of food, drug, and toxin. She trace the additive’s journey from Japan and across the globe and analyzes how it has been fetishized, racialized, and vilified. Tracy considers MSG as a focus point for connecting questions of authenticity and risk in foods; for connecting the state of knowledge in sensory science, neuroscience, and food design and marketing; and for thinking about how our food systems organize not only ways of being human (class, ethnicity, region), but the ways of being of creatures large and small (e.g. the laboratory mice in safety and cancer testing, the farmed bacteria who produce the glutamic acid we eat when we eat MSG).
Tracy’s research has been published in Global Food History, and is forthcoming in Radical History Review.

Specters of the Past: M. NourbeSe Philip Reading "Zong! As Told to the Author by Sataey Adumu Boateng"
2016-11-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet and writer and lawyer who was born in Tobago and lives in Toronto. She has published novels, essays, and poetry, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry and a Rebels for a Cause award from the Elizabeth Fry Society of Toronto. Zong! is NourbeSe Philip’s most recent book of poetry. This extended poetry cycle is based on a legal decision, at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the murder of Africans on board a slave ship.
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

Aurora Levins Morales, "Justice is Our Medicine: Ecology, Disability and Health"
2016-11-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Cypress Room, Faculty Center
Aurora Levins Morales describes herself as “a writer, an artist, a historian, a teacher and a mentor. I’m also an activist, a healer, a revolutionary. I tell stories with medicinal powers. Herbalists who collect wild plants to make medicine call it wildcrafting. I wildcraft the details of the world, of history, of people’s lives, and concentrate them through art in order to shift consciousness, to change how we think about ourselves, each other and the world. ”
She is the author of numerous books and essays, including a chapter in the foundational volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and, most recently Kindling: New Writings on the Body and Cosecha and Other Stories (co-authored with her mother, Rosario Morales).
In response to chronic illness and disability, Morales designed the Vehicle for Change, an ecological, sustainable, non-toxic home, built inside a 32 foot aluminum gooseneck trailer. She says: “My traveling studio home is more than transportation and shelter. It also embodies possibility and innovation. It’s a manifestation of hope, a solid, three-dimensional expression of what I write about. As I move around the country and beyond, the fact of this vehicle, and the need for it, will underline and expand my words, to help me talk about what we’re facing as a planet, and how to face it.”
Join us for a talk by Aurora Levins Morales, with discussion led by Robin Kelley.
This talk is part of “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice.” Each of the six speakers in this series is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health, social inequity, race, gender, and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work, and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice, in the fields of law, healthcare, or social services, in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social, health, or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Rapair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization, The UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.

Ruha Benjamin: "The Emperor's New Genes: Science, Race, Justice, and the Allure of Objectivity
2016-10-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
In this talk, Ruha Benjamin discusses advances in genomic science and explores questions of racial difference, scientific objectivity, medical trustworthiness, and social justice. Drawing upon developments in Mexico, South Africa, India, and the United States, she illustrates how political and scientific claims are connected in the day to day struggle of groups demanding rights and redress. Finally, she argues for a shift in focus away from individuals’ “trust” in biomedical research to the relative “trustworthiness” of institutions, as a starting point for developing science for the public good.
This talk is part of “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice.” Each of the six speakers in this series is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health, social inequity, race, gender, and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work, and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice, in the fields of law, healthcare, or social services, in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social, health, or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Repair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization, The UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and the The UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.

Andrea C. Gore, "Environmental Endocrine Disruption of Reproduction, the Brain, and Behavior"
2016-10-27 12:00 - 13:00 | Community Health Sciences 43-105, UCLA, Los Angeles
The chemical revolution that began during World War II transformed our world. While our lives are undoubtedly improved in many ways, we now know that a subset of chemicals, called environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), have detrimental effects on the health of humans and wildlife. EDCs include some pesticides, industrial chemicals, and components of plastics and food contact containers, and we come into contact with EDCs every day. Higher body burdens of EDCs in humans are associated with greater risk for endocrine and neurological disorders. Andrea Gore’s laboratory is using a rat model of low-dose EDC exposure, and ascertaining the consequences on neuroendocrine and reproductive functions and behaviors. They have discovered that prenatal EDCs “reprogram” genes and proteins in the developing neuroendocrine system, and that these molecular and cellular changes are associated with an impaired neurobehavioral phenotype. Importantly, the effects of EDCs are manifested very differently in males and females, a result that is consistent with sex differences in hormone actions in the nervous system. Current EDC research is beginning to identify vulnerable neuroendocrine targets, with the potential for future therapeutic interventions.

