UC Merced Center for the Humanities Annual Report, 2019-2020

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2019-2020

ANNUAL REPORT UC MERCED CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

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MESSAGE FROM THE

DIRECTOR

It goes without saying that this year was unlike any other that we have faced in recent memory. The early part of the year the center continued to build on its excellent record of public programming, building intellectual community, and creating publishing opportunities for our faculty. Our annual film festivals, concert series, and public lectures are long standing successes, which you can read more about in this report.

Our second year of the Medical Humanities theme got off to a great start and we hope to bring a Medical Humanities conference (either virtual or in person) to cap off the three-year theme during Spring term.

The recent hire of a director for medical education on campus is a major step in bringing a medical school to campus and our involvement with that office offers the possibility that we can offer a Humanities influenced curriculum to future medical students.

We also made great strides in our mission to build an archive of Central Valley history and culture through the acquisition of the Ernest Lowe photographic collection.

As we enter my third year as Director of the Humanities Center the specter of COVID-19 has yet to abate. It has presented us with numerous challenges to delivering our traditional content and mission. Yet we are busily working with community partners and the other UC Humanities Centers on collaborations that will take advantage of a virtual platform in new and exciting ways. In these times of isolation and social distancing is it more important than ever to create imagined communities in virtual spaces. We look forward to delivering on that promise in the coming year.

Mario Sifuentez

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LAOMAGINATION with Bryan Thao Worra

PUBLIC PROGRAMS “Laomagination: 45 Years in Diaspora,” featuring poet Bryan Thao Worra, kicked off the Center’s public programming.

Bryan is a returning visiting artist, who first spent a month in residence at UC Merced as part of our “Water” research theme. Bryan spoke about his national touring project, “Laomagination,” which was a direct result of his interactions with UC Merced faculty, students and staff during his residency. Using poetry, popular culture, science fiction, comedy, and mythology, he tours the US to help refugees and their neighbors understand the complicated journeys of Southeast Asians 45 years after the end of

their wars.

In collaboration with the Merced County Library, we planned for the visit of author Anthony Ray Hinton, and a county-wide read of his book The Sun Does Shine. We purchased 1,000 copies of the book to distribute to the community and involved K-12 educators in incorporating the book into their curricula. Due to COVID-19, the speaker’s talk was canceled but we are planning to continue with the county-wide read and book discussions this fall. Several of our SSHA students worked with us this spring to develop discussion questions for our reading groups.

Our annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival was hosted at Playhouse Merced this year, and featured numerous environmental documentary films, with an excellent turnout from the community. This event was co-sponsored by CITRIS. We continue to provide annual support for the Human Rights Film Festival, which occurs every February.

We provide support for Arts UC Merced Presents, which this year featured concerts by Antonio Sanchez and Migration and the Qadim Ensemble, as well as the Bobcat Art Show, which went virtual.

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Antonio Sanchez & Migration

Wild and Scenic Film Festival

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DIGITAL HUMANITIES

LAB

The Public Humanities Design Studio (PHDS) is a laboratory space for collaborative research in the public and digital humanities.

Projects supported by the lab may use digital tools for data collection, analysis or dissemination. This year, the PHDS hosted a variety of workshops to increase awareness of the services the lab offers as well as to connect the academic community at UC Merced to digital humanities resources.

This year, we collaborated with staff and researchers from UC Berkeley’s Social Science Data Lab (D-Lab) as well as UCLA’s Digital Humanities department (HumTech) and their Digital Research Consortium.

