James King, “Resistance from Below: Subcultures, Grassroots, Power, and State Reform in an Age of Autocracy”
May 19 | 10:30am-12pm | Building 360, Conference Room
This lecture is connected to CSRE 101C: Resistance and Liberation and is part of a series of student-facing events associated with the CCSRE
Faculty Seminar Series with Lesley Larkin “Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Novels by Ruth Ozeki, Gerald Vizenor, and Octavia Butler”
in conversation with Maria Bo
May 21 | 12-1:30pm | Building 360, Conference Room
Letter Writing Workshop
May 21 | 3-4:30pm | Building 360, Conference Room
Hosted by Asian American Studies, Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, and Casa de Paz
Faculty Research Network with Halah Ahmad & Maytha Alhassan, “On Palestinian Knowledge Making, Storytelling, & Narrative with/in the University”
May 27 | 5-7pm | Building 360, Conference Room
2025 CCSRE Honors Symposium
May 29 | 12-2:30pm | Levinthal Hall
Join us for this year's honors symposium, where the CCSRE honors students will be presenting on their thesis projects!
Our Mission: To advance racial equity through interdisciplinary education, innovative research, and community engagement.
Statement Reaffirming CCSRE’s Academic Mission
Dear CCSRE Community,
The flurry of Executive Orders and directives emanating from the Trump administration has disconcerted those of us who study and teach about race and ethnicity. The denial of birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, the threat to deport undocumented peoples is at once cruel and performative, and the attack on “D.E.I.” appears to be an attempt to outlaw any thought, writing, or scholarship about the structuring force of race and ethnicity in our society.
On February 14, the Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the United States Department of Education, Craig Trainor, made the current administration’s intent even clearer.[i] He published a directive indicating that any school that receives financial assistance from the Department of Education will be in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution if it does any the following: “segregat[e] by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories”; teach students “the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’”; or “treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race.” Any kind of “race-consciousness,” Trainor avers, is tantamount to engaging in “repugnant race-based preferences” that carry a “shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history.”
We at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity reject the fallacious logic embedded in this and similar directives. We will continue the important work of studying and demonstrating the significance of race and ethnicity in peoples’ lives. We will persist in revealing how processes of racialization shape our possible outcomes and structure people’s selves both individually and collectively. We understand that race and ethnicity are sources of meaning, motivation, belonging and action even as we document their role in devaluing and limiting opportunities and life chances. As consequential social phenomena that affect where we might live, whom we are likely to be friends with, and how we will probably be compensated for our work, race and ethnicity are not something that most of us can ignore. Being conscious of race is not the same as engaging in racial discrimination. In fact, being conscious of race is merely the first step toward figuring out how to address racial discrimination.
In the spirit of discussing “issues we care about as part of a vibrant exchange of ideas,”[ii] we call on Stanford University to actively support the study of and teaching about race and ethnicity and to decisively reject the suggestion that any support services, housing arrangements, and graduation ceremonies that enable people from historically under-represented groups to feel a sense of belonging at Stanford should be interpreted as a Civil Rights violation. Treating these as violations would be a preemptive submission to what the directive itself admits is merely “the Department’s existing interpretation of federal law.” Literary critics and lawyers know that interpretations can overreach. More importantly, as citizens of a democracy, we know that laws can be changed.
The mission of CCSRE is to “advance racial equity through interdisciplinary education, innovative research, and community engagement.” Standing in support of our students and our alumni, we will hold fast to that mission.
Yours in struggle,
Paula M. L. Moya
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities
Faculty Director of CCSRE
Ramón Saldívar
Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences
Faculty Director of CCSRE Academic Programs
Alfredo J. Artiles
Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education
Faculty Director of the Research Institute of CCSRE
Stephen M. Sano
Harold C. Schmidt Director of Choral Studies
Faculty Director of Asian American Studies
José David Saldívar
Leon Sloss, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature
Faculty Director of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies
Teresa D. LaFromboise
Professor of Education
Faculty Director of Native American Studies
Sheela Subramanian
Co-Founder, Future Forum
Chair, CCSRE National Advisory Board
Veronica Juarez
Managing Partner, Dahlia VC
Member, CCSRE National Advisory Board
Valerie Red-Horse Mohl
Founder, Red-Horse Financial Group
Member and Former Chair, CCSRE National Advisory Board
Roger Clay
Retired Attorney
Member, CCSRE National Advisory Board
[i] Trainor, Craig, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, United States Department of Education. Feb 14, 2025. Dear Colleague.
[ii] Adami, Chelcey. 2025. "Senate Hears Update on Federal Policy Matters, Approves Research Policy Changes." Stanford Report, Feb 20.
Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity - Resource List on the Gaza/Israel Crisis
In line with our mission to support teaching and research in comparative studies of race and ethnicity, and with sincere care for the diverse perspectives and experiences of our faculty, staff, and students, we have assembled a compendium of scholarly articles and opinion pieces that offer context for what happened on the border of Israel on October 7 and what is happening right now in Gaza. We invited five faculty members who are affiliated with CCSRE to provide a curated list of sources providing histories, analyses, and perspectives on the ongoing conflict; they were generous in their willingness to do so. We do not presume that this list of resources is exhaustive or offers a resolution. Rather, we hope to help illuminate some of the complex and fundamental issues that underlie what is happening in Israel and Palestine. We hope this can be one small step toward understanding how we might work together for a more just and peaceful world.
We encourage you to review the report by the Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the report by the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee.