Dr. Andrea Gore is Professor and Vacek Chair in Pharmacology at UT-Austin. Her NIH- funded research projects are investigating how environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) perturb the developing brain, and effects of estrogen on the aging brain as a model for menopause in women. Dr. Gore has published 4 books and 140 scientific papers. She is Chair of UT-Austin’s Faculty Council, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Endocrine Society’s flagship basic science journal, Endocrinology. Dr. Gore was lead author of the Society’s two Scientific Statements on EDCs, and organized and chaired the Gordon Research Conference on EDCs in 2012. In 2016, she was a recipient of the Endocrine Society’s Outstanding Public Service Award.
Andrea Gore and David Crews: Living in a Contaminated World

Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster
2016-10-26 12:30 - 15:00 | Ackerman Grand Ballroom, UCLA, Los Angeles
Part of Dishing: A Lecture Series on Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat. Video now available on YouTube!

A talk by Rachel Vaughn, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies

Join us after the talk for the Fighting Hunger Fair — your chance to meet UCLA and community groups and researchers working to eliminate hunger and waste.
Rachel Vaughn holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. From 2011- 2012, she was a Fellow in Gender Studies at Oklahoma State University; and was then Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her research engages the intersections of food politics, food sovereignty, and feminist environmental theory. By way of her oral history research with scavengers, foragers, and dumpster divers of varying food security levels and socio-economic backgrounds, she explores how the space of the dumpster and the act of diving work as alternative forms of cultural knowledge about food. Her work asks how the labels ‘real,’ or by default ‘un-real’, ‘edible’ or ‘inedible’ effect people of varying food (in)securities within the current food systems we consume. Vaughn is the author of a book in progress Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster (under review with University of Nebraska Press).
RSVP HERE!
Co-sponsored by UCLA Division of Social Sciences, UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative, UCLA Department of History, and UCLA Food Studies Graduate Certificate Program

Black Feminist Vision: A Symposium on Possibility and Practice
2016-10-20 16:00 - 2016-10-21 17:30 | Kerckhoff Hall Grand Salon, UCLA, Los Angeles
A two-day symposium on Thursday, October 20 and Friday, October 21 presented by the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California. Featuring some of the most important established and rising stars working in the field of Black feminism, this symposium is centrally organized around questions of feminism and race.
Please register HERE for each day you plan to attend.
Day 1: Thursday, October 20, 2016, 4pm
Opening Keynote: Barbara Ransby
Barbara Ransby, Professor of African American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Struggle: A Radical Democratic Vision and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Keynote Introduction by Dayo F. Gore, Associate Professor of Critical Gender Studies & Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego.

Day 2: Friday, October 21, 2016, 10am-4pm
Conversations on Black Feminist Vision
Kimberly Juanita Brown, English, Mount Holyoke College
Simone Browne, Sociology/African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas-Austin
Marcia Chatelain, History, Georgetown University
Erica Edwards, English, UC Riverside
Tanisha Ford, Black American Studies and History, University of Delaware
Kara Keeling, Cinematic Studies/American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California
C. Riley Snorton, Africana Studies, Cornell University
Ula Taylor, African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Lisa Ze Winters, English/African American Studies, Wayne State University
Day 2: Friday, October 21, 2016, 4pm
Closing Keynote: Katherine McKittrick
Katherine McKittrick is Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queens University and author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle. She is editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis and co-editor (with Clyde Woods) of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Keynote Introduction by Arlene Keizer, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and African American Studies, UC Irvine.
REGISTER ONLINE!

