Collaboratory Participants
Collaboratory Participants
Erika Barbosa (PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a concentration in Art Practice, UC San Diego, Visual Arts) is an artist and art historian. Her research is concerned with the role of design in everyday choreographies of power, and the materiality of visible and invisible modes of policing in the United States. She is currently working with community members, civil rights attorneys, and archivists in Los Angeles to examine the semiotics of criminal documentation, and bureaucratic archival procedures.
Kim Clark (PhD student in Communication, UC San Diego) researches the logics of mediation and speculation, often unwritten, which emerge from and drive racial and economic justice organizing. A Ford Predoctoral Fellow, her dissertation focuses on proactive team-based approaches of audio/visual monitoring and documenting of enforcement agency activity in Afrodiaspora neighborhoods in New York and California. Extensive documentation has been generated through this collective cultural practice, “copwatching,” and is slowly becoming publicly archived. Clark interrogates the imperative for both research collaborators and the researcher to not only draw from archives, but to simultaneously contribute to and build historical traces and records.
Catherine Czacki (PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a concentration in Art Practice, UC San Diego, Visual Arts) is an artist, art historian, and writer. She is invested in artistic practices and poetry as tools for self -healing and/or agency––as well as potential critical strategies against dominant forms of knowledge production. She is currently writing about the Sonora Market in Mexico City, a site where material culture intersects the everyday with religious, economic, cultural and aesthetic valuations of objects.
Jonah Gray (PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, UC San Diego, Visual Arts) is an art historian and curator. He researches comparative constructions of the self in contemporary art, particularly as they intersect with questions of identity and the politics of Indigeneity and whiteness in Canada and the US. He is a member of the editorial collective of Field Journal. As Curator of Discursive projects at Or Gallery, Vancouver, he ran the lecture series Curating the Self and the podcast Post-Studio Visit.
Shoghig Halajian (PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, UC San Diego, Visual Arts and Co-Director, Human Resources LA) is an art historian, curator, and organizer. Her research employs a feminist and queer reading of historical narratives, and explores visuality’s implications on the material conditions of bodies and on legislation.
Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She received her PhD in Anthropology (Women's Studies) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include: race, gender and sexuality in sound studies, ethnography, history of anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, psychoanalysis, queer studies, Iran, diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and Zora Neale Hurston studies. She has published Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: NYU Press, 2015).
Shaista Patel, a scholar of Critical Muslim Studies, is Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. She received her PhD in Social Justice Education and graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from University of Toronto. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her primary research interests include diverse fields such as Critical Muslim, Transnational, Critical Indigenous, South Asian and Black feminist studies. Her past and future publications traverse discrepant spatialities and temporalities in order to re-examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of bodies, colonialism, race, gender, religion, caste, capitalism, and relations of labor. She is primarily interested in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, questions of solidarity (from Palestine, North America to Kashmir), and cultural and social movements with special emphasis on questions of non-Black, non-Indigenous people of color complicity in settler colonialism. Her work has appeared as book chapters from Palgrave Macmillan and UBC Presses. She’s also published articles in Theory & Event, Feral Feminisms (as co-editor of an issue), and Cultural Studies (forthcoming).
Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2008. His forthcoming book Art and the Ecologies of the Modern Imagination (University of Chicago Press) is based on an ethnography of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exploring the technologies, climatic infrastructures, and forms of care and labor required to prevent artworks from falling apart. Additionally, he has written on how different forms of subjectivity and objectivity are produced, focusing, for example, on the relationship between enhancement technologies and political subjectivity or on the politics of design and urban infrastructures. He is also the co-editor of The Politics of Knowledge (Routledge 2012).
Katherine Steelman (PhD student, UC San Diego, Ethnic studies) is a cultural historian and writer. Broadly, her work examines how sexually non-normative spaces are socially and materially constructed in Tijuana, BC, MX. She takes up US cultural production, as well as the Tijuanense response to the US's narrative of the city and it's communities that might be called queer. This work juxtaposes critical analyses of cultural texts with ethnographic interviews. Currently, she is working on a project that engages cultural representations of Haiti in the US and Mexico, as well as collaborative ethnographic work with Haitian migrants in Tijuana.
Alena J. Williams is Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history and film and media studies. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research areas include film and media history and theory, modern and contemporary art, rhetoric of visual culture, theories of modernity, and the epistemology of the image. Since 2016, Williams has organized the campus-based research initiative, The Visual Cultures of Work, which focuses on working practices: affective relations governing artistic and intellectual labor; the “commons” and the common good; and the range of drives and investments that inhabit one’s production. Past speakers include: Giovanna Zapperi, Sabeth Buchmann, Joseph Masco, Laura Smith, Kaucyila Brooke, and Rachel O’Reilly.
K. Wayne Yang is Provost of Muir College and Associate Professor & Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. K. Wayne Yang’s work transgresses the line between scholarship and community, as evidenced by his involvement in urban education and community organizing. He was the co-founder of the Avenues Project, a non-profit youth development organization, and also the co-founder of East Oakland Community High School. He also worked in school system reform as part of Oakland Unified School District’s Office of School Reform. An accomplished educator, Dr. Yang has taught high school in Oakland, California for over 15 years and is a recipient of the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Yang writes about decolonization and everyday epic organizing, particularly from underneath ghetto colonialism, often with his frequent collaborator, Eve Tuck. Currently, they are convening The Land Relationships Super Collective, editing the book series, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, and editing the journal, Critical Ethnic Studies. He is interested in the complex role of cities in global affairs: cities as sites of settler colonialism, as stages for empire, as places of resettlement and gentrification, and as always-already on Indigenous lands.
Image: Pia Arke, Legende I-V series, 1999 (detail)