Newsletter

This year–indeed, the last few years–our world has often felt like all too much. Attacks on our academic fields have been coupled with attacks on our communities and our neighbors near and far, attacks on our histories, attacks on our collective abilities to cultivate critical knowledge in the service of more just and vibrant futures for all. In Ethnic Studies, we know this world. We know its roots and its branches. We also inhabit traditions that learn from the steadfast refusals, alternatives, and possible futures long studied, designed, and rehearsed against these violent terms.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant provide a useful framework to describe this dynamic: the ongoing encounter between racial despotism and racial democracy. Despotism, Omi and Winant tell us, refers to “the deprivation of life, liberty, or land; dispossession, violence, confinement, coerced labor, exclusion, and denial of rights or due process.” In the United States, we know, such practices have been predicated on the production and maintenance of racism and its racial logics.

And yet, arrayed against this racial despotism, Omi and Winant emphasize, following Robin D. G. Kelley, are freedom dreams–“among the most enduring contributions to the foundation of democracy in the modern world.”

With this idea in mind, Dr. Ruha Benjamin has recently urged us to consider what the first step is in unleashing the potential for freedom dreams: “to quiet the cynical voice in our heads that stands watch, guarding the borders of our imagination. Shhh,” Benjamin writes … “Do you hear? That is the sound of our collective dreams digging tunnels, scaling walls, and making a way outta no way.”

The sound of our students’ imaginations, inside and outside of our classrooms, these last few years, this is the sound of freedom dreaming. It’s the sound, not only of digging tunnels and scaling walls, but also the organized chaos of fortifying foundations and rehearsing the worlds we wish to inhabit.

The Department of Ethnic Studies has sought to accompany our students in this dreaming, to nourish our collective dreaming with knowledge, inquiry, curiosity. And despite, or perhaps because, of the intensity of the current encounter between despotism and democracy, Ethnic Studies has sought to marshal all the abundance we can muster.

This year alone, in the Department, 50 faculty members, lecturers, graduate students, and staff offered you over 100 courses, plus well over a dozen additional student-facilitated Decals, Berkeley Connect courses, and staff-run seminars. Individual student enrollments across these courses totaled well over 5000.

This year, the Department nourished our dreaming by sponsoring or cosponsoring numerous academic events that shed light on the present. In the month of April alone, the Department supported at least a dozen public events, from the legacies of the Page Act, to trans Indigenous theory, to Palestine, Here, There, and Everywhere. (For a full archive of events, see the Ethnic Studies Calendar.)

The Department’s PhD program, the first of its kind, marked its 40th anniversary with a day-long symposium reckoning with various flashpoints, past and present, in the history and trajectory of the field. More on this event below! (Berkeleyside covered the symposium with a wonderful feature!)

And since the work of nourishing the imagination with knowledge operates on time scales of years and decades, the Department has been intentional in growing its faculty ranks. More on an historic faculty recruitment season below!

In a moment when work like ours is demeaned, defamed, and defunded, Berkeley Ethnic Studies is making historic investments in the scholarship and teaching our faculty and students pursue. Today, tomorrow, and for years to come.

My term as Department Chair ends this summer. It’s been a true honor to do the work alongside such incredible students, faculty, and staff.

Dr. Lorena Oropeza has graciously agreed to serve as the next Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies, effective July 1, 2025! Dr. Oropeza is an award-winning historian whose research sits at the intersection of race, empire, and Chicano Studies. She is the author of ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Vietnam War Era (2005) and The King of Adobe: Reis López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement (2019), and is currently at work on A Mexican History of The United States

Dr. Oropeza joined the Berkeley faculty in 2022, after over 25 years at UC Davis, where she was a professor of History and, most recently, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Diversity. Since arriving at Berkeley, Dr. Oropeza has been an instant and impactful leader and program builder, serving as coordinator of the Chicanx Latinx Studies Program, the co-lead of the Latinx and Democracy Cluster, and the faculty lead of the Berkeley Faculty Writing Collective.

The Department is in great hands with this visionary, collaborative, and creative leader!