CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF STRENGTH IN SOLIDARITY |
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CCSRE eNEWSLETTER | OCTOBER 20, 2021 |
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Paula Moya (ENGL) named Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity |
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As institutions of higher learning across the country are addressing this moment of racial reckoning, Moya shares her determination for Stanford and CCSRE to remain leaders in race studies. |
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BY PERLITA R. DICOCHEA | October 18, 2021 |
Paula M. L. Moya, Professor of English and Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities, took the helm of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (CCSRE) in September. Moya has been involved with the Center since its founding 25 years ago, which coincided with her arrival at Stanford.
We sat for a conversation about Moya’s history of leadership at the Center, her upbringing in New Mexico, and her vision for CCSRE.
Attachments to CCSRE
Moya’s long engagement with CCSRE began shortly after she arrived at Stanford in 1996 when she participated in a faculty research workshop on identity. It was there, at the workshop convened by historians Al Camarillo and Estelle
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Paula Moya shares how her love for reading
has lead to her academic career in literature.
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Freedman, that she formed some of her longest-lasting and most productive intellectual relationships. Her future leadership roles grew out of the teaching and scholarship she did through the Center. After earning tenure in 2002, Moya succeeded founder Al Camarillo as CCSRE’s Director of Undergraduate Programs. The position was, Moya explained, a rewarding but tough job, largely because she had little staff support. “The Associate Director position did not exist at the time,” Moya explained. “It was difficult to get any of my own research done for those three years.” |
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Paula Moya's publications include Doing Race, co-edited with Hazel Markus, Davis-Brack Professor in the
Behavioral Sciences.
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Moya was drawn to CCSRE because it offered a supportive space for cutting-edge research on race. “I’ve been exposed to so much innovative research through CCSRE. I’ve become quite attached to the place in part because of how much I have learned as a result of interacting with people at the Center,” she explained.
Following the Sun
Moya grew up in New Mexico, which, unlike most other parts of the country, boasted many Latina/o leaders and everyday markers like
schools were named after people with Spanish surnames. While
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there was certainly racial discrimination in her home state, Moya admits, “I wasn’t aware enough to ever think that I couldn’t be whatever I wanted to be. And so I just followed my heart when it came to choosing my major.” |
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Faculty Research Fellows Chautauqua
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November 4, 2021 | 4PM - 5:30PM PDT
Join us on November 4th for our autumn quarter Faculty Research Fellows Chautauqua. This book salon event will feature 2021-2022 fellow Ato Quayson focusing on his new book, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature.
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford.
Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.
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School Matching for Racial Equity: Irene Lo (MS&E) presents models that address persistent segregation within SFUSD |
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BY CCSRE STAFF | October 20, 2021
The impactful work of Irene Lo, pictured right, Assistant Professor in Management Science & Engineering (MS&E), tackles continued and heightened racial and socioeconomic segregation in K-12 education. Last month, as part of CCSRE's Faculty Seminar Series (FSS), Lo demonstrated how she and research partner Itai Ashlagi, Associate Professor (MS&E), employed AI optimization and economics research to redesign a school selection process by which elementary school children in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) are assigned to public schools.
Taking an innovative approach, Lo and Ashlagi developed a new “controlled choice” model in partnership with SFUSD and its community of families to address persistent racial segregation.
The challenge for Lo and her team was to design a matching system that ensured student diversity without sacrificing predictability (parents’ capacity to anticipate where their student will attend school) or proximity (the distance between school location and a matching student’s home). The solution Lo’s team proposed was a hybrid model they called “controlled choice,” in which families’ school choice was restricted to geographic zones to ensure predictability and proximity. In addition, a set number of seats at every school was reserved for students from historically underserved communities.
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Discussant Francis A. Pearman (GSE) |
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Underscoring the importance of Lo’s work, Assistant Professor Francis Pearman (Graduate School of Education), who introduced Lo’s talk, emphasized how students’ educational opportunities are spatialized—geographical location is largely correlated with a student’s resources and opportunities. Lo’s controlled choice model remains sensitive to students’ need to remain local while simultaneously combatting the geographic constraints that often consign students in under-resourced neighborhoods to under-resourced schools. |
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Lo’s applied research on matching has the potential to foster more diverse and equitable public schools in San Francisco and may be a very useful model for other school districts struggling to reverse long-standing patterns of racial segregation.
