Previous Initiatives

Elucidating the Molecular Mechanisms of Gamete Recognition and Subsequent Egg Activation

Kathy Foltz, Ph.D.
CBSR Affiliated Faculty
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Foltz' research is focused on elucidating the molecular mechanisms of gamete recognition and subsequent egg activation. Fertilization triggers extremely rapid and dramatic changes in the composition and architecture of protein complexes in the egg. These changes ultimately manifest in the ability of the activated egg to transition to an embryo. Many species of marine invertebrates, such as sea urchins, sea stars and ascidians, are used to address these phenomena. Both large-scale biochemical approaches (including high throughput proteomic analyses) as well as single cell (microinjection and microscopic imaging) experiments can be conducted using the large, synchronously-developing eggs of these free spawning animals, which share the basic aspects of egg activation with other species, including mammals.

Cellular Communication Between Bacteria, Including Mechanisms and Biology of Contact-Dependent Growth Inhibition; Epigenetic Gene Regulatory Mechanisms

David Low, Ph.D.
CBSR Affiliated Faculty
Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Low spent the first 20 years of his career studying epigenetic regulation in bacteria. His laboratory first described methylation patterns in bacteria and showed that they regulate ON/OFF gene regulatory switches that control cell surface structures such as pili. In 2004 they discovered that bacteria can inject different toxic/effector molecules into each other via a process that he calls “contact-dependent growth inhibition” or “CDI”. Low's lab has focused on studying this phenomenon for the past 15 years, partnering with Professor Chris Hayes’s laboratory. Together with the Hayes lab they have identified the pathways by which CdiA, a stick-like structure on the cell surface that mediates CDI, binds to targets, delivers toxins, and modulates cell physiology and growth. His current interest is in identifying all of the critical factors required by CDI+ cells to build the CdiB/CdiA toxin delivery device and intoxicate neighboring cells. He is also interested in leveraging our knowledge from studying CDI to developing new antimicrobials and phage therapy.

Drivers of Social Variation: Competition for Food Resources

Michelle Brown, Ph.D.
CBSR Affiliated Faculty
Department of Anthropology

Michelle Brown’s research focuses on one of the main drivers of social variation: competition for food resources. She develops novel methods to disentangle the energetic effects of feeding competition among individuals, social groups, and species. Using information on the magnitude and timing of competition, she identifies its demographic effects on populations and tests hypotheses regarding collective behavior and social relationships. She conducts fieldwork on eight populations of wild monkeys at five sites in Uganda and co-directs the Biobehavioral Laboratory on the UCSB campus. She also works to diversify the fields of biological anthropology and animal behavior through extensive mentoring and training of students from under-represented groups in STEM fields.

Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance

Stephanie Leigh Batiste, PhD.
CBSR Affiliated Faculty,
Department of English; Department of Black Studies; Theater & Dance; Comparative Literature

Dr. Stephanie Leigh Batiste is Professor of Black Studies and English at The University of California at Santa Barbara and Director of the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative. Her research areas include African American Literature and Culture, Race and Racism, Black Performance Studies, American Studies, and Cultural Studies. Batiste’s research examines the operation of blackness and post-coloniality as subject positions in scholarship on race challenging the notion of the abject and the operation of subalterity in order to reassess Black relationships to self and to power.

Her award-winning book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) focuses on the relationship between power and identity in black theater, film, and performance cultures to reimagine national belonging, race, and modernism. As an engagement with dominant historical systems of thought on race and post-coloniality, this book rethinks critical traditions in American Studies. This research into black subjectivity explores the ideological mechanisms and challenges to the formation of Black diaspora and Black nationalisms. Darkening Mirrors won the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize and honorable mention for the ATHE Book Award.

Her current book project, currently titled, SpacesBetween, studies violence and affect in millennial Black urban performance cultures in Los Angeles. This research reveals embedded structures of transformation in the confrontations with violence forged in performance. It also identifies theories of affective self-activity, engaged witnessing, and alternative uses of time and temporality amongst a population consciously both abandoned and controlled by the state, and thus enveloped in its own state of formation.

