Ethnic Studies Colloquium

May 13th, 2026, 3:00PM - 5:00PM, Public Engagement Building (PEB), Room 721

Mortgaged Futures: Palestine Railways as a Ledger of Insurrection in Mandatory Palestine. In a global economy dominated by financial speculation, supply chain infrastructure, and multigenerational loans, how might Palestinian creditworthiness and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination inform our understanding of who owns tomorrow and who can withstand the economic crises of today? Shifting between the local and global, across commodities and sectors, this talk tells a story of how Indigenous Palestinians’ local acts of railway sabotage during the 1936-39 Great Revolt produced a regional crisis of British authority and Zionist colonization that signaled the United States’ entry into the region as an imperial planner.

Tareq Radi is a Palestinian scholar in exile. He is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and History at UC Merced as well as the Department of Media & Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. Rooted in Palestinian and Black Feminist thought, Indigenous anti-imperialism, and Marxist geography, Tareq is writing his first book, Mortgaged Futures: Financial Intimacies of Turtle Island, Palestine, and the Philippines. Mortgaged Futures charts the history of debt-fueled imperial expansion in Palestine within a larger constellation of state-led, race-making practices and technologies of Indigenous dispossession.

May 6th, 2026, 3:00PM - 4:30PM, Public Engagement Building (PEB), Room 721

"Join Unión del Barrio for a 'Know Your Rights / Community Self-Defense' presentation focused on defending our communities against ICE (migra) operations. This workshop will cover your legal rights, how to respond to encounters with immigration agents, and how community patrols work to prevent detentions and family separation. Together, we will share tools and strategies to build organized, barrio-based self-defense and protect our people."

When: May 6th 2026, 3PM-4:30PM

Where: Public Engagement Building (PEB) 721

Food will be served.

March 4, 2026, 3:00PM - 4:30PM, Price Center - Eleanor Roosevelt College Room

Producing Precarity examines the TV industry’s “offshoring” of production to impoverished sites within the US. It focuses on state efforts to attract film and TV producers to poor places with tax incentives, discounted public lands, and subsidized infrastructures. These efforts result in the redistribution of wealth from poor people of color, Indigenous people, and other taxpayers to Los Angeles-based media makers, while also diverting money that could be used for education and health care to the wealthy. The book also provides examples of local resistance, including Indigenous and Black movements against a “Cop City” and an allied film studio in Atlanta, as well as anti-gentrification movements in Latinx neighborhoods of LA. Key concepts include “settler TV,” “racial capitalism in place,” and “the police and prison televisual complex.”

Featuring Curtis Marez, Professor of Ethnic Studies

Title: Producing Precarity; The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places

Ethnic Studies Colloquium - Book Talk

When: Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Where: Price Center - Eleanor Roosevelt College Room.

Food will be served.

March 12, 2025, 3:00PM-4:30PM, Public Engagement Building (PEB), Room 721

Join us for an engaging panel discussion with health care practitioners exploring how an ethnic studies education fosters more inclusive healthcare, addresses systemic disparities and improves patient and community health outcomes. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with experts in the field and to learn about medical school admissions!

Panelists:

Nitya Yerabandi, Undergraduate Student in Human Biology
Dr. Tala Al-Rousan, Assistant Professor and founding faculty, Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity
Dr. Maria Rosario (Happy) Araneta, Associate Dean of Diversity and Community Partnerships and Professor of Epidemiology, School of Medicine
Dr. Parag Sanghvi, Assistant Dean of Admissions and Professor of Radiation Oncology, School of Medicine

When: March 12th, 3PM-4:30PM

Where: Public Engagement Building (PEB) 721

Food will be served.

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March 5, 2025, 3:00PM-4:30PM, Public Engagement Building (PEB), Room 721

Refusing the Land/Soul Binary: Catholic Appropriation of Kateri Tekakwitha

Speaker: Dr. Elisha Chi, President's and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow from University of California, Santa Barbara.

What is up with Catholic storytelling practices around the Haudenosaunee woman, Kateri Tekakwitha? Does she exemplify successful Jesuit missionary evangelization for Indigenous souls, offering America its first "homegrown" saint? Or are there wider settler colonial politics at play? This talk focuses on the political context of Tekakwitha's stories, illuminating how her conversion narrative not only marks Catholic thirst for Indigenous lands, but scaffolds Catholic attempts for political legitimacy in the North American "new world."

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February 5, 2025, 3:00PM-4:30PM, Roosevelt College Room, Price Center

Research Talk

Featuring:

Mary Klann, Ethnic Studies Lecturer

Book Talk: Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth-Century America (University of Nebraska Press, 2024)

Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, Ethnic Studies Lecturer

Article Talk: “How Do White Educators Need to Show Up in Ethnic Studies Spaces?: A Survey Ethnic Studies Pedagogies,” Ethnic Studies Pedagogies (forthcoming).

Discussant: Ross Frank, Ethnic Studies Faculty

January 22, 2025, 3:00PM-4:30PM, PEB 721

Community College Teaching

California community college students seeking an associate degree now need to complete a course in Ethnic Studies under a new regulation adopted by the Community Colleges Board of Governors.

Join us for a talk with UCSD Ethnic Studies alums who now teach Ethnic Studies at local community colleges to discuss approaches for teaching in the most diverse system of higher education in the country.

Panel Speakers:
América Martínez, Chicano Studies, San Diego City College
Olivia Quintanilla, Chair of Ethnic Studies, MiraCosta College
Katherine Steelman, Ethnic Studies, MiraCosta College

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November 20, 2024, 3:00PM-4:30PM, PEB 721

Please join us for “A Celebration of New Books in Ethnic Studies” featuring:

Archiving Medical Violence Consent and the Carceral State (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), by Chris Perreira, and

The Lamentations- A Requiem for Queer Suicide (Fordham University Press, 2024), by Patrick Anderson.

Chris Perreira, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, and Patrick Anderson, Professor or Ethnic Studies and Communication, will discuss their respective books in a talk moderated by Curtis Marez, Professor of Ethnic Studies.

October 23, 2024, 3:00PM-5:00PM, Climate Action Lab, Arts and Humanities Building, Room 0116

Protest Poetics: Solidarities in the Filipino and Palestinian Diaspora

Featuring: Jason Magabo Perez and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Moderated by Dr. Amanda Solomon Amorao

Join us for readings and conversation on solidarities with Jason Magabo Perez (San Diego Poet Laureate) and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (National Book Award Finalist), who will read from their recent collections: I ask what falls away (Kaya Press, 2024) and Something about Living (University of Akron, 2024).

May 1, 2024, 3-4:30PM, Cross Cultural Center

A discussion with Dr. Julian Saporiti of No No Boy

April 23, 2024, 3:30PM, Social Sciences Building 269

Speaker: Eli Clare

The Invention of Defectiveness: Disposability and Education

Join white queer disabled writer and activist Eli Clare in an interactive exploration--part story, part history, and part call to action--of the harm created by the notion of defectiveness, particularly in connection to disability and race, the realities of disposability, and how we can resist that harm.

Live In-Person and Online

Zoom Meeting ID: 940 6505 4477

Password: BRILLIANT