'Race and the Material World: Bodies and Buildings'

David Montejano, Professor, Ethnic Studies and History, UC Berkeley
Willow Lung-Amam, Assistant Professor, Architecture Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland
Maxine Craig, Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies, UC Davis
Stephen Small, Associate Professor, African American Studies, UC Berkeley

"Breaking Barriers, Building Community: 35 Years of Training Social Change Scholars"

What is the relevance of the academy to achieving social justice? What does it mean to be a social change scholar? How can the academy be (re-)made to reflect the diversity and complexity of society, where students and communities have active voices and roles in shaping the pedagogy, research approaches, and policy production of the research university?

2014 marks the 35th anniversary of graduate training at the Institute for the Study of Social Change (now the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues). For more than three decades, ISSC/I has provided mentorship, training and support to numerous doctoral students, who have gone on to produce social change scholarship that transforms the world and the academy. The training program grew out of the recognition, in the period after the civil rights and women's rights movements, that the academy did not reflect the diversity of American society. It was designed to expand the inclusiveness of the university by nurturing in under-represented students the skills and social capital necessary to learn and work in the academy. Its focus on providing both financial and social support for graduate students, through learning by doing research and training in a collective context, helped to increase the demographic diversity of Berkeley PhDs. In the process it helped transform the professoriate in research universities and colleges across the nation, contributing to new ideas of inclusiveness, membership, and citizenship in the academy and to fundamental change in the connections between researchers and the communities they studied.

In recognition of this anniversary, this conference features presentations by alumni of the graduate training program, now distinguished academics, whose groundbreaking work on stratification and social change in US cities challenges the presumptions of power and the powerful. Panelists draw on research that 1) examines the erasure of history and memory that occurs around race and gender; 2) explores the processes and contexts in which the definitions and enforcement of (il)legality are undergoing change in schools and community settings, on the streets and in workplaces, and around the use and design of the built environment; and 3) engages with the efforts of community organizations and activists to challenge the policies and control of dominant interests.