Professor Batiste is also a creative writer, performer, and supporter of the arts. She has written three plays: Stacks of Obits, Young Love Found and Lost: Six Poems in a Circle, and Blue Gold & Butterflies. Her solo show Stacks of Obits about street murder in Los Angeles has been performed nationally and internationally. An avid follower of Black Sci-fi and fantasy, Batiste researches the ways imaginative structures in Afro-Futurisms build alternative worlds while critiquing material ones to reimagine the nature of personal and social relationships and ways of being. She is co-editor of the New York University Press Book Series Performance and American Cultures. Her interdisciplinary critical and creative research has appeared in Text & Performance Quarterly, The Black Scholar, The New Centennial Review, The International Journal of Screen Dance, The Journal of Haitian Studies as well as multiple collections and anthologies.

Seeding Transformation for Seven Generations: A Case Study of Roses in Concrete Community School

Joaquin Noguera, Ph.D.
CBSR Postdoctoral Fellow, 2020-2023
Department of Black Studies

Dr. Joaquin Noguera is a former social worker, K-12 teacher, school leader, and director of an international youth leadership institute dedicated to serving Black and Latinx youth through community activism and international travel. He is also a consultant and coach to schools, districts, educators and other learning organizations throughout the country. As a consultant, he works in a variety of capacities to support the development and improvement of learning systems, structures, practices and processes – through strategic planning, vision and mission development and alignment, leadership coaching, in-class engagement support, evaluation and organizational review, curriculum design, workshops and trainings, and as a thinking partner - typically with a focus on equity, social justice and healing.

For his postdoctoral research, Dr. Noguera will convert his dissertation, Seeding Transformation for Seven Generations: A Case Study of Roses in Concrete Community School, into a manuscript and a number of research articles. Noguera’s work examines education and schooling as mechanisms of social, cultural and political reproduction, and their potential to support transformation, healing and revitalization. His dissertation looks at how a school that was deliberately designed to counter the adverse conditions of a working class, urban Black and Brown community meets the social-emotional and academic needs of students while working to revitalize the broader community and support healing. In the case of Roses in Concrete Community School, the theory of change involves prioritizing critical hope, love, Black and Brown solidarity, and wrap around services. In addition, learning and teaching are structured by Ethnic Studies, English-Spanish dual immersion, and arts-based, social justice-oriented engagement. Looking at three levels of the school – learning and teaching; leadership, management and accountability; and partnerships with families and the community – the dissertation considers strategies, practices interventions and supports, as well as challenges faced by the school and its stakeholders. The project makes theoretical and empirical contributions to extant literature on critical education for healing and transformation in urban communities of color, critical theories of race, identity and social change, and both structural violence and healing at various levels of scale across place and time in a white settler colonial society.

Charter Schools, Black Social Life, and the Refusal of Death in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Justin Hosbey, Ph.D.
CBSR Postdoctoral Fellow, 2019-2020

Dr. Hosbey is a sociocultural anthropologist, interdisciplinary ethnographer, and Black studies scholar. Broadly, his intellectual work is interested in the ways that Black Americans have resisted anti-Black violence from the beginnings of racial slavery through its afterlife -- using, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, "every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent, non-violent." More specifically, his ethnograpic work explores Black social and cultural life in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta regions, focusing on the ways that southern Black communities articulate insurgent modes of citizenship that demand the interruption of racial capitalism. His current ethnographic project utilizes research methods from the digital and spatial humanities to explore and visualize how the privatization of neighborhood schools and low income and working class Black communities has fractured, but not broken, Black space and place making in post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

Medicine for a Nightmare: Sun Ra, Metaphysical Religion, and the Black Radical Imagination, 1946-1961

