Necessary Trouble: Thinking with the Legacy of John R. Lewis

Savannah Shange is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and also serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Her research interests include gentrification, multiracial coalition, ethnographic ethics, Black femme gender, and abolition. She earned a PhD in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania, a MAT from Tufts University, and a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her first book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area.

David H. Anthony, III is Professor of African History at UC Santa Cruz. He graduated from New York University, and earned his MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at Coppin State College (now University), the University of Oregon, and since 1988, the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has done field work in Tanzania, Lesotho, and South Africa, and been published in African Studies Review, Social Sciences and Mission, Journal of Religion in Africa, Journal of Anglican Studies, among others.

Cat Brooks is an artivist, community leader, mother and passionate public speaker.  She is the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, whose mission is to eradicate state violence in communities of color, and Executive Director of the Justice Teams Network, a statewide coalition of organizations working to end state violence.

Andrea del Carmen Vázquez is a Doctoral Student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Education and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Departments. As an education anthropologist her work locates the everyday mechanisms of geographies of anti-blackness and how they shape the lives of Black and Latinx youth in Mexican/Chicanx Californian communities. Her areas of expertise include ethnography, anti-blackness/blackness, liberal statecraft, multiracial coalition, women of color theorizing and anthropology of education.

John Brown Childs is a professor emeritus of sociology and serves on the advisory committee for John R. Lewis College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Childs received the Distinguished Social Sciences Emeriti Award in 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the State University of New York, Buffalo and has published numerous works, including Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect. His research interests include  Sociology of knowledge; religion and social action; elitist and populist social movements; ethnicity; race; nationalism; global community.

The struggle to protect voting rights must go on. Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement can help.

Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez is a UC Santa Cruz alumnus who is the founder and Executive Director of Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos. He established the organization in 1977 to promote multicultural social justice, nonviolence, and economic equity through cultural healing, civic leadership, and youth & community development. Alejandrez was honored and awarded the prestigious ACLU of Northern California Chief Justice Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award in 2021. 

Sylvanna M. Falcón is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz and Director of the Research Center for the Americas. Falcón is an award-winning educator and author of Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations (University of Washington Press, 2016, winner of the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association) and the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021) and New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights (Routledge, 2011). She is the director of the Research Center for the Americas, the first research unit in the University of California system to advance a broad program of interdisciplinary research that brings together Chicanx/Latinx and Latin American studies. She is also the founder and director of UCSC’s Human Rights Investigations Lab.

Christine Hong is chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Associate Professor of Literature, and co-director of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2020). Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and she is the co-editor of the journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Chisato (Chisa) Hughes is a half-Japanese filmmaker who grew up in Humboldt County and is finishing an MFA in Social Documentary at UC Santa Cruz. Their thesis film, Many Moons, is a hybrid documentary that asks questions about ghosts and placemaking today– looking at the history of the expulsions in Humboldt and the Chinese people who, often with the help of local tribes, continued to live in the county despite the threat of white violence. Chisa’s research and interests revolve around Asian American identities, Indigenous-Asian solidarities, anti-carceral feminisms and the power of the ‘speculative’ in documentary. Before coming to Santa Cruz they were an organizer with California Coalition for Women Prisoners, and HAPI, Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. Chisato believes in documentary as a site for empathy, a means for reckoning social histories and subjective relationships, and for bearing witness.

Steve McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Labor Studies at UC Santa Cruz. His research interests include work, gender, migration, race, and globalization. He is the author of Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High Tech Production in the Philippines (2006), and co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (2021), and New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012).  Since 2014, he has also led community-initiated student-engaged research (CISER) projects conducted across Santa Cruz County, focused on: low-wage labor (Working for Dignity), affordable rental housing (No Place Like Home), immigrant and mixed-status families (We Belong), and the legacies of early Filipino farm workers (Watsonville is in the Heart). 

California Secretary of State Shirley Nash Weber is the first African American to serve in this role and only the fifth to serve as a state constitutional officer in California’s 170-year history. Secretary Weber was a professor for four decades in the Department of Africana Studies at San Diego State University and also served four terms as an Assembly Member representing California’s 79th Assembly District. Her family’s experience in the Jim Crow South has driven her activism and legislative work to secure and expand civil rights for all Californians. As a legislator, Weber’s tireless quest for equity has resulted in her pursuit of reforms focused on education and social and criminal justice. She has championed legislation on: school finance accountability, ethnic studies, quality instruction, elections reform, voting rights, Affirmative Action, law enforcement use-of-force restrictions, reparations, inclusive jury selection, resources for exonerees, restorative justice and combating racial profiling. Secretary Weber has chaired numerous important groups such as the Select Committee on Campus Climate, which was created to examine hate crimes on California campuses, and the California Legislative Black Caucus, which consists of the state’s African American legislators with the goal of promoting equal opportunity for California’s African American community.

Katharyne Mitchell is the Dean of the Division of Social Sciences and a Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. A Guggenheim and Brocher Foundation Fellow, Dean Mitchell’s research explores citizenship, migration, transnationalism, social movements, urban political geography, education, and critical humanitarian studies. She is the author of Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (Pluto Press, 2018) and Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis (Temple University Press 2004), and editor of the book, Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy (Oxford, 2008).

