Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative

Native / Immigrant / Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative

Background image: Ocean currents

Who is a “native,” who is an “immigrant,” and who is a “refugee”? Refugees, immigrants, and indigenous peoples are typically constructed as separate categories within nation-states, and thus may be studied in relation to white “natives,” but rarely in relation to one another. Immigrants, indigenous people and refugees are conventionally imagined as communities with little in common. This collaborative research project thus tackles a new question: how do these communities intersect, and how do the fields of study focused on these communities intersect?

For CRG's Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings Research Initiative (NIRCRI), we chose a virgule to connect and divide the key terms and emphasize the ways in which each term is entangled with the others and operating in a state of flux, disrupting or securing the lives of millions.

By bringing these terms together, we are able to ask questions such as: How have indigenous peoples simultaneously offered critiques of settler colonialism and demanded justice for immigrants? How has nationalist “nativism” displaced the claims of indigenous peoples? How does climate change produce “refugees” who never leave their home countries? How do current policies aimed at immigrants, such as child removal, echo policies focused on Indigenous peoples in the past? These questions and many more come to the forefront when we think through these terms in relation to each other, and across time and space.

About NIRCRI

Who is a “native,” who is an “immigrant,” and who is a “refugee”? These categories that are presumed to be fixed are in fact contingent; this contingency is made visible when pressure forces one group to slip from one category to another. Take the asylum seeker who can either successfully gain recognition as a refugee or become an irregular migrant. This slippage can happen narratively, even while it does not happen legally. We could look to Puerto Rico, which as an unincorporated territory of the United States, exemplifies the geographic, legal, and narrative incorporation of populations who are selectively included or excluded, marginal populations whose status is not secure.

Location in some geographic spaces renders some populations particularly vulnerable. The pressures of climate change link Puerto Ricans with Sami in the Arctic Circle. That land and water can render one a refugee or force one to migrate suggests a revisioning of the refugee as a figure produced through political persecution or war; likewise, it challenges us to expand our framing of forces such as climate change to consider its relation to colonization, and geopolitics.

Our key questions ask how the legal and cultural construction of these three groups–the native, the immigrant, and the refugee–are not isolated discourses but are deeply entangled in the regulation of the other. How has immigration law understood refugees as an exception? How has immigration law understood native peoples? How have native nations policed borders, membership, and territorial presence of non-members? And how do cultural forms and practices, from literary works to indigenous drum circles at the airport welcoming refugees in the face of Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants, reflect distinct epistemologies, experiences, and political claims that confound or confirm these legal understandings?

This research initiative has been generously funded by the Othering & Belonging Institute, Critical Refugee Studies, the Peder Sather Foundation, Social Science Matrix, the Institute of International Studies, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

People of NIRCRI

Beth Piatote

Founding Co-Chair, Native/Immigrant/Refugee - Crossings Research Initiative

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Award. Her current projects include a series of scholarly essays on Indigenous law through sensory representations of sound, vision, synaesthesia, and haunting in the long 20th century literary works; essays on Indigenous language revitalization; a novel, a poetry collection, and further development of her play, Antíkoni, which was selected for the 2020 Festival of New Plays at the Autry. She has held several artist residencies and frequently teaches writing at Fishtrap: Writing and the West and other workshops. In 2021, she will serve as a judge for the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

Beth is part of the core faculty group that created the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization (established in 2018) and currently serves as Chair of the DE. She earned her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University and joined the Berkeley faculty in 2007. In 2020, she joined the Comparative Literature department; she holds a dual appointment in Comparative Literature and Native American Studies. She is affiliated faculty in the Department of Linguistics; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; and American Studies. Beth is Nez Perce, enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes. In addition to her research and teaching, she is involved in ongoing efforts to repatriate ancestors from museums as part of a larger movement of reparation and redress. She currently serves on the international Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Leti Volpp

Founding Co-Chair, Native/Immigrant/Refugee - Crossings Research Initiative

She is a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity.

