Fall 2006 Newsletter

Contents:

1. ISSC Celebrates Thirty Years of Research with a Conscience
2. ISSC Oral History Video: “Understanding Change, Changing Our Understanding: Thirty Years of the Institute for the Study of Social Change”
3. Welcome First-year ISSC Graduate Fellows
4. ISSC Enters the Digital Realm with the Digital Youth Media Project
5. FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize
6. 2006-07 ISSC Visiting Scholars
7. Spotlight Event: One Year Later, Reflections on Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities
8. Save the Date: March 8 & 9 -- Spring Conference on Youth Violence Prevention

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1. ISSC Celebrates Thirty Years of Research with a Conscience

This year, ISSC celebrated thirty years of research and mentorship dedicated to understanding the processes of social change in ways that challenge and transform structures of inequality. On Friday, October 20, ISSC sponsored an all-day conference that brought together current and former students, researchers, faculty and staff to celebrate the distinguished life of the Institute. The conference featured a series of panels highlighting several of the significant research projects undertaken at the Institute that have influenced academic research, public debate and social policy and have expanded the boundaries of the social sciences. The scholars who shaped these groundbreaking projects reflected upon their involvement and the broader impacts of their research on the field. In addition, current and former ISSC Graduate Fellows described the significant ways the Fellows program has shaped their careers as scholars and teachers.

To view pictures of the celebration or to download materials presented by some of the conference speakers go here.

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2. ISSC Oral History Video: “Understanding Change, Changing Our Understanding”

During the summer of 2006, ISSC Graduate Student Researcher Eric Pido and Oscar Medina, who is a Graduate Student Researcher at the Center for Latino Policy Research, collaborated on an ambitious project to document the history, mission, and accomplishments of the ISSC. After conducting extensive archival research, as well as reviewing founding documents and other published materials, Eric and Oscar interviewed key faculty, scholars, students and staff who have been involved in the Institute over the past thirty years. In August, Eric and Oscar spent numerous hours editing the video interviews into a 30-minute documentary entitled, “Understanding Change, Changing our Understanding: Thirty Years of the Institute for the Study of Social Change.” The film vividly captures the unique history and path-breaking accomplishments of the ISSC, and it was greeted with high praise when it was shown at ISSC’s 30th anniversary celebration. It will be available for viewing soon on the “About the Institute” page of the ISSC website.

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3. Welcome First-year Graduate Fellows

ISSC is committed to fostering a new generation of scholars who address problems of social change in innovative and interdisciplinary ways. This year, ISSC welcomed 8 new Graduate Fellows, including 3 Youth Violence Prevention Fellows, from a range of disciplines. In addition to receiving monthly stipends, office space and use of a computer, Graduate Fellows enjoy access to a rich array of activities that promote mentoring relations with faculty, collaboration with peers, and the exchange of ideas with a broad audience of academic and community leaders.

Below is a brief description of each new Fellow. For more information about ISSC’s Graduate Fellows Program please go here.
To make a contribution to the Graduate Fellows Program please go to https://colt.berkeley.edu/urelgift/issc.html.

ISSC Youth Violence Prevention Fellows:

George Barganier, Education
George is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education. Originally from Pomona, California, he received his B.S. in Education from Grambling State University and an M.A. in Education from the University of Minnesota. His current research focuses on the political economy of Los Angeles area Black street organizations.

Miranda Lucia Ritterman, Epidemiology
Miranda is a Ph.D. student in Epidemiology at the School of Public Health. Her research interests in the field of social epidemiology focus on the social determinants of adolescent mental and physical health, risk behaviors, and academic achievement. Miranda is currently assisting with a youth-led research project in Oakland and San Francisco public secondary schools, entitled “School-based Violence Prevention: The Integration of Empirically-Supported Programs in Culturally-Diverse, Resource-Poor Settings,” under the direction of UC Berkeley Professor of Public Health Emily Ozer.

Kenzo Sung, Education
Kenzo is currently a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education with an emphasis on Educational Policy and Social Cultural Studies. Kenzo is a second-generation immigrant who graduated from Berkeley High School prior to receiving his B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.A. from Harvard University. His current work focuses on how school policies designed to provide language support structure immigrant students’ social constructions of race.