Professor Lo’s research is supported in part by a grant from CCSRE’s Race and Justice Research Initiative.
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FACULTY SEMINAR SERIES
Assimilation: An Alternative History
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OCTOBER 28, 2021 | 12PM - 1:30PM PDT
Catherine S. Ramírez, chair of the Latin American and Latino Studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a scholar of Mexican American history; race, migration, and citizenship; Latinx literature and visual culture; comparative ethnic studies; gender studies; and speculative fiction. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory and she is a co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship. She has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Public Books, and Boom California. From 2013 until 2018, she directed the Chicano Latino Research Center (now the Research Center for the Americas) at UC Santa Cruz.
Tomás Jiménez is a Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He is also Director of the Undergraduate Program on Urban Studies. His research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His forthcoming book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion uses survey data and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, US-born Latinos, and US-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico.
EVENT LOCATIONS
You may join us in person in Building 360, Conference Room 361J, or via zoom. In person capacity will be limited to 40 persons. Masks are required indoors. See below to RSVP or join online.
LUNCHEON
Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees at 11:30am outside of Building 360. RSVP Required.
*HEALTH CHECK
This event is open to Stanford affiliates. Please be sure to bring your devices as you will need to show your health check status and sign in upon entry. Go to healthcheck.stanford.edu for your status. |
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CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Technology + Racial Equity Practitioner Fellowships
Deadline: November 5, 2021
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The Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) are accepting applications for the 2022 Non-Resident Practitioner Fellowship.
We are seeking social sector leaders who are working on ideas or projects that advance the safe, ethical, and effective use of digital resources in civil society. These projects might include: designing tools to protect civil society actors and advance racial justice, developing policy frameworks to govern the use of data, prototyping tools that mitigate bias in emerging technologies, or agroecological approaches that promote African food sovereignty.
The fellowship is designed to provide time, space, expertise, and financial support, to help turn ideas into prototypes or actions. The fellows will be working together with their cohort to support and inspire one another and benefit from the access to an intellectual community of Stanford University.
The submission deadline is Friday, November 5, 2021 at 5:00pm PT.
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MODEL SCHOLAR LECTURE
Presented by the Program on Urban Studies
"Urban Alchemy: How Urbanists Can Save Us"
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Are you interested in supporting Stanford's hub for education and research on racial equity??
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BLACK PANTHER PARTY PHOTO EXHIBITION
Presented by African & African American Studies
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SILENCED:
How America's Love Affair with the NDA
Protects Workplace Predators
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October 27, 2021 | 4-5:30PM PDT
Zoom Webinar
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Non-disclosure agreements are a powerful tool to silence survivors of sexual harassment and to uphold racist and sexist hierarchies in many workplaces. The rise of #MeToo revealed the central role NDAs have had in maintaining codes of silence. NDAs are now often used to shield powerful men from accountability.
In this Clayman Conversation event, speakers will discuss the gender and racial dimensions of NDAs. How are NDAs used
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across sectors and organizations? How are activists mobilizing for state and federal legislation to address the perniciousness of NDAs? What are the opportunities and challenges in eliminating the systematic harms caused by NDAs?
This event is free and open to the public. Live captioning is available.
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OAKLAND DIA DE LOS MUERTOS |
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October 31, 2021 | 10a-5p PDT
International Boulevard in Oakland
The Oakland Día de los Muertos Festival is a free, outdoor festival that brings over 100,000 people to the vibrant, culturally-rich Fruitvale neighborhood to enjoy world-class live music, family-friendly games, rides and activities, traditional Latin American artisans, and the stunning altar artistic installations created by community members paying homage to los Muertos. The Día de los Muertos Festival was inducted into the U.S. Library of Congress by Congresswoman Barbara Lee as a “Local Legacy.”
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Have news or events to share? |
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We invite news and stories written by and about our CCSRE community—including from faculty, students, staff, alumni, and on and off campus partners—as well as race-centered events to feature in our eNewsletter.
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