Her most recent publications include “Protecting the Nation from ‘Honor Killings’: the Construction of a Problem” in Constitutional Commentary (2019), “Refugees Welcome?” in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (2018), “Passports in the Time of Trump” in Symploke (2018), “Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship” in the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (2017), “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law (2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), “Saving Muslim Women” in Public Books (2015), “Civility and the Undocumented Alien” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014), “The Boston Bombers” in Fordham Law Review (2014), “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019) and Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and many other articles.<

Christine M. Jacobsen

Fall 2022 CRG Visiting Scholar

Christine M. Jacobsen is a Professor of Social Anthropology working mainly in the fields of Gender Studies and International Migration and Ethnic Relations. Currently, Jacobsen heads a 3 year research project funded by the Research Council of Norway, Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration (WAIT). Based on ethnographic fieldwork with irregularized migrants in Marseille, Jacobsen is currently writing a book with the working title Un/documented lives in Marseille.

Jacobsen’s work on irregularized migration also includes the project Provision of welfare to irregular migrants, which she headed from 2011 – 2015. PROVIR investigated the complex relationship between law, institutional practice, and irregular migrants’ lived experience in Norway. Some of the major findings from the project are presented in the co-edited volume Eksepsjonell velferd: Irregulære migranter i det norske velferdssamfunnet

Jacobsen has worked for a number of years on gendered religious traditions, identities and practices among Muslims in France and Norway, in a context of international migration, globalization and secular modernity. In 2011, she published Islamic Traditions and Muslim Youth in Norway (Brill), and co-edited a special issue of Feminist Review on "Islam and Gender in Europe: Subjectivities, Politics & Piety". Within the frames of the RCN-funded project Secularism and Religious freedom in the Global Era (REGREL), Jacobsen shifted attention from ‘religious traditions’ to ‘secular formations’; looking at gender and sexuality in the legal and para-legal government of religious practices (such as female covering) in Norway and France.

Jacobsen has also worked on Prostitution, Gender and Migration (PROGEMI), and on transnationalism and political mobilisation among young adults of minority background (TRANSNAT).

Marry-Anne Karlsen

Fall 2022 CRG Visiting Scholar

Marry-Anne Karlsen is a researcher at Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK). She has a background in human geography and social anthropology. Her research interests cover migration, the welfare state, and border politics. Her most recent book Migration Control and Access to Welfare: The Precarious Inclusion of Irregular Migrants in Norway was published as an open access monograph on Routledge (2021).

Karlsen is currently heading a work package for the RCN-funded project, T emPro:Temporary protection as a durable solution? The 'return turn' in asylum policies in Europe, which investigates the increased use of temporary terms of asylum for people with a recognized need for protection in Norway, Denmark, Germany, and the UK. The project is a collaboration between legal scholars and ethnographers. Karlsen co-edit with Jessica Schultz the living web resource Interdisciplinarity in Migration Research: Combining law and anthropology.

Karlsen is also part of the EU-funded project P ROTECT: The Right to International Protection. A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization? As part of this project, she has conducted fieldwork in Cádiz, Spain on the field level governance of migration and refugee protection.

From 2016-2020, Karlsen worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the RCN-funded project Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration (WAIT). Here she uses temporality as an analytical lens to examine power relations and experiences related to irregularized migration. Together with Christine Jacobsen and Shahram Khosravi, she co-edited the volume Waiting and the Temporalities of irregular migration, which provides theoretical and empirical nuance to the concept of waiting in migration research. The volume, published on Routledge (2021), is open access, and can be freely downloaded.

Karlsen is a board member of IMER Bergen (International Migration and Ethnic Relations Research Unit Bergen), which she previously led (2018-2021). She is a former board member of Nordic Migration Research and the Norwegian Network for Migration Research.

Past NIRCRI Scholars

(Bios reflect scholars’ status at the time of their appointment at the Center for Race and Gender.)

Bonnie Cherry

Bonnie Cherry is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. Before attending Berkeley, Bonnie worked as a grant writer and program coordinator at Haskell Indian Nations University Cultural Center, building cultural programming for Undocumented and Indigenous youth, as well as working with local nonprofits and tribal entities to address jurisdictional gaps in the Violence Against Women Act for women on reservations.

