Working Groups

This working group aims to provide a forum for faculty, postdocs and doctoral students from across the schools to reflect on the various impacts of the pandemic as a global and historic shift and on the increasingly exposed limits of capitalism, with specific attention to informed alternatives.

Coordinators: Aniko Imre and Patricia Burch

This group interrogates what forms of agency underpin our own understanding of migrants and refugees, in order to better understand the discourses of their experience traveling throughout the diaspora. We aim to make the global patterns of circulation—of capital, commodities, and people—visible in order to remap and rethink migratory flows.

Coordinators: Brian Bernards, Lillian Ngan, and Christopher Chien

This reading group considers the ground breaking ideas and work of Cedric Robinson and his key text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.

Coordinators: Ben Carrington and Taj Frazier

We study books, writing, wordless communication, and record-keeping—past/present, scholarly/public, material/virtual—as well as transmissions of knowledge via tangible/immaterial means, and communities of production/interpretation. We share our work in progress, and consider scholarship on histories and theories of books and reading.

Coordinators: Lisa Pon, Malachai Bandy, and Frederic Clark

What is the Global South? This group will discuss its historical and contemporary formation, with a focus on capitalism, race, empire, and the modern state.

Coordinators: Daniel Delgado, Wolf Gruner, Issay Matsumoto

This working group examines the challenges and concerns associated with the resurgence of interest in interplanetary exploration, space tourism, speculative mining, and extraterrestrial colonization.

Coordinators: Meredith Hall, Ella Klik, and Jennifer Petersen

Discussions of work-in-progress and shared readings on theories of translation among scholars and translators.

Coordinators: Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús and Veli N. Yashin

This working group will bridge the fields of architecture, history, and political theory to foster interdisciplinary discussions of the political-aesthetic practices of colonization and decolonization.

Coordinators: Ginger Nolan and Harrison Diskin

We help shape new historical and humanities scholarship on the residents of the United States that lack legal status, usually referred to as “undocumented.”

Coordinators: George Sanchez and Julia Brown-Bernstein

Electronic communication has radically altered our sense of time and place. This group will explore how poetry and painting have spawned innovative narratives that address the technology era’s crisis of perception.

Coordinators: Mark Irwin and Enrique Martinez Celaya

We will think through the concept of “futurity” and collectively consider the stakes of future visions, asking: What do speculative visions reflect about the present and our current structures of society? What is at stake in different articulations of the future?

Coordinators: Ben Bush, Laura Nelson, and Mary Sweeney

This working group studies Latinx Media in its various manifestations: TV, film, music, art, theater, journalism, etc . We will read classic and recent texts on Latinx Media and discuss works in progress presented by members.

Coordinators: Elda María Román and Jonathan Leal

MASTS is an interdisciplinary community of knowledge and action that aims to rigorously and playfully build better media infrastructures, strengthen public life, and advance social justice

Coordinators: Mike Ananny and Colin Maclay

A collaboration between academics and museum professionals to investigate the ways in which museums collect, display, and narrate cultures, past and present, with a focus on objects that prove particularly resistant, provocative,  recalcitrant, nonconforming … “difficult” and why.

Coordinator: Daniela Bleichmar

We seek to find and create a reckoning with issues of social justice, related to racial capitalism, redlining, asymmetrical global development and environmental degradation, within the field of GeoHumanities.

Coordinators: Priya Jaikumar and Neetu Khanna

We are scholars from a range of disciplines with a focus on media and culture within Sound Studies framework. Our group’s interest lies in the emergence of sound, hearing versus listening of voice and sound, and sonic reproduction.

Coordinators: Sarah Kessler and Anna Sbitneva

A working group (open to faculty and students) that meets monthly to discuss the intersections of theory and the study of pre-modernity.

Coordinators: Cavan Concannon and Frederic Nolan Clark

This working group seeks to excavate layers of L.A., including geological, racial and economic, and infrastructural stratifications, among others. It unearths and juxtaposes the layers of Greater Los Angeles to expose, chart, and analyze its changing worlds, at local levels and through connections to macro geopolitical and ecological phenomena.

Coordinators: Christina Dunbar-Hester and Andrew Lakoff