Matthew Harris
CBSR Graduate Student Fellow, 2019-2020

Under the theme of Black Radical Tradition, my dissertation recovers the disregarded religious sources used to negotiate, resist, and outlast the systems of enclosure that defined Chicago's Back Belt at the tail end of the Great Migration. I do so by attending to the archive surounding the Chicago years (1946-1961) of the avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra. Sun Ra offers one entrance to the circulation of metaphysical--that is, esoteric and occult-- religious texts and ideas, which suffused the Black Metropolis and, for Sun Ra and is collaborators, produced the now influential discourse of the "space age." In other words, this is an account of how space became the place. This dissertation argues that alongside and somewhere in-between the transformation of black Protestantism, the rise of so-called sects and cults, and the incorporation and commodification of Southern black religious forms, the transformations of black religion during the Great Migration also enabled Sun Ra, as a performative idiom, to emerge. That is, by returning Sun Ra and the space age to Chicago, I am able to foreground the importance of the Great Migration and how how this "watershed in African American religious history" (Sernett, 1997) helped generate this peculiar, but persistent, "freedom dream" (Kelley, 2002). Rather than merely interpreting the "aesthetic community of resistance" that produced it and the metaphysical resources that informed them (Davis, 1998). "Medicine for a Nightmare" is an account of the making of one extension of the Black Radical Imagination.

Urban Studies

The Urban Studies Initiative was launched under the directorship of Professor Clyde Woods in 2007 and continued through 2012. The Initiative led to the founding of the journal Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies.

Focusing on the intersection of race and place, the initiative led to several important conferences and publications:

Race, Place, and Power was a yearlong series of classes, forums, presentations, and discussions aimed at evaluating emerging concepts, theories, and policies about race and space. These lectures and presentations fell in the areas of urban renewal, historical sociology, cultural geographies, race relations, public policy, art, and social change.

Life and Expressive Culture in Los Angeles: In Summer 2007, Professor Woods received a Cultural and Enrichment Program Grant from the Office of Instructional Development to study and showcase Life and Expressive Culture in Los Angeles. The activities, speakers, and symposia brought intellectual engagement and cultural programming for the Summer session, the campus, and the community at large. The research aspect of the project enhanced our new emphasis in urban studies and public policy, bringing the conversation about urban restructuration and inequality to the forefront of our agenda.

Domesticity, Affect, Intimacy, Power, and Justice: This third ethnic studies conference in a series was organized by Professor George Lipsitz and took place in October 2008. The conference staged an intercampus and interdisciplinary conversation about the ways in which sentiment, fear, anger, and love function as social and political forces. The dialogue featured intergenerational and interracial perspectives, and several speakers addressed the crucial roles played by gender and sexual normativity in shaping the social and cultural ecology of neo-liberalism.

African American Traditions in California: Establishing a University of California System-wide Network to Address Research, Curricular, Public Policy, and Archival Needs: This conference, organized by Professor Clyde Woods, convened scholars for an exploration of how to create and build a Black California digital archive within the Journal of California Studies and Calisphere initiatives and how the Black California Studies initiative can support and coordinate public policy research on, and in, California’s African-American communities. Funding for this conference was received from the University of California Humanities Research
Restorative Justice Symposium featuring Fania Davis On October 18 and 19, 2010 the Center for Black Studies Research in collaboration with the Multicultural Center and the City at Peace, a community organization, organized a two-day series of events on the issues of school discipline policies, restorative justice, and on alternatives to criminal justice solutions. This was a powerful experience of campus-community collaboration. Our featured speaker and workshop leader was Bay Area civil rights attorney Fania E. Davis, Executive Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth
Black California Dreamin’ Symposium and bookOn May 13, 2011, the Center hosted a conference and workshop at UCSB spearheaded by Professor Clyde Woods. The purposes of this project were (1) To investigate the central role African Americans have played in transforming their communities, the state and the nation during the last three decades; 2) To document the origins of the multiple crises currently facing African American communities; 3) To examine the impact of the current economic crisis and the emergence of new conditions, policies, communities, organizations, institutions, social movements, and cultural practices and movements; and 4) To identify solutions to the crisis emerging throughout the state.
From the conference, a book and internet project were designed to critically examine the multiple challenges faced by Black individuals, families, and communities as a result of the global economic downturn of 2008 and the subsequent state fiscal crises. Black California Dreamin’: The Crises of California’s African-American Communities, was released in print and online forms in summer 2012. The volume was conceived by former Center director Clyde Woods, and completed and co-edited by Ingrid Banks, Gaye Johnson, George Lipsitz, Ula Taylor and Daniel Widener. This peer-reviewed book contains original articles about Blacks in San Jose during the Great Migration, Black businesses, urban renewal and social protest in San Francisco, and mortgage foreclosures, the school to prison pipeline, expressive culture, homelessness, and demographic changes in Los Angeles.