The lab’s inaugural talk was from

3D printing of “Rio Verde Figurine” from El Ocote archaelogical site in Aguascalientes, Mexico, printed by PhD student Manuel Dueñas

Dr. Ashley Sanders Garcia, the Vice Chair of the Digital Humanities program, who joined us directly from the UCLA campus through Zoom. Our “Digital Humanities Tools” workshop series opened with our colleagues in the Office of Information Technology at UC Merced, Sarvani Chadalapaka and Matthias Bussonnier, who provided guidance for humanities researchers seeking to approach research questions computationally. Daniel Story, Associate Librarian from UC Santa Cruz, taught people how podcasting can serve as a vehicle for teaching and research while also providing various demonstrations on how to create and edit podcasts using GarageBand, an app that is pre-installed on most Mac

computers. Adam Anderson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the D-Lab in UC Berkeley, taught us how to digitize analog objects using open sourced tools.

As COVID-19 adjusted everyone’s life, the lab quickly adapted by transferring all programming online and invited people to learn with us through Zoom Webinars. In addition to our workshops, the lab continues to support communityengagement projects sponsored by the Luce Foundation and we are looking forward to seeing innovation and collaboration between UC Merced graduate student fellows and the community.

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Population Maps and Time-Series in R with Daniel Thompson

Digitization: Scanning, Imaging & 3D Modeling with Adam G. Anderson

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Peacemaking Workshop with Karen Biestman

CAPACITY-BUILDING

PROGRAMS

In addition to our digital tools workshops, we offer capacitybuilding workshops for faculty and graduate students to help them refine current skills or develop new practices, methods and techniques.

Our fall workshops opened with comic artist Darick Ritter, who gave a workshop on how to transform research into comics, featuring his work with four of our faculty who each created fourpage comics with him this year – one on climate change, one on diabetes, one on California history, and one on arts and dance theory.

Next, Karen Biestman, Associate Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Stanford, offered a peacemaking workshop for faculty, students, and staff that included simulation activities: “Peacemaking, Design Thinking, and Conflict Resolution in the Academy.”

This spring we were grateful that UC Press editors again joined us for a workshop on book publishing, this time virtually due to COVID-19, via Zoom. The workshop focused on how to write a book proposal, how to shop a manuscript, the contract, and the

publishing process and timeline.

Stacy Eisenstark, Editor for Environmental Studies, Archna Patel, Assistant Editor for Art History and Asian Studies, and Eric Schimidt, Editor of Premodern History and Religion, generously shared a wealth of behind-thescenes information and tips.

Our OpEd program continued with coaching from mentor-editors for three of our previous OpEd alums. This year they went on to publish articles in venues ranging from Ms. to The Hill and on topics ranging from domestic violence to incarceration.

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FACULTY & GRADUATE STUDENT

WRITE-INS

This year we hosted two weekly writing groups: one for faculty and one for graduate students.

The faculty write-in is co-sponsored by the Vice Provost for the Faculty and provides space for faculty to meet every Friday morning and write for several hours, with coffee and tea provided. The write-in is a means of providing a writing community, motivation and accountability for faculty as they write side-by-side.

Our faculty write-in transitioned to a virtual format as a result of

COVID-19: we moved to a Facebook Group with virtual check-ins and short motivational video posts. A group of faculty participating in the Mellon grant “Pathways to a Diverse Faculty” also joined the write-in as part of their grant program and participated in check-ins with mentors before or after the write-in.

The faculty write-in will be featured in an article published in Inside Higher Ed this summer.

The graduate student write-in opened with a workshop led by Tanya Golash-Boza on Wendy Belcher’s book Writing Your Journal

Graduate Student Write-In

Article in 12 Weeks. Each participant received a free copy of the book and we provided breakfast for participants every Tuesday morning as they came together to work through the book.

Our GSR, Alfredo Gaona, facilitated weekly check-ins. This group also moved online mid-semester due to COVID-19 and graduate students in the group have expressed the desire for more forms of writing support in the future.

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ERNEST LOWE ARCHIVE Director Mario Sifuentez spent the last two years working to secure for UC Merced a significant archive of photos by Ernest Lowe, who began reporting on migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley for KPFA radio in 1957. A student of Dorothea Lange, he took up the mantle of her work for the Works Progress Administration and Farm Security Administration. Dorthea Lange gave Lowe a 35 mm Contax and a gift to cover film and expenses and wished him well. While on assignment he began to photograph impoverished communities in the Central Valley that lacked paved roads, running water, electricity, and other essential services. Yet what he found was a cohesive and caring

community that looked after one another. His photographs captured the dignity, strength, and perseverance of these communities.

