2022-2023 Archive
For the 2022-2023 academic year, the department focused on the following types of hybrid gatherings: those in which we shared our own research and with invited Alumni and Visiting Scholars.
Sanley Abila on "Minding seafarers: Filipino seafarers, mental health and mental health education"
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
Location: RCC 301 + Zoom (registration)A hybrid talk with Visiting Scholar Sanley S. Abila hosted by Associate Professor of Sociology Steve McKay.
"Minding seafarers: Filipino seafarers, mental health and mental health education" - is a broad review of the intersections of international labor migration and mental health research. It focuses on the labor niche of Filipino seafarers within the international seafaring labor market, the negative mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on seafarers, and the potentials of mental health education in supporting the development of psychological resilience programs for seafarers.
Sanley S. Abila is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Professional Education, University of the Philippines Visayas. He completed a PhD in sociology from Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales with support from the Seafarers International Research Center and Nippon Foundation Fellowship. Recently, he collaborated with researchers from Sweden and England on a pilot study funded by the Lloyd's Register Foundation. The study examined the psychosocial interventions provided to international seafarers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sanley has been doing research on the intersections of labor migration, education, regulations, gender and mental health by focusing mostly on merchant seafarers.
Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean - CANCELLED DUE TO STRIKE, learn more.
Monday, November 28, 2022
Time: 2:00-4:00pm
Location: Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom (registration TBD)
Celebrate the launch of Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne's new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. In Contesting Race and Citizenship, I focus on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. This book opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. I trace not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.
The open-access ebook version can be downloaded at: https://d119vjm4apzmdm.
cloudfront.net/open-access/ pdfs/9781501762307.pdf Learn more in the campus news article: New book explores citizenship rights and Black anti-racist politics in Italy
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of the 2021 volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy, and she was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Society Humanities Award in 2021.
Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, History of Art and Visual Culture, Sociology, and the Science & Justice Research Center.
Theresa Hice-Fromille on Subversive Strategies in the African Diaspora and Community-Based Curricula
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Time: 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location: RCC 301 + ZoomThis talk addresses the processes of teaching and learning as conceptualized within the geography of the African diaspora. I focus on three interlocking subversive curricular techniques employed by Black women who direct and Black girls who participate in an educational community organization based in Baltimore, MD. From Baltimore to Cuba, and in such diverse places as public libraries, defunct plantations, City Hall, palenques, and a church basement, girls and leaders engaged healing rituals, investigated diasporic histories, and developed innovative strategies to leverage their travel experiences for the benefit of their community. My findings reveal the significance of gendered relations within teaching and learning processes and provoke my conceptualization of mothering as a diasporic praxis that is observable in educational curricula. This study extends important analyses of subversive Black educational practices and demonstrates the unique ways that Black women and girls contribute to the global circulation of cultural productions.
Theresa Hice-Fromille is a PhD candidate in Sociology with designated emphases in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, conducted in collaboration with two community-based organizations that enable youth to travel abroad, examines the ways that Black women and girls’ shape the global Black imaginary.
Brandi Summers on "Echoes of a Chocolate City: Race, Aesthetics and Speculative Black Urbanism"
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
Location: RCC 301 + Zoom (registration)Reading America’s present through its past brings up a sense of déjà-vu, especially if we pause and reflect on the events of the past couple of years. Urban problems are at the heart of what we are seeing in the world today. Especially since 2020, when an interracial coalition of people organized demonstrations in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans by police officers, it has been difficult to ignore how the events of the present-day echo a time in the 1960s, when a wave of urban race rebellions, led by Black Americans, gripped the United States. Feelings of cyclical loss and anxiety about unrelenting state violence, uneven development, and physical and cultural displacement are currently exacerbated by processes of gentrification. So, what does it mean for Black people to have the same experience over and over again? What does it mean for Black people to live through constant cycles of movement, containment, dispossession, and erasure? How can we imagine various forms of displacement and emplacement alongside the mechanisms (policies) that attempt to keep Black people in place?
Brandi T. Summers, Phd is an associate professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, alum of Sociology@UC Santa Cruz, and author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019). Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her current research includes a book project that examines representations and experiences of space, place, and landscape in her hometown, Oakland, CA; and “The Archive of Urban Futures,” a multi-modal archival project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, that focuses on questions of history, value, the right to place, memory, and erasure in Black Oakland. Dr. Summers has published several articles that appear in both scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston Globe, Antipode, and Places Journal.
Recommended Reading: Summers. "Untimely Futures" Places Journal (2021).
Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean
Monday, May 22, 2023
Time: 1:00-3:00pm
Location: Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom (registration)Celebrate the launch of Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne's new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Contesting Race and Citizenship explores the politics of Blackness and citizenship in Italy. It examines the ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency. The book represents one of the first ever in-depth studies of Black Italian political mobilizations in Italy. Associate Professor Marisol LeBrón (feminist studies) will provide a welcome, Graduate Student Theresa Hice-Fromille (sociology) will provide introductions, and Associate Professors Debbie Gould (sociology) and Savannah Shange (anthropology) will serve as discussants.
More information can be found at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501762291/contesting-race-and-citizenship/.
The open-access ebook version can be downloaded at: https://d119vjm4apzmdm.
cloudfront.net/open-access/ pdfs/9781501762307.pdf Learn more in the campus news article: New book explores citizenship rights and Black anti-racist politics in Italy
Camilla Hawthorne (she/they) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Legal Studies Program, and the new Visualizing Abolition Certificate Program, and co-founded the UCSC Black Geographies Lab. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the volumes The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Co-Sponsored by the departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, the History of Art of Visual Cultures’ Visual Media Cultures Colloquium series, and the Science & Justice Research Center.
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