Four publications emerged from faculty involved in the Center’s Urban Studies initiatives, either through direct research projects or other venues ranging from participation in symposia, talks, and conversations:

Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restoration in Post-Katrina New Orleans,edited by Laura Pulido and Jordan Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). This book manuscript contains the ideas, evidence, and analysis that Woods developed in his role as Center director.
Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Two chapters emanated in the Center’s urban studies initiative, especially its sponsorship of presentations by New Orleans spoken word artist Sunni Patterson in Washington, DC in 2009 and in Santa Barbara in 2010.
George Lipsitz, “Afterword: The Black Body as Proof: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination,” in Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2012), pp. 361–373. This afterword grew out of the appearance by Bernier hosted by the Center in 2010.
Gaye Johnson, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). This book stems from Johnson’s involvement in the Center’s Black California initiative and her earlier participation as a dissertation fellow at the Center.

Race and Technology

The Center’s Race and Technology (RT) Initiative was officially launched in 2003–2004. It strove to expand and further develop cutting-edge research and scholarship around these compelling and important areas of new knowledge production. A key component of the RT program was a new interdisciplinary conference that focused on issues of technology access, literacy, and adoption among underserved African Diasporic communities.

On May 7–8, 2004, the Center for Black Studies convened the first AfroGEEKS conference, “AfroGEEKS: From Technophobia to Technophilia.” This attracted over 150 prominent scholars, scientists, students, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists over the two days of the conference’s duration. The Center for Black Studies’ Race and Technology Initiative (RT), which featured the AfroGEEKS conference, Among the leading academics, artists, grassroots community activists, entrepreneurs, and scientists sharing their work at the conference were: computer engineer Charles Harper (Sierra Monolithics CEO), new media artist Floyd Webb (e22 digital studios), community activist Anita Brown (Black Geeks Online), professor and filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue (San Diego State University), poet and activist Kalamu ya Salaam (E-Drum), professor Juan Gilbert (Auburn University), professor Anna Beatrice Scott (UC Riverside), IT specialist Art McGee (Amnesty International), professor Eric Pierson (University of San Diego), professor Raiford Guins (Bristol, England), filmmaker Arthur Jafa, professor S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas-Austin), Ph.D. candidate Fenobia I. Dallas, professor and filmmaker Renee Green (UCSB), businessman James Fugate (EsoWan Books), journalist Greg Tate (Village Voice) and professor Kara Keeling (University of North Carolina), among many others.

Based upon the success of the first conference, the Center attracted major funding from the Ford Foundation for the second AfroGEEKS conference, titled “AfroGEEKS: Global Blackness and the Digital Public Sphere” on May 19–21, 2005. AfroGEEKS 2 was distinguished by its focus on technology issues in Africa; it was our primary goals of bringing in significant numbers of IT scholars, activists, artists and other IT workers from developing countries in Africa that interested the Ford Foundation in our grant proposal. The funding from Ford enabled us to bring in people from several developing African nations including Uganda, Ghana, and Sao Tome. UCSB funding enabled us to bring additional African Diasporic and other IT workers from Australia and South Africa. Other participants came from as far away as Australia, Hawaii, Canada, Britain, and across the U.S. The international diversity represented at AfroGEEKS 2 was striking and productive.

Among the outcomes of these two conferences was a scholarly anthology featuring seventeen essays from conference participants. Edited by Anna Everett and Amber Wallace, AfroGEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide included work on the digital divide, the importance of the internet and virtual communities, technology and art, connectivity and the diaspora, representation in computer and other technology related sciences, and globalization and modernization. The book included an interactive DVD featuring clips from speakers, presentation information, and embedded documents from the second AfroGEEKS conference as well as additional resources.