ISSC Graduate Fellows:

Katrinell Davis, Sociology
Katrinell Davis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology. She has a B.A. in Social Relations with a specialization in African-American History and Culture from James Madison College at Michigan State University, and earned her M.A. in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Katrinell’s dissertation research concentrates on links between employment outcomes, state and labor market institutions, and the changing expressions of racialization in American society.

Lisa Goldman, Public Health
Lisa Goldman is in her second year of the Ph.D. program in Epidemiology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Lisa began her career as a health educator and social worker with Farmworker Health Services Inc. providing services to farmworkers and their families in rural North Carolina during the summers and in Florida during the winters. Her dissertation addresses the growing public health problem of childhood obesity in California’s Mexican immigrant communities.

Ocean Howell, Architecture
Ocean Howell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architecture. He holds an M.S. in Architecture from Berkeley, and a B.A. in Modern Literature from UC Santa Cruz. Ocean has worked as an editor for Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Company, where he created a series of books on Community Building. His dissertation research examines how various conceptions of “publicness”—and their spatial expressions—have factored into the uneven development of San Francisco.

Erica Kohl, Education
Erica Kohl is a doctoral candidate in the Social and Cultural Studies program of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. With a B.A. in Sociology from Reed College and an M.A. in Community Development from UC Davis, Erica has spent the past decade working with a variety of community development and adult education projects. Her dissertation maps and analyzes philanthropic initiatives and partnerships across California’s Central Valley, a place sharply defined by the production of poverty through industrial agriculture.

Gerardo Sandoval, City and Regional Planning
Gerardo Sandoval was born in Antigua, Guatemala. He immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 6 and grew up in the neighborhood he is currently studying for his dissertation, MacArthur Park. Gerardo studied community development as an undergraduate at UC Davis and he completed a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Gerardo’s dissertation sheds light on a fundamental and paradoxical problem facing city planning: how to improve a low income marginal neighborhood without leading to neighborhood residents’ displacement as wealthier residents move into areas undergoing physical and economic investments initiated by redevelopment.

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4. ISSC Enters the Digital Realm with the Digital Youth Media Project

This fall, ISSC opened its doors to The Digital Youth Media Project – an extensive research project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, that studies kids’ use of digital technologies. The project’s Principal Investigators, Peter Lyman, Professor in UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and Mimi Ito of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC, are leading a large team of post-docs and graduate and undergraduate student researchers who are conducting ethnographic studies of kids’ work and thinking online. The findings are intended to determine how these emergent behaviors (e.g., using the Internet, mobile phones, text messaging, etc.) can be linked to learning, both formal and informal. There are three themes that guide this research project:

1. First, the research focuses on how communication networks (e.g., the mobile phone and the Internet) are changing the scale, scope and dynamics of kids’ social worlds, and asks, Is it possible to adapt these tools and practices to promote learning?
    
2. Second, the research looks at how young people are using the technologies of the imagination to use information and create knowledge. Researchers are studying places like the blogs on MySpace, making videos on YouTube, and writing stories on web pages. They have found that, at their best, these environments empower young people to gain their own sense of authority, voice, and knowledge within loosely structured and often mixed-aged peer learning communities.
    
3. Third, researchers are studying games and gaming, ranging from videogames, to online places where kids play, such as Neopets or Runescape. They ask: What do kids think they learn from games? Do skills transfer to other learning places like schools? Do games motivate kids and can this motivation be transferred to learning?

Ultimately the goal of this project is to relate the findings to MacArthur’s intent to improve education, both in schools and in kids’ world of hobbies and play. For more information on The Digital Youth Media Project, go to http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/.

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5. FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize

This fall ISSC announced the creation of the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize. The Prize will be awarded annually to an outstanding young activist who has contributed to social change. The goal of the prize is to establish a knowledge base for understanding and educating people on how to make social change happen. This award of $2,500 supports work that alters the social landscape, often in subtle and previously unappreciated ways. Ideally the honoree’s work should help to build a lasting bridge between the academy and the community. For more about the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize, or to download a nomination form, please go here. (Nominations are due by March 1, 2007.)
To make a contribution to the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize, please go to https://colt.berkeley.edu/urelgift/issc.html.

