American Cultures and Global Contexts Center

2013-14 Events

Welcome back! We are very enthusiastic about the direction of our program for the coming academic year. The Antiracism Inc. program series will feature the subheading “Antiracism Works.” We seek to extend the critical frames for addressing issues central to Antiracism Inc. by collaborating with community organizations. We seek to bridge intellectual work with community connection and engagement. Rather than hoarding intellectual goods, products, and services within the institution, we seek to build foundations for collective knowledge production across institutional divides. What frameworks and concepts do we need to critically and practically engage with ongoing movements for justice? What lines of flight, poetics of struggle, and radical imaginaries become possible through alternative modes for circulating and producing knowledge? While never minimizing the importance of examining the operation of institutional power, our questions look to the ways that power operates on the ground (broadly conceived) in the everyday. The program thus offers opportunities for engaging students, faculty, and community members, giving us coalitional work to do.

Also, thanks again to y’all who attended “Poetic Interventions” last spring, and we hope to have more folks at its next installment in February 2014. If you missed it, watch a video summary made by filmmaker Emanuel Garcia here.

Follow us on Twitter @acgcc

Live tweet events using the hashtag #AntiracismWorks

We would also like to thank the UC Humanities Research Institute for its support of our program this year!

Spring Quarter 2014

The American Cultures and Global Contexts Center is proud to present Antiracism Inc./Works: The Anticonference. Please join us onFriday and Saturday May 16-17 at the UCSB MultiCultural Center Lounge for the academic, artistic, and activist encounter that is sure to reinvigorate our analysis of and commitments to social justice. Our anticonference will involve the voices of faculty, organizers, students, and poets from across the country. Our conversation centers on the reading and redefinition of antiracism in the Age of Obama. We hope you’ll join us to participate in generative dialogues with folks who’ve been part of the program since its inception, spanning the ACGCC reading and film series to Poetic Interventions last spring to the prison abolition work of the Coalition for Sustainable Communities.

Everyone is welcome – no registration required! You may stop by for any or all of the events. Please see more info and a full conference schedule below, and you may join the event on Facebook:

Winter Quarter 2014

Please join us for the second iteration of “Activist Encounters,” which extends our conversation from Fall 2013 with the Shawn Greenwood Working Group and incredible undergraduate student activists. We are hosting a dialogue on stopping prison expansion in Santa Barbara County. We are delighted that Diana Zuñiga, Statewide Organizer from Citizens United For a Responsible Budget (CURB), will be joining us for the conversation. CURB is a statewide alliance of over 50 organizations working to curb prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. “Activist Encounters II” will offer both a critique of the structural conditions of mass incarceration and concrete strategies for stopping prison expansion. This will be our first organizing meeting to plan future community mobilizations around this pressing issue. As always, the event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided. Some more details are provided on the below flyer:

We at the ACGCC are excited to introduce our latest project: a drop-in writing lab for junior high and high school students, their families, SBCC students, and the greater Santa Barbara community! Please contact the Graduate Fellow, Alison, for more information or to get involved.

Fall Quarter 2013

Please join us for this incredible event at the UCSB MultiCultural Center:

On October 17, 2013, we will hold two related events: 1) a lunchtime meeting featuring a discussion with the Shawn Greenwood Working Group and 2) an afternoon forum about incarceration, drones, and detention with the SGWG, student activists, and academics. Both events are free and open to the public.

Event: Engaged Activism/Activist Encounters

Location: SH 2635

Date: Thursday October 17, 2013

Time: 12:30-1:45pm, 3-5pm

12:30-1:45pm – Talk by the Shawn Greenwood Working Group. More info and their Statement of Purpose can be found here.

3:00-5:00pm – Roundtable Discussion on activist responses to police murder, global security, drones, immigration, detention, occupation, incarceration, and other forms of state violence. We intend to foster dialogue and raise questions across racialized, gendered, and disciplinary divides with a common critique of the state to develop new frames for activism and coalition.

Join the Facebook Event here!