A Year in Review: 2023-2024 Research Institute Events
Sahera Bleibleh, "Cultural Heritage Lost: The Impact of War on Palestinian Identity and Memory"
May 29 | 4:00-6:00pm | Humanities Center
Special Event
Visiting CCSRE and Stanford Humanities Center scholar, Sahera Bleibleh, showed how in times of war and under the Israeli occupation Palestinian cultural heritage faces dire threats. The intentional destruction aims not only to distort Palestinian identity but also to erase national memory and deform history. While the human cost of war is challenging to quantify, the destruction of historic buildings and sites remains largely overlooked. Against the backdrop of the ongoing devastating war in Palestine, especially in the Gaza Strip, Bleibleh focused on the profound implications of targeting cultural heritage and shed important light on the humanitarian toll of the war alongside the destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage.
Research Institute Open House
May 22 | 12:00pm-2:00pm | CCSRE Building 360
Special Event
This event showcased the important research and professional accomplishments of our CCSRE community of faculty, staff, fellows, and students. Over 50 participants came out to show their support of the Research Institute and to take the opportunity to hear more about its programming including the research, art practice, community-centered, and network-building projects that engaged with issues of race, ethnicity, and inequality. CCSRE affiliates, friends, and partners also learned how they can participate in the activities scheduled for AY 24-25, and build stronger relationships with our vibrant community of faculty, staff fellows, and students. Read More
Rodrigo Reyes, "Sansón and Me," in conversation with Bridget Algee-Hewitt
May 14 | 6:00pm-8:00pm | Building 320
Mellon Arts Fellowship Event
An audience of nearly 50 from the CCSRE, Stanford, and local community came together on May 14 for the film screening of Sansón, a documentary film that traces the path of a young immigrant’s journey from coastal Mexico to a life sentence for murder in California. After the screening, Bridget Algee-Hewitt led a discussion with director and 2023-24 CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow, Rodrigo Reyes: together with the audience they explored how the film grapples with the harsh realities of mass incarceration and crimmigration, the significance of family and friendship, and the infinite potential for hope. Read More [link to my spotlight story on Reyes]
Isaiah Philips, "Gather Yourself: the Necessity of Self Love"
May 13 | 6:00pm-8:00pm | EPACenter
Mellon Arts Fellowship Event
Gathering musicians, artists, family, and friends at the EPACentre, in his hometown of East Palo Alto, CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow Isaiah Phillips unveiled his work over the last year. Merging live music and videos with conversation and discussion, Isaiah demonstrated the magnitude of human potential for growth and healing through self love. Read More [link to my spotlight story on Phillips]
Jisha Menon, “Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspirations in Urban India,” in conversation with Aileen Robinson
May 8 | 4:00pm-6:00pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Chautauqua Event Series
In a discussion of her latest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India, with interlocutor Aileen Robinson (TAPS), Jisha Menon (TAPS) explained how a postcolonial city could transform into a bustling global metropolis with the liberalization of the Indian economy. Menon delineated the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. Menon taught that neoliberalism is both an economic, social, and political phenomenon and an aesthetic project. Read More [link to Menon’s CCSRE chautauqua page]
Rodolfo Dirzo, “The Biological and Cultural Richness of our Planet in the Era of Global Anthropogenic Impact,” in conversation with Ramón Saldívar
May 1 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
Rodolfo Dirzo stressed how the beauty and richness of our planetary home is threatened by the human enterprise, as we live in an era of major anthropogenic impacts on nature and society. In his presentation Dirzo argued that, in order to address this challenge, we need to appreciate the beauty and fascination of our biological and cultural richness. In discussion with respondent Ramón Saldívar, Dirzo showed the imperative need to engage in an inter- and multi-disciplinary agenda of collective work to safeguard as much as possible of these two treasures.
