African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley

09/07/2026

Slide 1:Episode 3 of Office Hours, “Black Feminist Epistemology,” is now live!

Today’s conversation is with Dr. Nikki Jones and our Digital Black Storytelling fellow Racceb Arikew .Dr. Jones is a professor in the department of African American Studies at Berkeley. She served as the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair of African American Studies from 2021-2024 and has been on faculty in the UC-system for over twenty years. Her work examines the experiences of Black women, men, and youth with the criminal legal system, policing, and violence.

She is the author of two books: Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence (2010) and The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption (2018), which received the Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology in 2020. She is currently at work on her third book, Brutal & Routine, which examines the enduring legacy of racist policing in the U.S. and the promise of abolitionist dreams.

Her more recent work includes the analysis of interviews with police officers and the analysis of video recordings of lethal and routine encounters between Black people and the police. Records of these encounters are housed in her research lab. Professor Jones has shared her expertise with numerous print, radio, and television news media outlets, including NPR, KCBS Radio, Axios.com, History.com, BBC World Newshour, Minnesota Public Radio, Time Magazine, KQED’s Forum, Ireland Today, Australia Broadcasting Corporation (The Drum), SF Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, and CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” among others. Professor Jones is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Race and Gender; the Department of Women and Gender Studies; and the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC-Berkeley.

Slide 2: How to Tune In

SoundCloud:
YouTube: -American-Studies-UCB

🔗 Links available in our bio!

A special thank you to our amazing friend Candice Hoyes for supporting this project with her music! Each episode will feature the musical cadences of ‘Zora’s Moon’ written by Candice Hoyes and Sullivan Fortner; produced by Natash

08/31/2026

Slide 1:

Episode 2 of Office Hours, “Legalized Inequalities: Anti-Blackness & Immigration,” is now live!

Today’s conversation is with Dr. Darlène Dubuisson and our Digital Black Storytelling fellows Mira McDavitt and Manny Rivas. Dr. Dubuisson is an assistant professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, within the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies. As a sociocultural anthropologist, Dubuisson’s research engages Black feminist theory, Black intellectual history, speculative fiction, apocalyptic anthropology, and migration and transnational studies.

Her work examines how Black intellectual thought, migration, and feminist praxis intersect to shape public life, with a focus on the lived experiences and imaginative horizons of Black communities across the Americas, with an emphasis on Haiti and the Caribbeans.Her current research project concerns how Black transit migrants in Mexico engage practices of love and kin-work to forward futures amid transnational anti-Blackness and xenophobia.By combining ethnography, textual analysis, and critical theory, she examines how people build solidarities and articulate futures in contexts marked by displacement, inequality, and state power.

Beyond her scholarship, Dubuisson is an immigrant rights advocate and serves as an expert witness for Haitian asylum cases in the United States.

Tune in for a riveting conversation on the nature of anti-Blackness & Black political subjecthood across Latin America.

Slide 2: How to Tune In

SoundCloud:
YouTube: -American-Studies-UCB
🔗 Links available in our bio!

Slide 3: Upcoming Episodes
Sept 7: Ep. 3 – “Black Feminist Epistemology” ft. Dr. Nikki Jones
A special thank you to our amazing friend Candice Hoyes for supporting this project with her music! Each episode will feature the musical cadences of ‘Zora’s Moon’ written by Candice Hoyes and Sullivan Fortner; produced by Natasha Diggs. All music was used by permission of Candice Hoyes.

08/27/2026

Congratulations to our very own Dr. Tianna Paschel!

Tianna Paschel, the new Faculty Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, welcomes the CLACS community back to campus for an exciting new year!

Read her welcome message: https://clacs.berkeley.edu/news/welcome-tianna-paschel-clacs-new-faculty-director

08/27/2026

African American & African Diaspora Studies
Erskine A. Peters Reading Room
675 Social Sciences Building
Fall 2026 Open Hours

Monday - Friday | 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Come through for a space to work, study, and build community!

Office hours with African American Studies Librarian Michele McKenize: Thursdays, 2:00 - 4:00 pm. Your time to learn about research, how to navigate digital and physical libraries, and get help on any topic or subject area!

08/27/2026

Black Critical Theory Initiative | Biannual Public Lecture | Fall 2026

‘“Seeing Hints of a Trans Fella’: Holotypic Black Feminisms, Stereoscopic Transantagonisms” with Cecilio M. Cooper, Independent Scholar

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 | 4:00 pm
820 Social Sciences Bldg (Social Science Matrix)

Register to attend: events.berkeley.edu/africam or link in bio.

Impelled by Hortense Spillers’ and Sylvia Wynter’s interventions, the ‘black female’, ‘black woman’, ‘black femme’, ‘black feminine,’ ‘black girl’, ‘black mother’, ‘bulldagger’, and so on have become valorized topics of gender analysis while also being intermittently leveraged to camouflage collusion with negrophobic antitrans retrenchment. Suffering deemed intrinsic to both structural emplotment beneath these specific racial headings and the sex-gender binary writ large has long been narrated as stemming from black experiences with coercive masculinization. This talk not only critically appraises black transmasculinity’s aporetic function for cis-aspirant parsings of black female/woman from black male/man. Via psychosexual questions about aesthetics, taxonomy, and visuality, it likewise contends with the ways black transmasculinity and black trans manhood have been deployed as foils to ideal trans(gender) subjectivity.

