California Studies

uchri.org/page.php?page_id=1252

Particularly encouraged are proposals for projects that include joint fundraising efforts by multiple campuses working in collaboration. “Multi-campus” research groups are defined as involving three or more UC campuses.

As the thematic title “California Cartographies” suggests, the UCCSC strives toward comprehensive critical mappings and re-mappings of California and its cultures. It is interested in California as a site of global intersections and circulations—culturally, economically, and politically. This research initiative supports projects invested in sustained, multidisciplinary, and differently situated notions of intersection, power, history, language, migration and movement. The UCCSC hopes to supplement a more traditional sense of California Studies by dealing squarely with questions of public pedagogy that address the antagonisms comprising what it means to be a “Californian.”

Projects should be thematically driven, exploding current theoretical lenses to create a prism that includes interests as diverse as nativism and the environment to prisons, industry and the military. To refocus the topic of California away from its common identifiers to its underlying layers of contradiction—labor, resources, scarcity, race, tourism, technology, recreation, suburbia, for example—would expand our understanding of California’s complex relationship(s) to the world at large. We are excited by the implications of such critical mappings for research, teaching, engaged learning, digital archives and resources. We also hope to identify and harvest projects that will contribute to a complex digital prism of virtual representation for California Studies in web-based form.

UCCSC REGIONAL SEMINARS AND RESEARCH WORKGROUPS

www.uchri.org/page.php?page_id=1307

online app due 02.01.09

While each CA region is geographically located, all contain distinct and often familiar characteristics based on demography, culture, politics and economics that locate them in ways that recognize and, simultaneously, reach far beyond actual location. Increasingly, with a dramatic expansion in population, even smaller ethnic, multi-county and bioregional clusters have emerged as important sites of social formation, cultural production, public policy, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Equally encouraged within this broad framework of analysis are examinations of historic, contemporary, and emerging sub-regional realities

Region 2. Geologically, the Central Valley is a wide basin, beginning in the area of Bakersfield and extending north, as far as the area of Redding. Long California’s underrepresented “little sister,” the Central Valley has existed far enough under the state’s cultural radar to possess a resistant identity, whether forced upon it or aggressively embraced. The Central Valley and its inhabitants are primed for many studies “from below,” culturally, politically, and demographically.

Proposal should center on new or evolving themes that will map out new regions of critical CA studies, especially:

Activites might include:

$5,000 max, with additional $5,000 available for digitizing or archival component and plans for IT to bridge regions

1:2 cost sharing requirement.

Notes:

Possible Proposals