Paula M. L. Moya, CCSRE Faculty Director
Alfredo J. Artiles, Faculty Director of the Research Institute
Ramón Saldívar, Faculty Director of Academic Programs
Stephen M. Sano, Faculty Director of Asian American Studies
José David Saldivar, Faculty Director of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies
Teresa D. LaFromboise, Faculty Director of Native American Studies
Steven J. Zipperstein, Faculty Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies
From Ari Y. Kelman, Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies
- Read comedian and writer David Baddiel’s “Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity” about why Jews are often excluded from discussions about ethnic minorities.
- Read James Loeffler’s chapter on “Anti-Zionism” in the volume Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism edited by Sol Goldberg, Scott Ury, and Kalman Weiser (Palgrave MacMillan 2021).
- Read Derek J. Penslar’s 2001 article “Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism” in the Journal of Israeli History 20 (2-3): 84-98. See also Penslar’s book Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers 2023). It is a superb analysis of why Israel—and the ideology that inspired it—evoke such strong reactions from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum. Penslar holds the Chair in Jewish History at Harvard.
- Read Ronen Bergman’s book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. It is a deeply researched journalistic history of Israel’s targeted killing program. It is haunting, horrifying, humanizing, and both a cautionary tale and a powerful glimpse into the evolution of the psyche of Israel’s military and intelligence leadership.
From Alexander Key, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
- Read Adania Shibli's Touch, the luminous short story of a girl's horizons growing up in Palestine that launched the author’s career (Clockroot Books, 2010).
- Read Tareq Baconi's "Author's Statement (2024)," his overview of what has happened in Palestine since his book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance was published in 2018: "When Hamas Contained was published in 2018, it looked as if Israel’s blockade over the Gaza Strip was immovable. Shortly after the book’s release, an event transpired that signaled the possibility of a different future..."
- Graham Usher’s book, Dispatches from Palestine: The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process (Pluto Press 1999), is an excellent analysis of the "Oslo" period from 1993 to 1998, a period that saw massive political changes that largely created the twenty-first century landscape of Palestine and Israel. The book covers the Palestinian Authority, the major political actor in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Hamas, in detail.
- Sara Roy’s book Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton 2013) provides a history of the movement up to 2013 and analysis of its social and governmental roles.
From Jonathan Rosa, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education
- Read an interview that anthropologist Sa’ed Atshan, Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College, gave about his book Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (2020, Stanford UP). The book brings critical attention to pinkwashing efforts that have mobilized narratives of queer inclusion in Israel to obscure the brutality of its colonial occupation of Palestine. PDF of interview.
- Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Professor Jennifer Lynn Kelly's book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine (Duke 2023), provides a powerful account of the strategic use of tourism as a political strategy for challenging colonial relations and structures. Read more in her piece for the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute.
- Read here a short piece in truthout that presents some key points from Indigenous Studies and Comparative Literature scholar Steven Salaita’s book Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. The book engages in a careful relational race and ethnic studies analysis to argue for the significance of connecting Native American and Palestinian political struggles.
- See here a video-taped conversation between Noura Erakat and educational anthropologist Marc Lamont Hill and President of ReThinking Foreign Policy Mitchell Plitnick, the authors of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. The book is an important account of how advocates for various justice struggles are systematically unwilling or unable to address existential colonial violence in Palestine.
From Shirin Sinnar, William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law
- Read Noura Erakat’s Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford 2019), especially the Introduction, Chapter 1 and Conclusion
- Read Lisa Stampnizky’s Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism,” (Cambridge 2013) especially Chapter 5: “Terrorism Fever: The First War on Terror and the Politicization of Expertise.” Dr. Stampnizky is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield.
- Listen to (or read the transcript of) this podcast, in which Ezra Klein Interviews Aslı Ü. Bâli.
- See here the Human Rights Watch website on Israel/Palestine.
From Steven Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Faculty Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies
- See here a short piece entitled “On Slaughter and Solidarity” by Vashti reporters David Feldman and Brendan McGeever on the crucial distinctions between antisemitism and anti-Zionism where they differ and where they intersect. Feldman, a historian, is director of a leading center for the study of antisemitism in London. PDF
- See here a remembrance by journalist Bradly Burston of Vivian Silver who was murdered on October 7 and was a co-founder of Women Wage Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking organization. PDF
- See here a recent article entitled “Even the Oppressed Have Obligations: Not Every Act of Resistance is Justified.” The piece by Michael Walzer, American political theorist and professor emeritus for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, was published in The Atlantic. PDF
- See here a short article entitled “Toward a Humane Left” that was authored by journalist, editor, and translator Joshua Leifer and published in Dissent Magazine. PDF
Academic Programs
Eva Saenz presenting at the 2023 Community Engaged Scholarship Symposium
Undergraduate
2019-2020 Grad Fellows travel to the San Francisco Immigration Court to observe the master calendar hearings
Graduate
Research Institute
Isaiah Berry Philips presenting at the 2024 Mellon Arts Fellows Showcase
Research Institute Programs
Tommy Orange giving the 20th Annual Anne & Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture
Events
Spotlights
As an ethnic studies scholar, justice and liberation are some of my core values. I chose this discipline to be my academic home because of its origins in the organizing and action of Black and Brown students in the late 60s (right here in the Bay!) during the Third World Liberation Front movement, and how those radical roots inform the values and praxis of ethnic studies spaces and scholarships today. I have learning from and supported various social justice movements, including climate justice, gun control, Black Lives Matter, and the rights of the gender marginalized.