Sarah Domenick

Sarah Domenick is a third year law student at UC Berkeley, where she is a Henderson Center Scholar. Sarah’s focus at Berkeley is on immigration law and policy, and she is currently a law clerk at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings. She previously interned at the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant and at the East Bay Community Law Center’s Immigration Clinic.

Rianna Hidalgo

Rianna Hidalgo is a third-year law student at UC Berkeley, where she has pursued a wide range of public interest work in the areas of immigration, housing, and employment law. She is currently a student advocate in the 9th Circuit Practicum, and previously interned at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Before attending law school, she worked as a journalist focusing on issues of social and economic justice.

Fantasia Painter

Fantasia Painter is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a new Researcher for the Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings Research Initiative in the Center for Race & Gender (CRG). She is also a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow, a Joseph A. Meyers Center for Research on Native American Issues Fellow, and a member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRP-MIC).

Ryan Rhadigan

Ryan Rhadigan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Rhetoric with a concentration in Critical Theory. He received a Master’s degree in American Indian Studies from UCLA. Ryan’s dissertation research historicizes and contextualizes ongoing Native American rhetorical engagements with legal and technoscientific discourses by examining how archival technics have shaped the conditions of legibility for Native American epistemological claims.

NIRCRI Events

Immobility and Movements Across Contested Temporalities and Spaces -- University of Bergen Seminar

08.28 & 29.2019| University of Bergen (Norway)

Jointly organized by the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (University of Bergen) and The Center for Race and Gender (UC Berkeley), and funded by Peder Saether.

Workshop abstract

This present moment is one of both unprecedented and contested mobility and immobility. In this workshop we will examine several understandings of immobility and movement. The Covid- 19 pandemic, in conjunction with the rise in xenophobia and hate crimes, the closure of national borders to non-natives and the furious erecting of border walls, raise critical questions for scholars at disciplinary crossroads.

Movement includes the physical migration of bodies across nation-state borders as well as the movement of territorial borders themselves. We will examine how the movement of different populations are responded to by states and other political organizations, and we will study the movement of rhetoric in constructing and describing the categories of those who move, and movement between these categories. In addition, we will examine the role of social movements that contest how political bodies respond to these migrations. How do advocates and protest groups engage in strategies to shift verbal and visual representations along with policy, and provide care to those who require it?

The workshop will also examine contested spaces and temporalities. These are the spatial realities of borders, courts, and carceral spaces, but also tense public policy and scholarly debates with their differing claims about political futures, rights, and justice. Movement across contested spaces is woven together with contested temporalities, of colonial pasts and presents, of multiple interesting nows and future modalities, of speed and slowness, acceleration and deceleration, synchronicity and temporal disjuncture, figures of crisis and emergency.

We will explore two lines of inquiry that will reveal moments of convergence and divergence in different sites of inquiry 1) legal status and the attendant social and material contexts; 2) cultural/political discourses and cultural forms and practices, particularly ‘ground up” imaginaries and practices, and how such imaginaries are raced and gendered.

Schedule
Monday June 19

09.15 Coffee and welcome

09.30 – 11.00 Section one: Movements Across Borders

Cristiana Giordano: A Hole in the Fence

Synnøve Bendixsen: Journeys Interrupted: the Labyrinthine Border Experience along the Balkan Route

Leti Volpp: Border Crossing

11.00 – 11.30 Break

11.30 – 13.00 Section two: Moving Borders and Rights

Kari Anne Drangsland: Language Requirements for Residence and Citizenship

Svati Shah: Hindu Nationalism and Migration in India' Second Emergency

Ann Cathrin Corrales-Øverlid: Labor, Capital, and Borders: Structures of Domination in the Shadows of Freedom of Movement

Heath Cabot: Displacements in Place and Grassroots Healthcare Activisms in Greece

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

13.30 – 15.00 Section three: Movements and Mobilizations

Seth Holmes: We Provide Food for Your Table: Indigenous Triqui Farmworkers Organizing for Change