Over the years he took photographs, produced radio and TV programs, and documented the farm worker struggle in the valley.

His work includes cultivation and harvest work, farm worker communities, farm labor camps, unionization campaigns, and the changing nature of agribusiness, including mechanization. Perhaps the most historically important are the photographs of African American Okies. Between the 1940s and 1960s some 40,000 African

American sharecroppers migrated to California’s Central Valley, taking up residence in labor camps across the valley. Their rural-to-rural journey makes them an exception to the mostly rural-to-urban migration of previous generations.

Lowe documented their everyday lives in towns such as Pixley, Dos Palos, and Fairmead. This puts UC Merced at the forefront of archival collections concerning rural African Americans in California. The Chancellor’s Office provided the funding for this and the Library will assist with making the photos accessible through Calisphere.

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Ernest Lowe Archive

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“They [Color] Blinded Me with Science: Why Facing Racist Realities Requires Identity Concious Research” with Phia S. Salter

MEDICAL HUMANITIES SEMINAR The second year of our Medical Humanities Seminar featured the work of scholars from across the nation, as well as local writers, such as Yu-Han Chao. Yu-Han is a nurse at Mercy Medical Center, trained at Merced College, who also holds an MFA and was a writing lecturer at UC Merced. She launched the first seminar by talking about her creative writing blog on nursing.

Phia Salter, from Davidson College, gave the next talk of the series: “They Color-Blinded Me with Science: Why Facing Racist

Realities Requires Identity Conscious Research.” As part of a UC-wide junior faculty exchange program, Elizabeth Dzeng from UCSF, who is also a former OpEd workshop alum, spoke on “Using Human-Centered Design to Mitigate the Impact of Neo-Liberalism on Burdensome End-of-Life Care.” Nancy Chen from UCSC spoke on “Brainfood: Medicinal Foodways and WellBeing,” a talk that was timely as we were just beginning to hear more about COVID-19.

Michael Bakan joined us from Florida State to speak on “Life, Music, and Autism: A New Approach to Understanding.” Several local doctors attended his talk and provided excellent discussion and feedback during the seminar.

Finally, Ithar Hassaballa joined us to talk about the Ebola response effort in Liberia and also drew parallels to COVID-19 in Q&A; the community toolbox she shared in this meeting is now in use throughout dozens of African countries as part of COVID-19 tracking.

LUCE GRANT FELLOWS

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Baskets 2 Bytes: Indigenous California Heritage Preservation Team Members: Cristyna Galarza, Manuel Dueñas, Scott Nicolay Discussions with members of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association (CIBA) confirmed the value of producing 3D digital images of traditional baskets in museum collections that can be shared back with communities of origin, thus making currently inaccessible basket-weaving techniques and designs on curated baskets available to contemporary basket weavers. Digital Heritage preservation techniques can restore access of the baskets and related materials to the communities that created them.

The project will focus on the creation of 3D visual scans of the baskets in some of these collections. This project is in its second year of support.

Baskets 2 Bytes: Indigenous Voices – Heritage Preservation and Revitalization Team Members: Alfredo Gaona Gaytan, Etka Kandhway, Miriam Campos Martinez The second Baskets 2 Bytes (B2B) team built on the foundation of the original project by employing anthropological methods including oral history, interviews, and participant observation, along with some archival work, to document the cultural importance of baskets and basket weaving in the lives of Indigenous communities.

