Previous Initiatives

Faithe J. Day has a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Michigan and a BA in English and Digital Humanities. As a researcher, writer, and digital creative Dr. Day develops curriculum, data collection, and curation projects in collaboration with other scholars to identify critical frameworks and best practices to ensure an ethical and justice-centered approach to data curation, with a focus on Black and LGBTQIA+ Data and Discourse. Dr. Day is also the creator of the "Black Living Data Booklet" a manual and a manifesto on the ethical engagement of data on and for Black communities. This work brings greater awareness to issues of data privacy, ethics, and ownership in developing personal and community based archives, and this work is currently featured as part of the Princeton University "Visualizing the Virus" project.

Through working with students in the Student Engagement and Enrichment in Data Science (SEEDS) program, Dr. Day will expand upon the “Black Living Data Booklet” in order to create a culturally informed curriculum which focuses on teaching data and information science in a way that centers the contributions of communities of color. In addition, through research mentorship and critical engagement, students will perform a mixed method analysis of online video content, online comments sections, posts, and tweets from platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Especially as online platforms act as spaces of recognition and representation for intersectionally marginalized communities, these projects reinforce the importance of community and culture when collecting and analyzing social media data.

As the Lead Editor of the CLIR Collaborative Futures Project, Dr. Day is also committed to engaging writers and research teams in employing Afrofuturism and Queer of Color Critique in interdisciplinary collaborations. Through philosophical understandings of epistemology, hermeneutics and existentialism Dr. Day plans to engage students and participants in postmodern, speculative and/or imaginative understandings of the role of data and information in our current reality and beyond. By centering the research and contributions of Black diasporic people in the study of culture and technology, we will utilize Black feminist, queer, and decolonial frameworks to understand the ethical, cultural, and sociopolitical role that digital media and technology plays in our understanding of Black communication practices and performance both online and offline.

Foltz's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 surrounding 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.

My current research project seeks to make ethnographically visible how black dwellers of urban peripheries of African diaspora cities such as Santiago de Cali (Colombia) and São Paulo (Brazil) respond to enduring forms of space-based racial injustices. The multi-sited research aims at identifying extralegal or outlawed everyday practices such as informal settlements, pirate-taxi, the practice of “rebusque” (hustling), the participation of black youth (particularly black men) in street gangs, and retaliatory violence against the police, as insurgent spatial practices seeking to decolonize the antiblack city. In mapping out these forms of resistance, the research also aims to provide a race-centered anthropological account of urban marginality that challenge conventional narratives of city politics. I ask: how might a focus on outlawed practices of black urban dwellers expand our understanding of urban politics of resistance usually framed through the limited lenses of “the right to the city”? How is everyday life reproduced and sustained within the margins of these anti-black urbanities? Through an unapologetic Fanonian reading of the wretched of the city, I pay attention to a myriad of programs of spatial discipline (such as community police and NGO’s pedagogical innitiatives to “save” black children), the spatial praxis of black youth resisting such hegemonic urban projects, as well as the alternative black spatialities that emerge from such territorial contests This research takes issues with "the right to the city" perspective for its inability (unwillingness?) to accommodate the specificities of the black experience; a precarious condition that, I argue, is foundational to the racialized regime of urban citizenship. Blackpolis, thus, is a project that builds on an alternative theoretical foundation -- in dialogue with interventions in the field of black studies, critical urban studies, and urban anthropology -- to present an utopic account of black urban life in these two racially charged and dystopic violent contexts.

Jean Beaman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was previously on the faculty at Purdue University and has held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and chapters. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Editor of H-Net Black Europe, an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.