Kathryn Abrams: Movement within Movement: Radical Critique and Tactical Transitions in the US Movement for Immigrant Rights

Marry-Anne Karlsen: Contested Knowledges in Asylum Litigation

15.00 – 16.30 General discussion

16:45 Drinks at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research

19.30 Dinner at ALLMUEN (allmuenbistro.no)

Tuesday June 20

09.15 – 11.00 Breakfast seminar and Film screening of First Time Home and panel discussion (Holmes, Giordano, Sanyal, Shah). Chair: Leti Volpp (NB! Venue Bergen Global Jekteviksbakken 31)

11.00 – 11.30 Break

11.30 – 13.00 Section four: Temporalities - Futures

Christine M. Jacobsen: The St. Bazile Temporary Residence and The Boat to Be as Sites of Future Speculation

Rhiannon Welch: Thick Time against Carceral Temporality

Dinara Yangeldina: Russophone Racial Translation

Debarati Sanyal: Border Kinoaesthetics

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

13.30 – 15.00 General discussion

15.00 – 16.00 Way forward (Publication and continued collaboration)

19:30 Dinner at BIEN Basar (bienbar.no)

Unsettling Borders: O’odham (Indigenous) Land As Intervention and Analytic

04.21.2022 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar

A conversation with Sherally Munshi (Georgetown Law) and Fantasia Painter ((Salt River Pima-Maricopa) UC Davis). This event will explore the colonial dimensions of the U.S. southern border to critically examine the political stakes of border enforcement, particularly in the face of Indigenous displacement and migration (Munshi), and will position O’odham land at the center of analysis to ask how borders and borderlands are produced and negotiated by resident communities, employing vocabularies of space, place, and Indigeneity (Painter).

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Hosted by CRG’s Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, and Native American Studies Program.

LISTEN - Click to hear "Unsettling Borders: O’odham (Indigenous) Land As Intervention and Analytic".

Indigenous And Asian Entanglements: Space, Time, Tense

02.17.2022 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar

A conversation with Quynh Nhu Le (University of South Florida), author of Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas (Temple University Press, 2019) and Juliana Hu Pegues (Cornell University), author of Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (UNC Press, 2021).

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Hosted by CRG’s Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies, Asian American Research Center, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

LISTEN - Click to hear "Indigenous And Asian Entanglements: Space, Time, Tense”.

Design Politics, The Border, and The Passport

03.04.2021 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar

A conversation between Ronald Rael(Professor of Architecture, Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture, UC Berkeley) and Mahmoud Keshavarz (Senior Lecturer in Design Studies at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg and Research Associate at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University (Sweden)). Their discussion will address how border transgressors and passport forgers use the capacity for design to dissent from immobility, as well as Rael’s seesaw installation on the U.S. Mexico border with Virginia San Fratello, winner of the Design Award of the Year 2020.

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Hosted by CRG’s Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, College of Environmental Design, Department of Scandinavian, and the Latinx Research Center.

LISTEN - Click to hear "Design Politics, The Border, and The Passport".

Decolonizing Indigenous Migration Violence, Settler Colonialism, Gender And Law

04.05.2021 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar

Presentations by Shannon Speed ((Chickasaw) Professor of Gender Studies & Anthropology, and Director of the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA), Kristen Carpenter (Council Tree Professor of Law, and Director of the American Indian Law Program at University of Colorado Law School), and Angela Riley ((Potawatomi) Professor of Law, and Director of Native Nations Law and Policy Center, UCLA School of Law). How is the violence to which indigenous women migrants are subjected related to “neoliberal multicriminalism” and settler structures of indigenous dispossession and elimination? And how might migration law consider the colonial origins and impacts that undergird state policies on territorial sovereignty and border regulation?

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Hosted by CRG’s Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, American Indian Studies Center at UCLA, Native Nations Law and Policy Center at UCLA Law, the University of Colorado American Indian Law Program, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues at UC Berkeley.