Historic Places Merced: Digital Preservation of Historic Buildings in the Community of Merced Team Member: Anaïs Guillem This project partners with the Downtown Neighborhood Association (DNA) and the Merced County Courthouse Museum to provide rigorous research using the following methods: digitizing historical inventory, conducting oral histories, sounding archives, and analyzing urban space. This project implements an online platform to record, update, and access data about architectural heritage of Merced. This project was initially funded in the first year of the grant and was renewed for a second year.

Water Governance & Power Dynamics: Demystifying Special Districts in the San Joaquin Valley Team Member: Ivan Soto Recent studies indicate many people in California are exposed to unsafe drinking water. This project responds to California’s drinking water crisis through community-engaged research. The first objective developed a collaborative study to contextualize debates around clean water in the San Joaquin Valley’s Latinx and low-income rural communities. The second objective endeavored to open a discussion on how power operates in relation to California’s water crisis and water-related special districts.

Data gathered will result in a comic book to inform San Joaquin Valley residents about California’s drinking water crisis, the role of water-related special districts in addressing the drinking water crisis, and how community members can address the crisis through water-related special districts.

How Did We Get Here? A Comic Book for More Equitable and Healthy Merced Land-Use Team Members: Ahmed Correa, Amalia Perez Martin, Joshua Semerjian This community-engaged project aims to answer the following question: what specific policies and practices in Merced’s history have left a legacy of poor health outcomes, segregation, and/or reduced opportunities for low-income folks and people of color?

The project connects graduate student fellows with youth journalists from We’Ced Youth Media in a collaboration to investigate the history of Merced land use and its differential impact on residents. Research done will be presented in a comic book sponsored by Building Healthy Communities, a comprehensive community initiative launched by the California Endowment.

Cannabis Economy Team Members: Tabesh Zaidi This project aims to collect data about the revenue generated by the cannabis industry since portions of this revenue are supposed to be allocated to community services and data is not widely available. Forecasts by the State of California and information from city officials provide some information but interviews with those who are involved with the process of legalization, establishing a dispensary, and bank officials and community members will inform the study. Non-academic community partners such as Building Healthy Communities Southwest/East Merced County are vital to this project as well as local public health officials and economic development officials in Merced.

Merced: A City of Arts and Culture Team Member: Camille Paladino Ponce This project works closely with Colton Dennis and Kathryn Hansen, of the Merced County Arts Council, as well as with artist Lisa Gilliland-Viney to assess whether Merced should create an Arts & Culture district downtown. The focus is on a community development model with the goal being to create buy-in from the diverse communities within Merced. The project aims to create a feeling of inclusion in the planning of this proposed district and guide community members as they create a state-recognized Arts & Culture district. Data collection for this project includes a Qualtrics survey, ethnographic interviews, and focus groups to involve Merced residents and key informant interviews with local stakeholders.

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LUCE fellows in the Digital Humanities Lab

LUCE fellow Ekta Kanshway weaving a basket at an event

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PROJECTS WE AWARDED LEAD PI

PROJECT

RICHARD GOMEZ

Building Community Through Art

DAWN TROOK

Merced Youth Skate Voices/Celebration of Skate Festival

IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO

Hydrohumanities: Transforming Currents for Uncertain Features

MUEY CHING SAETEURN

Cultivating their Own: Agriculture in Western Kenya during the “Development” Era

JEFF YOSHIMI

Horizons of Phenomenology

HUMBERTO GARCIA

England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750-1857

YEHUDA SHARIM

Songs that Never End

KEN YOSHIDA

Avant-Garde Art and Nondominant Thought in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Matter

YEHUDA SHARIM

Letters2Maybe

CHRISTINA TORRES-ROUFF

Recovering Lost Excavations: The University of California Excavations at Guatacondo, Chile (1967-1969)

CHRISTA FRASER

Podcasting 101: A Workshop Series with Andrew Burkam

CATHERINE KOEHLER

Developing a Multilingual Writing About Writing Curricula in First-Year Composition

PAULA DEBOARD

Writing Justice: The Seventh Annual Creative Writing Conference and Collaboratorium

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FINANCIAL OVERVIEW

REVENUE In addition to the above sources of funding, the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts also provided two .25 Graduate Student Researchers for the Center this spring and partial support for our administrative assistant; our administrative assistant is also partially supported by funding from Arts UCM Presents, a program we support.