The Race and Technology Initiative also led to the creation of a new journal. Edited by former Center director Anna Everett, Screening Noir: A Journal of Black Film, Television and New Media Cultureproduced three issues between 2007 and 2009.

Community Alliance for Democratic Education

PIs Esther Lezra, Chela Sandoval, and Diane Fujino received a grant from the UC-wide Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC, 2015–16) to create an interdisciplinary, equity-oriented, race-based collaboration, the Community Alliance for Democratic Education (CADE). This project builds on the CBSR’s ongoing partnerships with two local community organizations fostering educational equality, Dos Pueblos High School’s Committee on Equity and Excellence in Education and La Casa de La Raza, as well as with Students at the Center (SAC) in New Orleans, which works in the few remaining public schools there and uses writing and story-circle learning to foster critical analysis and creative solutions for a city devastated by natural and unnatural disasters.

kalumu ya saalam photo The CCREC grant will, in part, enable us to bring poet, activist, and teacher Kalamu ya Salaam, who co-directs SAC, to Santa Barbara for a series of lectures and meetings with the CBSR and our community partners. This project builds on the CBSR’s work in the local schools this past year to promote educational equity by, among other endeavors, supporting the Dons Net Café’s student-run social entrepreneurial projects at Santa Barbara High School and serving as facilitators with Just Communities to foster dialogues about racism and other social issues. Together, we seek to understand and illuminate the models of social movement organizing that foster the participation of parents, students, teachers, and community members as agents of change; that cultivate the leadership of those most affected by educational inequities; and that develop new democratic programs to transform the educational experiences and lives of students, families, and teachers.

Transformative Pedagogy Project

We developed the Transformative Pedagogy Project (TPP) as an experimental method for enhancing democratic participation and active learning around critical race issues. From January to June 2015, the TPP met every Friday morning to discuss a key reading on the history of Black freedom struggles, critical pedagogy, and current social issues through a story-circle learning format. We deployed dialogue in a more deliberate way that built on Chela Sandoval’s pedagogical work, the subject of her current book project, and on the inspiring learning and writings of Students at the Center in New Orleans. We “learn to listen and listen to learn” in order to develop a critical analysis combined with compassionate listening and to recognize the power in witnessing or reflecting on the impact of the spoken word. The project, initiated by CBSR director Diane Fujino in collaboration with faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and a good number of undergraduate students, kept growing in unexpected ways, with a new student joining us nearly every week. The work also inspired a collaboration with Freedom4Youth and its co-founder and director Billi Jo Starr to begin story-circle dialogues at the Los Prietos Boys Camp, located in the Los Padres National Forest and under jurisdiction of the Santa Barbara County Probation Department. Coordinated by Dr. Teishan Latner of the CBSR and with Freedom4Youth and TPP student mentors, the CBSR implemented a five-session pilot program of a Chicano-Black studies curriculum, which we plan to extend in the upcoming year.

Professors Diane Fujino and Esther Lezra and doctoral student Jonathan Gomez also made a presentation on the TPP’s pedagogical methodology at a meeting of the Dos Pueblos High School’s Committee on Equity and Excellence in Education.