If you require accommodations to fully participate, please contact Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4524 with as much advance notice as possible.

Hosted by UC Berkeley African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies.

08/24/2026

[Sound On] Episode 1 of Office Hours, “Blackness Without Borders,” is now live!

Today’s conversation is between Dr. Tianna Paschel (Tianna Paschel) , our Digital Black Studies Fellows Bryce Woods and Kiara Price, and our Graduate Student Researcher Sam Jean-Francois. Dr. Paschel is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California – Berkeley. She is interested in the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America.

Professor Paschel is the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects Professor Paschel is also the co-editor – along with Petra Rivera-Rideau and Jennifer Jones – of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and blackness in the Americas. Her most recent project, Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide co-written with Dr. Christina Mora, examines how people living amid stark economic and racial disparities interpret and navigate the inequalities that shape their everyday lives.
Tune in for a riveting conversation on the nature of anti-Blackness & Black political subjecthood across Latin America.

Slide 2: How to Listen

SoundCloud:

YouTube: -American-Studies-UCB

🔗 Links available in our bio!

Slide 3: Upcoming Episodes

Aug 31: Ep. 2 – “Legalized Inequalities” ft. Dr. Darlène Dubuisson
Sept 7: Ep. 3 – “Black Feminist Epistemology” ft. Dr. Nikki Jones

A special thank you to our amazing friend Candice Hoyes for supporting this project with her music! Each episode will feature the musical cadences of ‘Zora’s Moon’ written by Candice Hoyes and Sullivan Fortner; produced by Natasha Diggs. All music was used by permission of Candice Hoyes.

08/21/2026

Slide 1:
The UC Berkeley African American & African Diaspora Studies Department is proud to present Office Hours: a limited student created podcast series free and accessible to all.

In the wake of ongoing threats to Black intellect and history, this series was born out of an urgent need to discuss: How Black Studies—and its rich, enduring tradition of storytelling—might further ground us in this era of gratuitous anti-Black violence, fear, and political unrest?

Across three episodes, our Undergraduate Digital Storytelling Fellows—Racceb Arikew, Mira Sky McDavitt, Bryce Woods, Kiara Price, and Manny Rivas—explore critical interventions in Black Studies. Through informal office hour conversations with Dr. Darlène Dubuisson, Dr. Tianna Paschel, and Dr. Nikki Jones, they highlight how Black Studies offers a lens for current events and fosters community.

Special thanks to our lead Graduate Fellow Sam Jean-François and Project Manager Barbara Montano for guiding our fellows, award-winning vocalist and composer Candice Hoyes for her sharing her music with this project, and the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost for their generous support.

Slide 2: Episode Release Schedule
Aug 24: Ep. 1 – “Blackness Without Borders” ft. Dr. Tianna Paschel
Aug 31: Ep. 2 – “Legalized Inequalities” ft. Dr. Darlène Dubuisson
Sept 7: Ep. 3 – “Black Feminist Epistemology” ft. Dr. Nikki Jones

Featuring music by the one and only Candice

Slide 3: How to Listen
SoundCloud:
YouTube: -American-Studies-UCB
🔗 Links available in our bio!

08/19/2026

Memories in Motion: Selected Stories of Mildred Howard
September 2, 2026 | 6-8 pm
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley
Screening followed by conversation with Mildred Howard, Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown, Leigh Raiford, and Irene Denise Ross.
RSVP at events.berkeley.edu/africam or link in bio.

Presented by the Department of African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley in partnership with Hella Black Media and the Oakland Museum of California, along with co-sponsors English, Art Practice, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

“Memories in Motion” is written and directed by Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown and Delency Parham. Produced by Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown, Mario Brown, Mildred Howard, Delency Parham, and Oakland Museum of California. Cinematography by Kevin Kumar and Tristan Custodio. Edited by Mauve Projects. Music by Pat Mesiti-Miller, Makeda, and Jonathan York.

For additional information and/or accessibility needs, contact Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible.

07/24/2026

Is the California dream alive? 💭 📚

ISSI faculty affiliates Tianna Paschel and G. Cristina Mora describe how Californians understand the profound inequality around them in their new book, 'Normalizing Inequality.'

"Rattling off the 'isms' and clinging onto California's exceptionalism, as some of the respondents did, will not make real inequalities more fixable. It will only serve to justify them, tie a bow around them, and relegate them to the background."

Tianna Paschel is an associate professor of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. G. Cristina Mora is Chancellor's Professor of UC Berkeley Sociology and co-director of UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

07/24/2026

Essential reading for anyone interested in Black culture and the history of Liverpool!

ISSI alum and faculty affiliate Stephen Small's new book, Black Liverpool (Liverpool University Press), draws on more than 70 first-hand interviews with Black community residents, workers, activists, and celebrities to examine Liverpool’s unique history.

Stephen Small was the ISSI Director from 2020-2024 and taught in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley from 1995 until his retirement in 2024. He earned his Ph.D. in UC Berkeley Sociology.

About the book: https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781805967521