EXPENDITURES Our expenditures include projections for June, pending final numbers from fiscal close anticipated in mid-August. Programs we supported not reflect­ed in these expenditures include those of Arts UCM Presents.

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ADVISORY COMMITTEE SUSAN VARNOT, Lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program Since 2007, Susan Varnot has been active in the Writing Studies Minor, including founding the UC Merced Creative Writing Collaboratorium, a multi-campus conference, and curating the Write! Look! Listen! reading and workshop series. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Face to Meet the Faces: Contemporary Persona Poetry.

PATRICIA VERGARA, Assistant Professor of Music Patricia Vergara received her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2017. Her research examines the routes of Mexican corridos (narrative ballads) to and across Colombia from the 1930s to the present through processes that emerged in contexts of political violence, rural-urban migrations, and changing technologies of musical production and distribution.

CHRISTINA TORRRES-ROUFF, Associate Professor of Anthropology Christina holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Barbara and focuses her research on prehistoric populations in northern Chile, seeking to understand the ways in which individuals used their bodies to convey personal and community identities. She has published her work in field specific journals as well as flagship anthropology journals including Current Anthropology and American Anthropologist.

SEAN L. MALLOY, Associate Professor of History, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Sean L. Malloy is Associate Professor of History/Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He is the author of Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War and Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan, both from Cornell.

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STAFF

MARIO SIFUENTEZ, Director and Associate Professor of History He holds a Ph.D. in History from Brown University and his book, Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest, was a Choice 2016 Outstanding Academic Title. His research focuses on race, immigration, water, food and labor. His current project focuses on farm workers, water rights, and food equity in the Central Valley.

CHRISTINA LUX, Associate Director Christina holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Oregon; her scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Francophone Studies and the Journal of Transnational American Studies; her poetry has appeared on NPR and in journals such as Feminist Formations, North Dakota Quarterly, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, and in books from presses such as Oxford University Press and Eyewear Books. Her co-edited book, The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth, was published by Northwestern UP. LYNNE CAYABYAB, Administrative Assistant Lynne recently joined the team. Previously, she worked in the construction industry for prominent building projects in the Bay Area. She looks forward to this new venture of coordinating and planning events at UC Merced as she is a new resident of the city. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her family, outdoor activities, and volunteering at community events.

MARISOL ESPINO, Junior Specialist Marisol holds a B.A. in Psychology from UC Santa Barbara and an M.A. in Anthropology from Texas State University-San Marcos. She manages our Public Humanities Design Studio, which provides talks, workshops, consultations and training on various topics such as digital tools; engaging the public through the humanities and arts; and community-engaged research projects.

BRENDA GUTIERREZ, Student Assistant Brenda recently graduated: she holds a B.A. in Public Health from the University of California, Merced and plans to attend dental school in the near future. She assists with operational and event programming support as well as with our media and publicity.

ALFREDO GAONA, Graduate Student Researcher Alfredo holds a Masters in English and has 11 years of instructional experience. He has worked with a wide spectrum of English language interests in order to develop, coordinate, and implement teacher-training workshops and intensive English language acquisition programs in South Korea and in Indonesia. He is currently serving as an English Language Fellowship Alumni Ambassador for the State Department ECA Program.

ADAM FLEENOR, Graduate Student Researcher Adam Fleenor is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at the University of California, Merced. His current research involves Native American cartographers residing in California that use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to support Native goals and create opportunity for future generations to leverage spatial technology to maintain and expand Indigenous sovereignty.

University of California, Merced Center for the Humanities 5200 N. Lake Road Merced, CA 95343 T: 209-228-2453 W: crha.ucmerced.edu E: humanities@ucmerced.edu