Elizabeth Beaumont is an Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching center on issues of democratic citizenship, constitutionalism, civic engagement and education. She is the author of The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path Toward Constitutional Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her current research examines the struggle against the promise of egalitarian democracy that has been waged by white supremacist and nationalist groups since the 1860s. Previously, she was a Research Scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she helped lead the Foundation’s research on civic education and civic and political engagement among U.S. college students. Her co-authored books, Educating for Democracy (Wiley, 2007) and Educating Citizens (Jossey-Bass, 2010), are resource texts for the American Democracy Project. Among other roles, she serves on the Academic Advisory Board for the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, works with the non-partisan ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, and helped found the Puentes Initiative, a UCSC campus-community partnership to support the Santa Cruz immigrant community.

Hiroshi Fukurai is a Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz and has served as President of the Asian Law Society Association (ALSA). His specializations include lay adjudication, Original Nation Approaches to International Law (ONAIL), private international law, race and law, and Asian law and politics. His recent books span a variety of topics: Prosecution Review Commissions and the Japanese Prosecution (Iwanami, 2022, in press); Original Nation Approaches to Inter-National Law: The Quest for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Nature in the Age of Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); East Asia’s Renewed Respect for the Rule of Law in the 21st Century (Brill, 2015); Japan and Civil Jury Trials: The Convergence of Forces (Edward Elgar, 2015); and Nuclear Tsunami: The Japanese Government and America’s Role in the Fukushima Disaster (Lexington Books, 2015).

Rekia Jibrin is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in Education at UC Santa Cruz. Her scholarship speaks to the ways that schools shape race relations in America. In a context of Black Lives Matter and youth-inspired social movements against forms of racialized state punishment, conceptualizing and instituting alternatives to punitive institutional cultures also involves resisting the complicity of reforms in reproducing antiblackness and class oppression. Rekia’s work illuminates these very tensions in schools, centering how neoliberal discourses of justice can reproduce hegemonic logics of race, class, and gendered oppression. A transnational migrant from the Muslim north of Nigeria to the most segregated “internal colonies” of urban America, Rekia’s commitment to transformative and critical scholarship and teaching is grounded in her own involvement in justice movements against police violence and the criminalization of young people, and the collective work of struggling for a more humane and sustainable world.

Linnea Beckett is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and the Director of the Apprenticeship in Community Engaged Research or (H)ACER, an interdisciplinary community-engaged research and undergraduate learning program housed at Colleges Nine and John R. Lewis College. Grounded in popular education and informed by feminist and decolonial theories, Linnea’s research studies anti-racist and anti-colonial participatory learning processes in the classroom and beyond. Her research informs her programming as the director of the (H)ACER program, where she teaches courses on community-engaged research and facilitates undergraduate community learning experiences.

Alicia Riley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Core Faculty in Global and Community Health at University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies the health effects of structural inequity, with a particular focus on their modifiability through policy and other types of social change. Her research sits at the intersections of sociology, epidemiology, demography, and public health, and is currently organized around four lines of inquiry: 1) structural disparities in COVID-19 mortality and related consequences; 2) the enduring impacts of structural racism for health in later life, 3) state policy and modifiable health gradients in the U.S., and 4) migration and health over the life course. In addition to her research and teaching on health inequity, she has a longstanding involvement in im/migrant rights organizing. She completed her postdoctoral training at UCSF, her PhD and MA in Sociology at University of Chicago, her MPH in Epidemiology/Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and her MA in Latin American Studies at Stanford University. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, she worked in community health in non-profit and government settings.

Nancy Chen is a Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society in the Division of Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she focuses on the study of healing narratives, chronic and infectious diseases, traditional medical knowledge, and intersections between the body politic, gender, ethnicity, and medicine. She has conducted fieldwork in mainland China, primarily, with comparative research in the United States. Her books include Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health: Nutrition, Medicine, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2007).

James Doucet-Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University of California San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. He applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities. His book, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) addresses thorny bioethical issues about pharmaceutical power, medical (mis)treatment of patients belonging to marginalized groups, and issues of consent, remuneration, and trust.

Cristina Gamboa, M.D. is an obstetrician-gynecologist and Director of Ambulatory Women’s Health at Salud Para La Gente, a health center committed to providing comprehensive quality care regardless of ability to pay or insurance status. She completed her specialized training at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Residency Program in San Francisco, earned her medical degree at the University of Illinois in Chicago and her Bachelor of Science in Psychobiology from UCLA. She is a Board Member of the Pajaro Valley Health Trust and the California Breastfeeding Coalition.

Dr. Gamboa has a special interest in maternal health as it relates to the Latinx community, focusing her clinical work and advocacy efforts on Latinx immigrant women, agricultural field workers, young mothers, and others with life adversities that influence the health and well-being of mother, baby and community. She is a native of Visalia, California, a largely agricultural city located in the San Joaquin Valley, and comes from two generations of agricultural laborers.