Jan Hare, "Land, Language, & Learning: Living in Right Relations," in conversation with Adae Romero-Briones
April 18 | 4:30-6:00pm | CERAS 101 "Learning Hall"
Special Event
Speaking to her experiences in Canada as a model for exploration, Jan Hare argued that , as K-12 schooling and teacher education respond to growing calls aimed at reconciling colonial histories of schooling in settler countries, educators need to consider what it means to live in 'right relations' with Indigenous people. Speaking further to the challenges of this work with interlocutor Adae Romero-Briones, Hare focused on a rights-based approach for advancing Indigenous priorities in classrooms and schools that attend to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and discussed its implementation in British Columbia, Canada.
Mark R. Warren, Willful Defiance: Abolitionist Practice and the Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline
April 2nd | 4:30-6:00pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Special Event
This event highlighted the role of Black and Brown parents and young people in challenging the school-to-prison pipeline and building a movement to end racist zero tolerance discipline and policing practices in schools nationwide. This session brought into conversation scholars and organizers across sites of abolitionist practice in schools and communities to discuss the challenges and successes of building an intergenerational and intersectional movement centering the experiences of those most impacted by injustice. It featured spoken word poetry and the contributions of organizers working in Black and Brown communities and with Trans, queer and two-spirit youth.
Panelists included::
Mark R. Warren, author of the book Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline; Patrice Hill and Denisha “Coco” Bland, Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS); Geoffrey Winder, Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) Network.
Conversations: 2024 Mellon Arts Fellows Showcase
March 12 | 12:00pm-4:00pm | Black House
Mellon Arts Fellowship Event
The 2024 Mellon Arts Fellows Showcase, Conversations, brought together three visiting artists: Kim Ye, a mixed-media creator, Rodrigo Reyes, a filmmaker, and Isaiah Phillips, a musician. They shared through conversations the catalysts and art practices activating their CCSRE-IDA fellowship projects. Contextualizing their work within their larger lived (artistic, academic, social) histories, each artist's conversation challenged the audience to interrogate their own conceptual lenses. Victoria Stone-Cadena (Yale) & Bridget Algee-Hewitt (CCSRE Stanford) responded to these presentations, asking the audience to reflect more deeply or differently on issues of identity, place, power, trauma, justice, and healing
Conversations included:
Isaiah Philips with Tiffany Johnson, "Gather Yourself: the Necessity of Self Love"
Rodrigo Reyes with Daniel Chavez & Sansón, "Cinema as a Tool for Liberation: Radical Collaborations to Transcend Crimmigration"
Kim Ye with Maxine Holloway and Lena Chen, "Content Warning"
Barbara Buchenau, “Jewish Intellectuals in a Postcolonial Age: Elias, Auerbach, and Cassirer”
February 22 | 4:00-5:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Special Event
In this talk, Barbara Buchenau (University of Duisburg-Essen) discussed the way three major Jewish thinkers address conceptual concerns of postcolonial studies in potentially decolonial ways. Exiled by German antisemitism and national socialism, Erich Auerbach, Norbert Elias and Ernst Cassirer address problems of relationality in three domains: a war-faring society, the imagination, and symbolic action. Read together, she showed how they present an engaged figural theory about the interdependencies that emerge whenever influential speakers script new connections by restating observations across geographical and temporal contexts.
Vasiliki Fouka, “Discrimination and Muslim Integration: Evidence from Europe,” in conversation with Alexander Key
February 21 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
In her talk, Fouka argued that discrimination may impede integration of Muslim immigrants in the West, but it is not clear if integration is affected by exclusionary actions of majority populations or disengagement by Muslims. She argues that less is known if different sources of discrimination have different effects. In her conversation with Alexander Key, Comp Lit, she discussed how results suggest that discriminatory treatment lowers integration despite and not because of Muslim immigrants’ oppositional reactions.
