All Events

DIVERSITY LECTURE
The Making of Asian America with Erika Lee
MCC Theater
“The Making of Asian America is a stirring chronicle long overdue.” – The Los Angeles Times
Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the US today, but most Americans know little about their long history here and their current complicated status. Award-winning historian Erika Lee unravels 450 years of Asian American history to explain how these citizens, once a 'despised minority,” became a 'model minority' and how Asian Americans help us understand America today. Erika Lee teaches American history at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and is Director of the Immigration History Research Center.

Art Exhibition
Malik Seneferu: From the Hill and Beyond
MCC Lounge
Malik Seneferu is an American conceptual artist and painter whose work explores race, identity, politics, spirituality, and adolescence. Employing intense color, he engages in magical realism with other works from the visual arts, literature, and history, as well as his own life. From the Hill and Beyond draws on Seneferu’s experience of leaving San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point community where he began his career, and his travels in Kenya where he explored his roots among the Kamba people of Machakos.
There will also be an Opening Reception for the artist in MCC Lounge: Tues, Feb 2, 6 pm. Open to all.

Social Justice Workshop Series
We Get Our Power From The Sun: Performance Poetry & Hip-Hop Workshop
MCC Lounge
This workshop explores performance poetry and hip-hop as a tool for empowerment. We will challenge disempowering images, language, rhetoric, narratives, and cultural traditions, by telling our personal, and political truths. Participants will use political dialogue to prompt new writing, and also have an opportunity to develop the performance of existing work.
Space is limited so RSVP to Sepideah.Mohsenian-Rahman@sa.ucsb.edu.
Join us downtown after the workshop for a full spoken word performance by Kahlil at Rebar Coffee (214 State St) 7:30pm. Free!

Social Justice Workshop Series
Theatre of the Poor/Teatro de los Pobre: Decolonization Degentrification Seminar
MCC Lounge
An interactive seminar covering issues of poverty, houselessness, migration, false boarders, criminalization/incarceration, Po'Lice terror, disability, eldership and indigenous resistance - presented by what we call Poverty SKolaz-ie, us, the houseless, the bordered, disabled, criminalized/incarcerated, Po'Lice terrorized and displaced who have lived, not institutionally learned knowledge - the consumers, the case mangled, the clients - telling our own stories, teaching solidarity and street knowledge with the unpacking the lies of colonization, formal/stolen histories/herstories and continued -ologies (studies) about us without us.
Seminar includes interactive work with each participant on their own his-stories/her-stories and colonization and decolonization.
Space is limited so RSVP to Sepideah.Mohsenian-Rahman@sa.ucsb.edu.