UC OFFICE OF RESEARCH ANNOUNCES FOUR NEW PROGRAMS

African Studies (five years funding)
Co-Directors: Stephan Miescher and Peter Bloom, UC Santa Barbara

The African Studies multicampus research group will conceive new paradigms for the study of Africa. Scholars from across the UC system will develop further UC's association with African scholars and institutions on the African continent through international conferences in Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, leading to a series of new exchanges. These collaborations will ground the study, teaching, and framework of African Studies in the UC system.

The African Studies Initiative will

establish bonds with African interlocutors and institutions to develop a new research agenda for African Studies;
create outlets for dialogue among Africanists and an emerging generation of graduate students across the UC system;
explore systemwide initiatives in digital technologies for reconceiving teaching and research about African Studies;
identify new locations for African Studies in the Diasporas, China, India, and other Asian contexts.

Activities will include conferences, faculty retreats, dissertation workshops, visiting performers, and a comprehensive website.

Studies of Food and the Body (three years funding)
Director: Carolyn de la Pena, UC Davis

Website: http://foodandbody.ucdavis.edu/

Interest in food and the body has exploded in popular culture, as evidenced in an array of recent popular books. The subjects of such books range from historical explorations of certain commodities as the key to understanding modern life to muckraking exposes of current food production practices. Anxieties about bodily health (and beauty) figure into many of these titles. All suggest that food practices and meanings provide an abiding lens by which to understand human social life.

The Food Studies multicampus research group will bring together faculty and graduate students from across the UC to develop intellectual community, focusing on graduate student training and development and faculty enrichment and collaboration. Graduate students will have the opportunity to present and discuss papers, develop contacts with faculty members outside of their home campus, and create working groups to support their research and publication.

Activities will include a colloquium series, public lectures, working meetings for curriculum development, a website, and a final food, body and health conference.

Transnationalizing Justice (five years funding)
Director: Gina Dent, UC Santa Cruz

Recent U.S. public discourse on issues of justice—war, incarceration, gender violence, global capitalism—has depended increasingly on modes of expertise that exclude feminist engagements. Meanwhile, the academic environment has seen important developments in feminism's ability to theorize explanations for such crises and to diversify responses to them. Transnationalizing Justice seeks to make visible and to enhance feminist interpretations of current conditions in the global juridical and political order. Its goal is to renew and recast the project of social justice within extant disciplinary formations and beyond state and international rubrics of jurisprudence.

UC faculty and students, along with other professionals (media, legal, policy, and service), will develop working relationships to facilitate the transmission of social justice research, eschewing the pragmatic/academic divide. Through a renewed discourse on theoretical and practical approaches, Transnationalizing Justice seeks to open up a more widely accessible—yet complex—dialogue on the idea of justice.

Activities will include conferences, dissertation workshops, faculty/student reading groups, and annual faculty meetings.

UC Initiative in Human Rights (three years funding)
Director: Camille Crittenden, UC Berkeley Human Rights Center

The UC Initiative in Human Rights will establish UC as a leader in human rights research and training, fostering a human rights orientation to graduate and professional work conducted in a range of disciplines. The UC has established human rights centers and programs on several campuses, including UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, UC Davis's Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, and many other programs dealing with related topics, including civil rights, gender and refugee rights, death penalty, social justice, and more.

This initiative will aggregate and showcase UC research endeavors in human rights, while also enriching campus and community awareness of human rights issues by bringing prominent activists and scholars to give lectures and colloquia on participating campuses.

Activities will include graduate student fellowships, a conference and poster session, a comprehensive website, and speaker series.