LISTEN - Click to hear "Decolonizing Indigenous Migration Violence, Settler Colonialism, Gender And Law"

Chronopolitics And Knowledge Production In Migration Studies

04.15.2021 | 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Zoom Webinar

Presentations by Christine Jacobsen (Professor of Social Anthropology, and Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen (Norway)), and Marry-Anne Karlsen (Researcher, Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, University of Bergen (Norway)) with commentary by Samera Esmeir (Associate Professor of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley).

Their conversation will examine the concept of “waiting,” and relationships of time and space, mobility and immobility, as a matter of power, lived experience, and affect.

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Hosted by CRG's Native/Immigrant/Refugee - Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Department of Scandinavian, and supported by the Peder Sather Foundation.

LISTEN - Click to hear "Chronopolitics And Knowledge Production In Migration Studies"

NIRCRI's Fall 2020 Course Collaborations on YouTube

09.22.2020| ASAMST 125 w/Prof. Khatharya Um
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es)
with Yến Lê Espiritu, Distinguished Professor Department of Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

09.24.2020 |NATAMST 102 w/Prof. Thomas Biolsi
Unbelonging & the State
with Kathryn Walkiewicz, Assistant Professor of Literature, UC, San Diego

10.16.2020| SOC 11AC w/Instructor Joanna Reed
Central American Families and Legal Violence
with Leisy J. Abrego, Professor and Chair Chicana/o and Central American Studies, UCLA

11.16.2020 | ESPM 163AC w/Prof. Michael Mascarenhas
Plankton Rich Streams: Migration, Water and Labor
with Jessica Cattelino, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Director of Center for the Study of Women, UCLA

12.01.2020| SOC WEL 274 w/Prof. Julian Chow
Working on Immigration and Refugee Issues as Scholar/Activist: Opportunities and Dilemmas
with Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor, Departments of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology, Associate Dean for Academic Programs, School of Social Ecology, UC, Irvine

In March 2020, CRG's Native/Immigrant/Refugee - Crossings Research Initiative (NIRCRI) had to cancel its planned symposium, "Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Movements Across Contested Grounds” due to the pandemic. NIRCRI turned the material from the symposium into course collaborations between UC faculty and symposium speakers, this fall providing several UC Berkeley courses with guest lecturers.

WATCH - Click here for NIRCRI's Fall 2020 Course Collaborations on YouTube.

Cancelled due to Pandemic – Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Movements Across Contested Grounds Symposium

03.12 & 23.2020| Social Science Matrix, 8th Floor, Barrows Hall

Two global crises—the heightened regulation of movement across national borders, and the impact of climate change—prompt us to examine the meanings and imbrications of the terms “native,” “immigrant” and “refugee” in legal, cultural, political, and environmental contexts. Join us for sustained conversations with keynote speakers Shannon Speed of UCLA; Christine Jacobsen of University of Bergen, Norway; and Yen Le Espiritu of UCSD; and a slate of international and UC scholars at our free two-day symposium.

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Support provided by: Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding, and the UC Humanities Research Institute, Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, Social Science Matrix, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, Othering & Belonging Institute, Critical Refugee Studies, and International Interdisciplinary Studies.

Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides -- University of Bergen Seminar

08.28 & 29.2019| University of Bergen (Norway)

Refugees, immigrants, and indigenous peoples are typically constructed as separate categories within nation-states, and thus are studied in relation to white “natives,” but seldom in relation to one another. Immigrants, indigenous people and refugees are conventionally imagined as communities with little in common.

This seminar, jointly organized by SKOK (University of Bergen) and The Center for Race and Gender (UC Berkeley) will tackle the question: how do these communities, and the fields of study focused on these communities, intersect? A key question for the seminar will be how these communities are imagined to diverge through conceptions of time and space, and how such imaginaries are gendered. The participants will explore convergence and divergence among these three populations with respect to legal status and the attendant social and material contexts as well as cultural/political discourses and cultural forms and practices, particularly the “ground up” imaginaries and practices of natives, immigrants, and refugees.

