In January of 2023, I joined the Feminist Research Institute (FRI) as a research assistant and worked on a project exploring the mobility justice movement. As an undergraduate student new to research, I was expecting to mostly observe the graduate students and FRI’s Director, Sarah McCullough, as they championed the project. In most research settings, undergraduate students play minor roles and mostly observe. Instead, I became a fully integrated member of the research team, an experience that has profoundly shaped my understanding of equity, mentorship, and learning.
Is it possible to intervene in the racist zoning practices that are fueling displacement in cities across the United States? FRI Postdoctoral Fellow Kai Wen Yang’s new article in Urban Geography, Zoning initiatives, divide or unite?
Thank you to everyone who participated in making FRI’s Strategic Planning Workshop a great success!*
More than 30 people showed up on a stormy morning and joined us online. Those in attendance included undergraduate and graduate students and faculty from over 15 departments, staff from several offices, one state government agency, as well as engaged community members.
In “Serena Williams’ Catsuit and #BlackMommaMagic: Speaking Back Through Fashion,” published today in Dismantle, Sarah Rebolloso McCullough brings a feminist sports studies lens to recent controversies surrounding Serena Williams’ tennis attire, and situates them in a historical context that dates back centuries.
Kalindi Vora investigates relationships between gestational surrogates and commissioning parents as part of a larger discussion of the ethics of increasingly globalized assisted reproductive technologies in “Biopolitics of Trust in the Technosphere: A Look at Surrogacy, Labor, and Family,” published in the latest issue of Technosphere magazine.
Cultural Studies doctoral candidate Jeanelle Hope is researching the role black women artists play in combatting gentrification in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento. Hope places gentrification in a greater historical context of a racial resegregation that has been ongoing since deindustrialization.
What opportunities and tensions arise in the production of public scholarship at the intersection of scholar-activism and civic engagement in California's Central Valley?
Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and borders are central frames for the feminist research of Ethnic Studies doctoral candidates Leslie Quinatanilla and Jennifer Mogannam. Quintanilla’s research on the U.S.-Mexico border is in conversation with women of color feminism. Mogannam examines what is happening in Palestine through a framework of settler colonialism.
Pharmacologist Renae Ryan discusses gender equity in STEM, institutional change-making, and the value and importance of inclusive and diverse research teams.
Natasha Myers’ work is grounded in a thinking through of feminism as a political theory of the asymmetries of power in relations not only between humans but also between humans and the “more than human” world. Much of Myers’ work explores the possibilities of an aspirational episteme in service to plant beings, termed the Planthropocene.