Fear: UCLA French and Francophone Studies 2016 Graduate Conference
2016-10-20 08:00 - 2016-10-21 17:00 | 306 and 314 Royce Hall, UCLA
Discourses of fear dominate our contemporary moment. In this so-called “Age of Terrorism,” fear knows no borders, spreads quickly, and provokes the fearful to react in unpredictable ways. Politicians lash out and make shows of strength; citizens march en masse while immigrant families take flight; journalists proclaim “même pas peur!” while young people turn to newer forms of media to express their disillusionment and reshape pervasive stereotypes. At the same time, the causes—or perceived causes—of fear can be as varied as these reactions. Though opinion polls might define fear in terms of “terrorism,” “immigration,” or “globalization,” these kinds of categories often obfuscate and conflate more than they clarify.
In the face of repressive regimes from Indochina to Vichy France, from Haiti to Cameroon, dissidents could face severe, or even lethal, punishment. How does the fear of denunciation give rise to coded writings that criticize and subvert the status quo? In and beyond these contexts, how does fear cloud reason or induce clarity? Can it also have positive, not simply negative, effects? When is fear “natural” and when is it not? Who plays a role in shaping these perceptions? How and by whom is it incited and manipulated, diverted and channeled, coped with, suppressed and overcome? To what end? The 21st Annual Graduate Student Conference of the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, seeks to explore the reverberations of fear in French and Francophone literatures, languages, arts, cultures, and histories across time periods and disciplines. We understand fear to include empirical and conceptual engagements with the notions of terror, horror, panic, and phobia. We are interested in how these may be connected to creative endeavor, literary and artistic movements, political and economic gain, and aesthetic and cultural transformations. Our aim is to address concerns of importance to scholars in literature, history, film and media studies, art history, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and philosophy.
Keynote speaker: Tracy D. Sharpling-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of Humanities (African American Diaspora Studies and French), Vanderbilt University
Sharpley-Whiting has published 14 scholarly books; her most recent, Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris Between the Two World Wars and The Autobiography of Ada “Bricktop” Smith, or Miss Baker Regrets (SUNY Press, February 2015), consists of two-parts, a nonfiction multi-life history followed by a noirmystery. The book was an American Library in Paris Book Award Long List selection and a Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently at-work on a scholarly volume, A Quartet in Four French Movements: A Voodoo Queen, A French Romantic, a Poet, and an African Ethnologist, as well as a family history. She is on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2014-2018) and is the editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.

The Poetics of Fragility: a Film Screening and Discussion with Lata Mani
2016-10-19 18:30 - 21:00 | Charles E Young Research Library Conference Room
A film screening and conversation.
Lata Mani is a feminist historian, cultural critic, contemplative writer and filmmaker. She has published on a broad range of issues, from feminism and colonialism, to illness, spiritual philosophy and contemporary politics. She is most recently the author of The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present (2013).
Nicolás Grandi is a Buenos Aires based filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist and educator. He has taught film direction and the history of world cinema at the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires, and in the Film Department at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
The Poetics of Fragility explores the texture, vitality and aesthetics of fragility. It interweaves stories of bodily frailty with optical vignettes of nature’s delicacy to reclaim fragility as intrinsic to existence, not something to be bemoaned or overcome.
Shot in the San Francisco Bay Area in September 2015, the film features internationally renowned scholar-activist Angela Davis, the acclaimed playwright and critic Cherrie Moraga, Nora Cortiñas, the inspiring founding member of Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, actor-dancer Greg Manalo, feminist performance artists Thao P. Nguyen and Martha Rynberg, theater scholar Jisha Menon, healer Christopher Miles, creative writer Xochitl M. Perales and the young trombone talent, Jasim Perales.
The Poetics of Fragility is conceived as a “videocontemplation;” a form that Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani have been developing to explore how the audiovisual medium with its sensuous possibilities can become a tool for social inquiry with a philosophical impulse. The visually arresting and formally plural film unfolds through stories that build on and amplify each other. Moments of emotional intensity alternate with speculative calm, dramatic narration with poetry and critical inquiry into prevailing understandings of fragility.

Christina Sharpe, "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being"
2016-10-13 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 193, UCLA
Christina Sharpe is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University and the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subject. Her research interests are in black visual culture, black diaspora studies, and feminist epistemologies, with a particular emphasis on black female subjectivity and black women artists.
This talk will draw from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake”—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather,” Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Women's Reproductive Health and the Environment
2016-06-21 08:00 - 14:00 | The California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda Sreet, Los Angeles, CA, 90012, United States
Advocacy Through Education
Women’s Reproductive Health and the Environment: Best Practices for Los Angeles County
A free symposium that will bring together health professionals, community activists, researchers, academicians, civic and business leaders, politicians, and government officials to learn about best practices related to research, policy, and community advocacy.
Plenary Session
Update on the Hidden Reproductive Health Hazards of Environmental Toxins
Symposium Topics

