Category: Grad Research Spotlight

Hi Marina! To start, please give us a general overview of your dissertation project and current research.  My doctoral research focuses on exploring the strategies employed by Brazilian feminists, queer and trans politicians, and activists through social media platforms. I aim to understand how they have responded to the challenges posed by social and political…

by Talib Jabbar Migration Circuit Talib Jabbar: You’re doing a Creative/Critical dissertation project as part of the Literature program as well as a DE in CRES. How has CRES informed your project? (Note, if you’d like here you can explain what a creative/critical project is best you can).  Kiley McLaughlin: My dissertation comprises two major components: an…

Each quarter, I tell my CRES and Sociology students and my P2R mentees that I am in graduate school so I can travel the world. Even before I had the means and opportunity to do so, I considered travel to be one of my main interests. Still, it didn’t occur to me that I could translate this…

Coming of Age in South Central: Gender Ideologies, Youth Activism, and The Carceral State On September 15th, I joined Black and Brown youth activists at the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters as they rallied to continue their calls to defund the second largest school police department in the country. Earlier that summer, LAUSD voted…

Queer Convoys: American Imperial Militarism and Global Asian Cultural Production “’Terror’ talk is the new race talk—the ‘terrorist’ (or the ‘militant’ or the ‘radical’) is the twenty-first century way of saying ‘savage.’” –Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, “Left”  A maddening amount of technological and socio-cultural shifts have cast the twenty-first century in the markings of…

An interview with Jane Komori, also a CRES DE in the Department of History of Consciousness JK: You’re a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department with a Designated Emphasis in CRES. What does this interdisciplinary formation offer you that you might not have in a more traditional academic setting? CA: The interdisciplinary formations…

For the Glory of Gold and Bones: Spiritual Accumulation and Grave Theft in the Construction of the San Francisco Bay Area As U.S. settler colonial empire expanded into California during the nineteenth century, the Gold Rush brought hundreds of thousands of settlers who unleashed a brutal genocidal project of terror against Indigenous peoples [1]. From the…

Muslim Students Capture Campus Climate: A Photovoice Project For over 20 years, Muslim students at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) have fought for a prayer space/meditation room on campus. In 2017, UCSC campus administrators met with the Muslim Student Association (MSA) to understand the needs of the Muslim student community, particularly after the inauguration of the…

Settler Colonial Imaginaries and the naming of the first UC Campus   “Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama of the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last” [1] In spring of 1866, the Trustees of what would become the first public…

California Eugenics and The Making of a Liberal State California’s history of eugenics came under public scrutiny when an investigative journalist uncovered evidence that non-consensual reproductive sterilizations took place in women’s prisons as recently as 2010. My interest in the investigation was grounded in hearing similar stories of unethical medical practice within prisons while volunteering…