Social Movement Organizing Collaborations

PIs Diane Fujino, Chris McAuley, and Natalia Molina were awarded a grant from the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC, 2014–15) to fund “New Politics and New Polities: Equity-Oriented, Race-Conscious Social Movement Mobilization in California Communities.” This engaged scholarship project initiated a dialogue among social justice organizers, scholars, and students about theories and strategies, structural and personal obstacles, and leadership models that guide social movement organizing under conditions of racial neoliberalism. Toward this end, we developed a two-day Symposium consisting of a public panel, dinner and discussion, and a day-long closed-door meeting held May 8–9 at UCSB’s MultiCultural Center. The Symposium featured six community partners: the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) of Los Angeles, working to empower community advocates to eliminate race, class, and gender barriers around issues of violence and homelessness; the Environmental Health Coalition of San Diego, seeking environmental and social justice by empowered communities acting together to make social change; the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) of Oakland, developing the collective leadership of low-income immigrant women and youth to organize for positive changes in their living and working conditions; The Committee of Los Angeles, addressing issues of severe abuse within social movements through an Afrikan People’s Liberation Tribunal; PODER (People Organized for the Defense & Equal Rights of Santa Barbara Youth), which won the first successful court case against a gang injunction; and United Parents/Padres Unidos of Santa Barbara, empowering predominantly Spanish-speaking, working-class parents to advocate for equity in education. Through the Symposium, we developed a space for an intergenerational discussion and the development of knowledge on social movements and community organizing among activists, scholars, and students—not in unilateral, but rather multidirectional and spiraling ways. The process of the Symposium was one of mutual respect, active listening, and a desire to learn from one another in ways that reflect our commitment to the “situated knowledges” that are interwoven in historical and social life rather than abstracted from it, and that generate theory through praxis by scholars and activists.

PI George Lipsitz was awarded a grant from the UC Center for New Racial Studies to organize and edit a special issue of the journal Kalfou on improvisation and social movement mobilization. This issue will explore the ways in which race-based but not race-bound social movement organizations in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Oakland are using improvisation to deepen the capacity for democracy in urban areas.

Art and Social Transformation

Improvisation and Social Movements. PI George Lipsitz was awarded a grant from the UC Center for New Racial Studies to organize and edit a special issue of the journal Kalfou on improvisation and social movement mobilization. This issue will explore the ways in which race-based but not race-bound social movement organizations in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Oakland are using improvisation to deepen the capacity for democracy in urban areas.

Fandango, Music, and Community Making. PI Gaye Johnson received a grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute to fund a public humanities collaborative research project, “Afro-Mexican and Afro-American Encounters: Creating a Space of Convivencia in a Hollowed Out World” that brought together scholars, performers and community leaders to explore how the revival of Mexico’s most African-based music—son jarocho—serves as a register of the intertwined histories of Blacks and Chicana/os in California and signals the possibility of forging new relations between members of these groups. Framed by the arguments Johnson advanced in Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles about the ways in which shared sounds have helped Blacks and Mexicans in the United States find common ground, the CBSR staged a community son jarocho performance featuring the Grammy award–winning band Quetzal and, in the fandango tradition, engaged in participatory music making among participants of different races, classes, citizenship statuses, and levels of musical ability. The concert was held at La Casa de la Raza on February 26, 2015. The next day, the CBSR hosted an academic panel in which musicians Dr. Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores, scholar Ana Rosas, and CBSR Advisory Committee faculty Gaye Johnson and George Lipsitz spoke about the ways in which the convivencia (a deliberate act of convening outside of commercial culture) of fandango can help us better understand both the forces that divide Black and Brown people in California and those that unite them, as well as how the occluded history of Black-Brown coalition and collaboration can inform our shared civic and social life in the years ahead. At the CSBR, we recognize son jarocho music, convivencia, and fandango gatherings as, in part, expressions of an Afro-diasporic tradition of community-based art making and art-based community making.

International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The CBSR was appointed executive partner of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) in Guelph, Canada, becoming the only US executive partner of this previously all-Canadian project. The IICSI has been very successful in securing funding from Canadian research foundations and we expect that this partnership will help to position us to secure similar support from US funders to build our engaged scholarship initiative.

The Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Art. On behalf of the CBSR, professors Felice Blake and Diane Fujino were awarded a $5,000 Public Events Curatorial Grant from the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California for a multi-component symposium on the Black Panther Party (BPP) and art activism. The symposium, held in November 2016, featured Emory Douglas, revolutionary artist and the former Minister of Culture of the BPP, and Akinsanya Kambon, pan-Africanist artist and author of the Black Panther Coloring Book. In collaboration with the UCSB MultiCultural Center, which hosted the event, the CBSR developed a quarter-long art exhibit, “50 Years Strong and Counting: The Revolutionary Art of the Black Panther Party,” that showcased Douglas’s graphic prints and Kambon’s drawings, watercolors, and paintings. The two Panther artists delivered the CBSR’s 2016–17 Clyde Woods Memorial Lecture, “Revolutionary Art and Black Liberation: The Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter and Beyond.” As part of our pedagogical research in dialogic learning and our commitment to community collaborations, we also organized an “Intergenerational Dialogue,” held at and in partnership with La Casa de la Raza in Santa Barbara, as a community discussion promoting youth voices and youth leadership in collaboration with various generations of those in struggle for social justice.

Black Freedom Struggles

In preparation for the CBSR’s fiftieth anniversary in Fall 2018, we are developing a workshop series on “Transformational Scholarship, Freedom Dreams, and Future of Black Studies,” funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research, that enables us to develop small-group discussions, public talks, meetings with graduate and undergraduate students, and book readings to foster critical and creative thinking about the future of Black studies as a field and to facilitate dialogue about Black studies on the campus. In early January 2017, we hosted a discussion-based gathering to meet with Professor Tricia Rose, of Brown University, who discussed ideas about program building and intellectual projects in support of transformative scholarship based on her experiences as Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives as well as her innovative work as a scholar of Black culture, popular music, social issues, and gender and sexuality. In late January 2017, Robin Kelley of UCLA opened up the discussion to a historical and structural analysis of current social problems; he emphasized the importance of knowing what we want to do at the university while being aware of its constraints and possibilities, and explored ways to develop the work of public intellectuals. Both were planned as small-group discussions to facilitate dialogic thinking and engagement among CBSR and Black Studies scholars on campus. Appreciation to the Workshop Committee: Felice Blake, Eileen Boris, Victor Rios, Vilna Bashi Treitler, and Diane Fujino, chair. Given the Center’s overflowing Spring schedule, we decided to continue the workshop series in 2017–18.

For 2017–18, we are developing a series of programs on the Black Radical Tradition. First, we will host a year-long reading group to discuss: (a) former CBSR director Cedric Robinson’s magnum opus, Black Marxism; (b) two books that came out this year by Clyde Woods, also a former CBSR director: Development Arrested (reissued with an introduction by Ruthie Gilmore) and Development Drowned and Reborn (edited by Jordan Camp and Laura Pulido); and (c) Gaye Johnson and Alex Lubin’s new edited volume, Future of Black Radicalism. Second, we plan for public programs and small-group discussion with these authors and UCSB scholars on the history of Black radicalism and possibilities for the future development of Black Studies.

West African Solar Energy Project

CBSR postdoctoral scholar Dena Montague partnered with the UCSB Black Engineering Society and EnergieRich in Burkina Faso, West Africa, to develop a sustainable energy project that also bridges the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields in the areas of Black studies and engineering. The project is designing solar-powered poultry egg incubators to enable sustainable local economic development in Burkina Faso. The idea is to develop technology that is transferrable to local communities, empowering them to build their own solar-powered units. Students from UCSB’s National Society of Black Engineers, Ugo Nze, Antonia Sowunmi, David Chau, Karlon Johnson and Ricardo Vidrio, and former student Erica Johnson worked on the project over the past year.

Community and Academic Partners

International Partners

Haitian Studies Association
Bibliothèque du Soleil/ Haiti Soleil (Port-au-Prince, Haiti)
International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (Guelph, Canada)
Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh (UK)
ÉnergieRich (Burkina Faso, West Africa)

National Partners

Students At The Center, New Orleans
Temple University Press
Edwidge Danticat Society

Statewide Partners

UC Consortium for Black Studies in California
Los Angeles Community Action Network
Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC)
Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA)

Local Community Partners

Martin Luther King Jr. Committee
La Casa de la Raza
Freedom4Youth
Ethnic Studies Now! Coalition of Santa Barbara

Institutional Supporters:

Office of the Associate Vice-Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy
Office of Equal Opportunity
Dean of Social Sciences
Executive Vice-Chancellor

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