What’s New in Policy for 2016?
Grassroots Advocacy: Community-Based Preconception Program: Planning for a Healthy Home, Body, and Baby
Applying Research into Action: Using Data to Investigate Health Effects of Environmental Toxins

Chinyere Oparah
2016-05-25 13:30 - 15:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
Birth Matters: Research Justice and Black Life
African American women are 3 to 4 times as likely as white women to die of childbirth related causes, our infants are twice as likely not to survive their first year. “Birthing while black” is a site of struggle, which for too many leads to disabling, trauma or even death. Birth matters in conversations about black life and death, yet the reproductive autonomy of black women and trans/gender nonconforming pregnant and birthing individuals has only recently gained recognition with the #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName movements. Research justice is a strategic framework within which those directly affected by structural violence and discrimination use research tools in order to achieve self determination and lasting social change. Using a research justice approach, Oparah worked alongside members of Oakland-based collective Black Women Birthing Justice to document black women’s experiences of childbirth, and to publish an anthology of critical essays and activist and personal testimonies on black bodies and birth justice. In this talk, she explores the role of activist scholars in the movement to #LiberateBlackBirth.
Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation, race and adoption, research justice and birth activism. Her work is informed by personal experiences of crossing racial, gendered and national boundaries as a biracial, transracial/ transnational adoptee, survivor of intimate violence and queer parent with ties to Britain, Nigeria and the U.S.
Oparah is Associate Provost and professor and department chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She played a leading role in the establishment of Mills’ Queer Studies Program and sits on the Advisory Committee for that program. She recently led the College’s Gender Expression and Identity initiative, leading to the production of an important report on improving the experiences of transgender and gender-fluid students at Mills.
Oparah was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in Sex, Race and Globalization in 2002, and held the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Diversity at the University of Toronto from 2004-6. Educated at Cambridge University and Warwick University, she has graduate degrees in Sociology and Ethnic Studies. In addition, Oparah trained in community development. Prior to entering academia, she coordinated a black women’s center in the UK, and was executive director of a national development agency for non-profits serving communities of color.
Oparah is author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement on Britain. She is editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of 3 books: Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism and Social Change, Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology. and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption.
She is working with the grassroots community organization Black Women Birthing Justice on a participatory action research project about black women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, and editing an anthology on black women in the birth justice movement. In her spare time she practices mindfulness meditation and vinyasa yoga, sings along to gospel music, hangs out with toddlers and is learning horse-riding. Oparah has Nigerian (Igbo) and British origins, and immigrated to the US in 1995. She lives in East Oakland with her partner and daughter.
Each of the six speakers in this series, “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice,” is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health. social inequity. race. gender. and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work. and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice. in the fields of law. healthcare. or social services. in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social. health. or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Repair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization and the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies. and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.
Organized by: UCLA Department of Gender Studies
Cosponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and UCLA American Indian Studies Center

Racialized State Violence in Global Perspective
2016-05-25 - 2016-05-26 | Royce 306 & 314 and Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium of the Fowler Museum
RSVP! eventsrsvp.ucla.edu/RacializedViolence
Conference schedule now available! Download here or view online!
Questions? Email: rsv@csw.ucla.edu

The conference brings together scholars who work on racialized police violence in North America with others who work in Brazil, Central America, the UK, the Caribbean, and elsewhere to consider questions of pressing global importance including economic inequality, state power, racism and indigeneity, legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and gendered violence. Featuring intellectuals in the social sciences, humanities, and arts, the symposium not only analyzes racialized state violence but also engages possibilities for justice.

“Living With Certain Uncertainty: Violence, Exile, and Black Life”
KEYNOTE by EDWIDGE DANTICAT

May 25, 6 pm, Lenart Auditorium, Fowler Museum
The extraordinary novelist and public intellectual Edwidge Danticat (left) will deliver the conference’s keynote lecture on Wednesday evening May 25th, with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, associate professor, Department of History, UCLA, as respondent. Danticat is an award-winning author of short stories and novels that often engage with the history of her native Haiti. She also writes about the immigrant experience—what she calls “dyaspora”—and the reality of life in Haiti today. Her works include Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1996); Claire of the Sea Light (2013); Mama’s Nightingale (2015); and Untwine (2015). She wrote and narrated the film Girl Rising (Haiti) in 2013. In 2007, she received a National Book Award nomination for Brother, I’m Dying. She was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for Claire of the Sea Light in 2014.
PANELS and ROUNDTABLE: May 26, 9 am to 5:30. Royce 314
On Thursday, May 26th, we will hold two panels of speakers and a lunch scholar-activist roundtable on policing in Los Angeles.

