Ethnic Studies Colloquium 2010-2011
The Ethnic Studies Department Colloquium meets on the selected dates below. For more information, please contact us.
Spring 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 3:00pm
The Story of Vacant Lots in Southeastern San Diego: A Collaborative Ethnography & Mapping Project - Annie Lorrie Anderson-Lazo, Ph.D., U.C. Chancellor ’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UCSD Center for Global California Studies; SSB 107
Wednesday, May 18, 3:30pm
Race and Science at UCSD: A Roundtable Discussion - Professors Adam Burgasser (Physics) Tara Javidi (Engineering), Tracy Johnson (Biology), Jim Lin (Math), and Shelley Streeby (Literature); SSB 107
"The Story of Vacant Lots in Southeastern San Diego: A Collaborative Ethnography & Mapping Project"
Wednesday, May 11, 3:00pm Social Science Building, Room 107
Annie Lorrie Anderson-Lazo, Ph.D.
U.C. Chancellor ’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow
UCSD Center for Global California Studies
In under-resourced and high health-risk neighborhoods of Southeastern San Diego, community residents are leading a grassroots movement to improve access to healthful foods and economic opportunity through community gardens, farmers’ markets and backyard growing certification. Local institutions of higher learning have declared renewed commitments to service-learning, field schools and practicum courses connecting students and faculty to the communities around them. These converging interests provide unique opportunities for community leaders, students, teachers and others to forge enduring partnerships for community change, confront policy obstacles to urban agriculture, and create novel community-based participatory research (CBPR), including workshops, tools for evaluation, assessment and publications.
This talk describes a budding CBPR project exploring how a university/community partnership focused on collective ethnography and community history might bring together the Engaged University’s instruction, research, and service aims, while also contributing to community change in underserved regions. By framing the presentation about “vacant lots,” which emerged in the CBPR context, within a conversation about engaged ethnography, the author expects to provoke discussion about borders and boundaries - boundaries of epistemes (what "counts" as valid knowledge?), boundaries of place and space (who is "in" and "out" of the community?"), boundaries of time ("when" are you "who" and how?), and how all of these are constituted in people's everyday practices.
Please join us for a talk about how AL Anderson-Lazo’s “Foodways & Foodscapes Project” is supporting the efforts of residents in Southeastern San Diego, who are reclaiming a healthy food system and the wealth of their community by reframing the discursive and material landscape of vacant lots.
Reception follows in SSB 103
About Annie Lorrie Anderson-Lazo
U.C. Chancellor ’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow Annie Lorrie Anderson-Lazo is a cultural anthropologist, community organizer and political storyteller. She received her Ph.D. from the Culture and Power Program of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz in 2003 and wrote a dissertation based on her fieldwork among Garifuna women organizers conducting community development work through the implementation phase of the Guatemalan National Peace Process (1996-1998). During her two years in Livingston, Guatemala, she also apprenticed with Don Beto, the octogenarian Master Storyteller of the Garinagu community. Since 2003, she has lived in San Diego working with various nonprofit organizations in the areas of social justice organizing, civic engagement and resource development. Her recent writings and research focus on the relationships among food justice organizing, stories about foodscapes and foodways, the ethical responsibilities of engaged social science researchers, and the potential of variously-situated collaborators to use community based participatory research to support social change efforts in the communities around them as well as to decolonize the traditional disciplinary orthodoxies, epistemologies and methods that have located social scientists outside the communities where they live and work. Her other interests include critical food theory, critical race studies, intersectionality, indigenous movements, and borderland theories that advance the understanding of the border as a multicultural landscape of social, political and economic relations.
Annie Lorrie joined the Center for Global California studies in late September 2010 as the UC Chancellor’s postdoctoral research fellow in Minority Health and Health Disparities. Her publications include "Introduction to Practice What You Teach: Activist Anthropology at the Sites of Cross-Talk and Cross-Fire," New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2009; "A Reflection on Political Research and Social Justice Organizing," New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2009; and her doctoral thesis, Of One Accord: Garifuna Collective Action and the Social Transformation of the Guatemalan Peace Process in Labuga (1996 – 1998), Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, CA.
Race and Science at UCSD: A Roundtable Discussion
Wednesday, May 18, 3:30pm Social Science Building, Room 107
Professors Adam Burgasser (Physics) Tara Javidi (Engineering), Tracy Johnson (Biology), Jim Lin (Math), and Shelley Streeby (Literature)
- What is the current state of the race and gender climate in science and engineering at UCSD?
- How do scientific thinking and practice shape thinking and practice with regard to diversity?
- What are the similarities across disciplines when it comes to issues of inclusion and equity and what are the differences?
- What are the existing or potential relationships between scientists of color and larger academic communities of color on campus?
- How can we formalize some sort of collaboration between ethnic studies and science and engineering on campus?