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6. Introducing ISSC’s Visiting Scholars

ISSC is pleased to host the following Visiting Scholars during the 2006-2007 academic year:

Aaron Cicourel earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego. Professor Cicourel is a prolific scholar with many research interests, including the construction of human nature and the intersections between different levels of analysis used to understand human development.

Lawrence Rosenthal holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at the University of California and San Francisco State University and he specializes in Modern Italian Society and Politics. Dr. Rosenthal has also been a Fulbright Professor at the University of Naples and speaks fluent Italian. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy and The Nation, as well as the SF Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee. This fall, at an ISSC lunch seminar entitled “Bush and Berlusconi: The Rise of the Patrimonial Executive,”

Dr. Rosenthal discussed the profound similarities between the recently-ended government of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and the administration of George W. Bush in the U.S.

Kay Trimberger earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago. She has taught at a number of universities including Columbia University, Barnard College, Queens College of the City University of New York, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and San Jose State University. From 1981 to 2000 she was Coordinator of the Women's Studies (now Women's and Gender Studies) Program at Sonoma State University, where she is currently Professor Emerita. On Wednesday, February 7, 2007 from 12:00 – 1:30pm in the ISSC Conference Room, Dr. Trimberger will serve as a respondent for Dr. Bella DePaulo, who will be presenting her new book, Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After.

Keiko Yamanaka is a sociologist who is a Lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. This fall she taught a course entitled, "Asian American Women: Theory and Experience," in the Asian American Studies Program, and she taught a new course on "Migration and Multiculturalism in Asia," in the Asian Studies Department. Since 1993, Dr. Yamanaka has studied transnational migration and social transformation in Japan, focusing on two contrasting immigrant populations: authorized resident Brazilians of Japanese ancestry, and unauthorized Nepalese. In recent years she has investigated feminized migration, civil actions for migrants' rights and emerging multiculturalism in East Asia.

For more information on how to apply to be a Visiting Scholar at ISSC, please contact Dr. Christine Trost, ctrost@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-7237.

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7. Spotlight Event: One Year Later, Reflections on Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities

On September 7th in the Goldberg Room of the Boalt Hall School of Law, a standing room only crowd participated in a campus-wide event marking the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the nation. The physical destruction of the Gulf Coast was tremendous, but Katrina's most enduring legacy was the unmasking of race and class inequality in America, which became visible in the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans. At the event, Professors John Brown Childs, William Russell Ellis, Jr. and Hardy T. Frye offered reflections on the state of the Gulf Coast one year after the disaster, and discussed their contributions to the book, Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities. One of the first scholarly works to be published post-Katrina, Hurricane Katrina is a collection of multifaceted, critical and personal essays on the many unanswered questions and social quandaries unearthed by the storm. Those in attendance also had the opportunity to watch a captivating short documentary film chronicling grassroots organizing in New Orleans post-Katrina.

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8. Save the Date: March 8 & 9, 2007 – Spring Conference on Youth Violence Prevention

On Thursday and Friday, March 8th and 9th, at the Boalt Hall School of Law, ISSC’s Center on Culture, Immigration and Youth Violence Prevention, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Boalt Hall’s Center for Social Justice, and the Center for Latino Policy Research will co-sponsor a conference on the violence that occurs among and towards youth in Latino and Asian Pacific Islander communities. By analyzing violence as an environmental and societal problem instead of as the action of pathological individuals, the conference seeks to reframe the problem of youth violence. The conference will include a panel of graduate student researchers and four main panels featuring a mix of activists, policymakers, and legal and social science scholars who will identify promising new directions in research, programs, and policy. In addition, Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Life in L.A, will offer a keynote address in the form of The Raven Lecture on Access to Justice. For more information, please go here or contact Dr. Deborah Lustig: dlustig@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-7238.