SPEAKERS
Melina Abdullah, Professor and Chair, Pan-African Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, is a womanist scholar-activist – recognizing that the role that she plays in the academy is intrinsically linked to broader struggles for the liberation of oppressed people. Her research interests include activism and movement building and Critical Race Theory. Abdullah was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 2014 and is a member of the California State University Chancellor’s Taskforce for the Advancement of Ethnic Studies. She is currently writing a book manuscript that examines Hip Hop and political mobilization.
Mohan Ambikaipaker, Assistant Professor, Communications, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, is a social anthropologist and cultural studies scholar who studies the dynamics of multiracial societies. His research aims to examine the shifting configurations of racism and racial structures that go beyond bipolar frameworks of analysis. He is the co-author (with Robert Berkeley and Omar Khan) of What’s New about New Immigrants in 21st Century Britain? (Runnymede Trust/Joseph Rowntree, 2006).
Aisha Beliso-de Jesus, Associate Professor, African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School, is a cultural and social anthropologist. She has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States since 2003. Her book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015) details the transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and actively reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Her current research, “Policing African Diaspora Religions,” draws on ethnographic research with police and religious practitioners in the United States exploring questions of race, religion, and policing.
Maurice Magaña, Lecturer, Chicano/a Studies, UCLA, researches youth activism and social movements in Mexico and the United States. He received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Oregon in 2013 and was the Institute of American Cultures Visiting Researcher in Chicano Studies in 2013-14. His dissertation, Youth in Movement: the Cultural Politics of Autonomous Youth Activism in Southern Mexico, was named as one of the “50 Best Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology of 2013”.
Ana Muñiz, Criminology, Law, and Society, UC Irvine, does research on gang injunctions, social control, state violence and surveillance, militarization, and race. She is the author of Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries (Rutgers University Press, 2015) which examines how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered “dangerous” and how they should be policed in Los Angeles.
Laurence Ralph, Associate Professor, African & African American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University, researches how the historical circumstances of police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade naturalize disease, disability, and premature death for urban residents, who are often seen as expendable. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Audra Simpson, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University, is energized by the problem of recognition, by its passage beyond (and below) the aegis of the state into the grounded field of political self-designation, self-description, and subjectivity. Her work is motivated by the struggle of Kahnawake Mohawks to find the proper way to afford political recognition to each other, their struggle to do this, and the challenges of formulating membership against a history of colonial impositions. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) and co-editor with Andrea Smith of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014).
Christen Smith, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin, does research in the areas of performance, race, gender, violence and the black body in the Americas with a particular emphasis on transnational black liberation struggles and racial formation. Her book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016) explores the visual and performatic economies of the Black body in pain as an ironic transfer point for the production of Brazil’s racial state.
Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of American Indian Studies and Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico, and her research and teaching interests include indigenous politics, legal anthropology, human rights, neoliberalism, gender and feminist theory, indigenous migration, and activist research. She has published five books and edited volumes, including Rights in Rebellion: Human Rights and Indigenous Struggle in Chiapas, Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Moral Engagements, and Cultural Contentions, and Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. She serves on the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and as co-chair of the Otros Saberes/Other Knowledges section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and on the editorial board of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. In 2013, she was awarded the Chickasaw Nation’s Dynamic Woman of the Year, and in 2014 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the State Bar of Texas Indian Law Section.

Rinaldo Walcott, is Professor and Director of the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. As an interdisciplinary scholar Rinaldo has published on music, literature, film and theater and policy among other topics. All of Rinaldo’s research is founded in a philosophical orientation that is concerned with the ways in which coloniality shapes human relations across social and cultural time. Rinaldo is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003); he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000); and the Co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counseling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010). In all of Rinaldo’s research and publication he focuses on Black cultural politics; histories of colonialism in the Americas, multiculturalism, citizenship, and diaspora; gender and sexuality; and social, cultural and public policy