Alicia Sheares, “The Racialized Legitimation Strategies of Black Tech Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Atlanta,” in conversation with Bridget Algee-Hewitt
February 7 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
Sheares shared her work on response behaviors of Black Tech Entrepreneurs (BTEs) in Silicon Valley and Atlanta when facing challenges within their respective ecosystems. She showed that BTEs encounter similar barriers but rely on different tactics, or racialized legitimation strategies, to get ahead: those in Silicon Valley gain elite credentials, while those in Atlanta form connections with elite BTEs. As her conversation with Algee-Hewitt underscored, this work clarifies the extent that racialization of entrepreneurship is bounded by place and reveals the strategies adopted to navigate this unequal reality.
Asad L. Asad and Javier Zamora on Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life
January 25 | 4:00pm-6:00pm | Stanford Faculty Club
Chautauqua Series
In this special Chautauqua, Asad L. Asad, Stanford sociologist and author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton 2023), and Javier Zamora, poet and New York Times bestselling author of Solito: A Memoir (Hogarth 2022) came together in conversation with moderator, Alfredo Artilea, Faculty Director of the CCSRE Research Institute. To an audience of over 150, they leveraged both their own personal histories and the powerful content of their books to reflect on the diverse and complex lived experiences of Latinx migrants to the United States.
Elliot White, “Life on the Margins of Society and the Environment” in conversation with Andres Cardenas
January 17 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
Through personal stories of a New Orleans past and present, Eliott White argued how socioeconomically marginalized communities existing in coastal regions of the country must contend with the dynamic effects of human driven climate change. His talk showed how the effects of climate are chronic (sea level rise, rise water intrusion) and acute (flooding, hurricanes), and that both contribute to and create new inequalities in mitigation and recovery for those that have the fewest resources. In his discussion with epidemiologist Andres Cardenas, he advocated for greater consideration of growing climate inequalities, arguing that much research is needed to understand vulnerability and create equity focused solutions.
Destin Jenkins on “The Bonds of Inequality in Modern America,” in conversation with Zephyr L. Frank
November 15 | 4:00pm-6:00pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Chautauqua Series
With San Francisco as its focal point, CCSRE affiliate Destion jenkins spoke of how his new book, The Bonds of Inequality, re-situates the history of post-World War II urban development and economic growth in previously unexplored national financial networks, and the ways it reveals how racial inequalities were critically tied to the municipal bond market. In conversation with Zephyr Frank, Jenkins dug deeper into this account of the outsized power of unfamiliar institutions, showing how they distort democratic freedoms and life chances within indebted municipalities. Read More [link to Jenkins CCSRE chautauqua page]
Farzana Saleem, “Healing and TRANSFORMing,” in conversation with Philip Fisher
November 8 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
Grappled with the effects of race-related stress, Farzana Saleem argued that this kind of experience can have significant negative consequences for youth of color, particularly during the development period of adolescence. Delivering first an overview of racial stress and trauma and its consequences for youth of color, especially African Americans in the US, she identified tools to foster empowerment and healing and discussed in conversation with Philip Fisher the lessons learned from the group-based intervention TRANSFORM.
Gabriella Safran, "Jewishness, Voice, Comedy, and Space,'' in conversation with Jonathan Rosa
October 25 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
Literary historian Gabriella Safran and linguistic anthropologist Jonathan Rosa came together in conversation over comedic performance and the thematized Jewish voice. Through film clips and text, they ask how recent English-language renditions of comic Jewish voices relate to earlier Yiddish and Russian renditions, positing that that speech style can be identified as Jewish in certain spaces at certain times.
Joseph Gone, "Re-Counting Coup: Communicating Indigenous Vitality in the Age of Historical Trauma," in conversation with Shashank V. Joshi
October 18 | 12:00-1:30pm | CCSRE Conference Room (Building 360)
Faculty Seminar Series
Gone describes the historical functions of Aaniih-Gros Ventre war narratives and coup tales, including their role in conveying life or vitality. Through comparative consideration of the “trauma narrative” with the “coup tale,” he presented an important approach to cultivating American Indian community resilience that does not invoke the discourse of vulnerability.