For more information visit: https://www.uib.no/skok/127365/nativeimmigrantrefugee-crossings-and-divides

Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and The Transcontinental Railroad

04.01.2019 | 4:00 – 5:30 PM | 691 Barrows Hall

The Native/Immigrant/Refugee – Crossings Research Initiative of the Center for Race & Gender presents:
Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and The Transcontinental Railroad with Manu Karuka, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College

Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American nations, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism.

BIO
Manu Karuka is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College. In his scholarship and teaching, he focuses on the intersections of imperialism and capitalism. His intellectual approaches are grounded primarily in Indigenous critique, the Black radical tradition, and materialist feminisms.

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Co-sponsored by: Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Indigenous Americas Working Group, Native American Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Transnational & Ethnic American Studies Working Group.

Indivisible Tohono: Resisting Border Militarization On Tohono O’odham Land Through Education And Civic Engagement

10.23.2018| 1:00 – 2:30 PM | 554 Barrows Hall

Presenters:April Ignacio
Gabriella Cazares-Kelly
Annamarie Stevens
Facilitator (Intro/Questions): Fantasia Painter

Indivisible Tohono is a grassroots organization working on issues that affect the Tohono O’odham Nation and those that affect the Natives within the state of Arizona and federally. Tohono O’odham is a federally recognized tribe split by the US-Mexico border in what is today southern Arizona, and it has become well known for its recent refusal to allow Trump’s Wall on Tohono O’odham land. This event features three key members of Indivisible Tohono who will discuss their work against the US-Mexico border and border-related militarization on Tohono O’odham land through education and civic engagement.

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Presented by CRG's Native/Immigrant/Refugee Research Crossings Research Initiative. Co-sponsored by the Native American Student Development (NASD), Native American Studies (NAS); Indigenous and Native Coalition and Recruitment and Retention Center (INC-RRC), Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) Diversity and Democracy Cluster, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, American Indian Graduate Program (AIGP), American Indian Graduate Student Association (AIGSA), Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues.

Funders & Awards

CURRENT AND PAST FUNDERS

Critical Refugee Studies Collective
Institute of International Studies
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
Othering & Belonging Institute(formerly Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society)
Peder Sather Foundation
Social Science Matrix
UC Humanities Research Institute

AWARDS

2020 Peder Sather Grant Program Awards
Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Immobility and Movement Across Contested Grounds (2nd Phase)
Norway: Christine M. Jacobsen, University of Bergen (UiB)
UC Berkeley: Leti Volpp

NIRCRI was awarded a second grant for continued collaborative research between Berkeley and Christine Jacobsen, Director of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) and her research team at the University of Bergen, Norway.

2019 Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research ORU Seed Fund Grant
The “Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings Research Initiative (NIRCRI)” received a $50,000 multi-year grant from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research through aORU Seed Fund competition.

2019 UCHRI Conference Grant
NIRCRI was awarded a UCHRI Conference Grant to provide funding for the “Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Movements Across Contested Grounds,”symposium that was scheduled for spring 2020.

2018 Institute of International Studies Faculty Grant
A grant from the Interdisciplinary Faculty Program of the Institute of International Studies supported the research initiative’s ongoing faculty conversations, and will also assist in bringing distinguished visitors to campus who will speak to the theme of how these three communities and concepts converge, displace, and shape each other.

2018 Peder Sather Grant Program Awards
Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides (1st Phase)
Norway: Christine M. Jacobsen, University of Bergen (UiB)
UC Berkeley: Leti Volpp

A grant from the Peder Sather Center enabled collaborative research between Berkeley and Christine Jacobsen, Director of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) and her research team at the University of Bergen, Norway.

2018 Social Science Matrix Research Team Grant
NIRCRI was funded as a Social Science Matrix Prospecting Team titled “Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides.” The funds will enable the Prospecting Team to examine how these communities and concepts converge, displace, and shape each other.

2018 Critical Refugee Studies Collective Faculty Grant
Project:The Native, the Immigrant, the Refugee: Confluences and Divides
Beth Piatote & Leti Volpp

The Critical Refugee Studies Collective provided additional seed funding for the Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings Research Initiative.

2018 Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society
A grant from the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) provided seed funding through the HIFIS Faculty Cluster Research Grant for the Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings Research Initiative.