RESPONDENTS
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA, does research on twentieth-century U.S. history with a concentration on race, migration, and police and prison systems in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her book, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) is the first book to tell the story of how and why the U.S. Border Patrol concentrates its resources upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration despite the many possible targets and strategies of U.S. migration control. Her current research explores the social world of incarceration in Los Angeles between 1876 and 1965.
Saree Makdisi, Professor, Department of English, UCLA, does research at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. His recent books include Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010) and Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Sarah Haley, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, UCLA, does research on African American history, critical prison studies, social movements and labor studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies from 2010-2011. She is author of the book No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
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Organized by Hannah Appel, Jessica Cattelino, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and Jemima Pierre
Cosponsored by Alessandro Duranti, Dean, UCLA Division of Social Sciences; David Schaberg, Dean, UCLA Division of Humanities; UCLA Center for the Study of Women; Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs; Robin D.G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History; Eric Avila, Associate Dean, UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; UCLA African Studies Center; UCLA American Indian Studies Center; Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA; UCLA Department of Gender Studies; Disability Studies at UCLA; UCLA International Institute; and UCLA Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies.
Photo credits: Black Lives Matter march, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 31, 2015, Fibonacci Blue, https://www.flickr.com/photos/fibonacciblue/; Photo of E. Dandicat courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Black Feminism, The Carceral State, and Abolition
2016-05-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
A Book Talk by Sarah Haley with responses by Mariame Kaba and Dayo Gore
Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity illuminates black women’s experiences of imprisonment in the South to uncover how gendered regimes of incarceration were crucial to the making of Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here examines the brutalization of imprisoned women in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also situating them within the black radical tradition by illuminating practices of resistance, refusal, and sabotage that challenged ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy, offering alternative conceptions of social and political life and envisioning a world beyond prisons.
Sarah Haley is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies.
Mariame Kaba is a public scholar and organizer, and the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a long-term vision of ending youth incarceration.
Dayo F. Gore is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and the founder and co-director of the Black Studies Project (BSP@UCSD). She is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War.
Cosponsored by Center for the Study of Women

Ungrid-able Ecologies: Cultivating the Arts of Attention in a 10,000 Year-Old Happening
2016-05-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
In “Ungrid-able Ecologies,” Natasha Myers will explore what can a queer, feminist, decolonized ecology can reveal about the relationships that develop between species.
Ecology is not just an object of study. It is also a mode of attention to worldly relations. Where the sciences of ecology have traditionally been grounded in teleological, militarized and economizing logics, and bound to heteronormative reproductive imperatives, this talk insists that ecology could be otherwise. It describes my efforts to cultivate a queer, feminist, decolonized ecology within an ancient oak savannah in Toronto’s High Park, a site 10,000 years in-the-making. For millennia these lands were shaped by Aboriginal peoples who used fire to keep the woodlands open for hunting and farming. Today, it is a site of massive ecological restoration efforts in the midst of a bustling city. The aim is to bring back the oak savannah through the use of controlled burns, and the planting of native grasses and wildflowers. But today the oldest oaks are falling and the next generation is just 15 years old.
Kinesthetic images by Ayelen Liberona with Natasha Myers
What modes of attention can help us learn how to pay attention to this remarkable naturalcultural happening which is both in-the-making and coming undone? Working at the cusp of anthropology, art, and ecology, this project interrogates the self-evidence of approaches to conservation ecology and environmental monitoring by throwing open the very question of what it means to pay attention. It proposes an “ungrid-able ecology” to disrupt conventional ecology’s normative, moralizing, and economizing discourses. This ecological practice reconfigures the naturalist’s notebook by innovating techniques for tuning in to the “affective ecologies” and the “involutionary momentum” that propel plants, insects, animals, and people to get involved in one another’s lives (see Hustak and Myers 2012). Through an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona, this research-creation project experiments with sensory practices that can document the growth, decay, combustion and decomposition that are essential to the life of this remarkable land. In the process, we explore new forms of collaboration to cultivate plant/people relations that are fit for earthly survival.

Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, a member of Sensorium, and on the editorial board of Catalyst. She works alongside Michelle Murphy as co-organizer of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and is co-founder of the Write2Know Project with Max Liboiron. Her ethnographic research examines forms of life in the contemporary arts, sciences and ecologies. Her book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. In her new work, she is experimenting with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species affinities.
Support provided by Estrin Family Lecture Series Fund
Cosponsored by the Institute for Society and Genetics
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/natasha-myers-tickets-23195678900
