All Events
Race Matters Series
Roots and Routes: Reimagining Home and Belonging Among Indigenous Migrants
Dr. Daina Sanchez
MCC Lounge
Join the MultiCultural Center, in collaboration with CPOD and the Chicano/a Studies Department, for a critical lecture and guided discussion featuring Dr. Daina Sanchez, Associate Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCSB. This event explores how Indigenous youth craft new worlds of belonging when home exists across multiple territories. Dr. Sanchez will draw from her powerful ethnographic work and lived experiences as a diasporic Solagueña to unpack how displacement, language, and intergenerational memory shape identity and community across the U.S.–Mexico border. The session invites attendees to think of home as a living relationship built through stories and traditions, culminating in a hands-on “Roots & Routes” reflection board to connect participants with their own cultural and communal heritage.
Daina (day-nuh) Sanchez is an Associate Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. She was previously the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research agenda focuses on race, migration, and Indigenous youth.
Her first book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (Stanford University Press), examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both Mexico and the U.S. to erase their Indigenous identity or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identities through practices of el goce comunal ("communal joy") in their new homes.
Co-Sponsors: CPOD, Chicana/o Department, USS Office
Art Exhibition Opening Reception
Art Exhibit Reception: Zimele’s Dream
Dr. Tara Jones
MCC Lounge
Join us for the reception of Zimele's Dream with Dr. Tara Jones, aka Zimele, showcasing paintings and drawings that bring together the Black feminist imagery. These images explore, elevate, and celebrate themes of Black womxn's sexualities, maternity, mothering, situating Black womxn as portals, containers, and embodiments of African divinities and ancestral knowledge and wisdom. The colorfully vibrant collection imagines Black womxn as intercessors between cosmic and temporal realms, thereby serving as protectors and creators of Black peoples and Black futures. Together, the featured pieces chronicle the archetypal constellations of Black womxn's spiritual journeys towards healing, empowerment, uplift, and self-making through creative praxis and unconscious revelations.
Dr. Tara Jones, aka Zimele, is a visual and spoken word artist, whose paintings and drawings explore themes of Africana womxn’s sexualities, spiritualities, healing, rest and rebirth, and the Black female body as divine temple and cosmic portal. The artist experiences artistic images as retrievals of memory and revelations of deeper and unconscious dimensions of psyche that when tended to can facilitate processes of self-making. Her visual work has been featured on covers of the National Political Science Review, a publication of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and debuted at UCSB’s Multicultural Center’s 2011 exhibit, Bridging Through the Arts: Transracial Community Building. She is the 2023 winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Anna Julia Cooper Award.
The artist also holds a Ph. D. in Depth Psychology, specializing in Community, Liberation, & Eco-Psychologies, a Masters in the Science of Teaching, a Masters of Arts in Counseling Psychology, a Master’s of Arts in Depth Psychology, and a UCSB alum in Black Studies and Sociology. Her areas of research include: teacher well-being, cross-professional applications from counseling to teaching, Pan Africanism and educational fugitivity, revolutionary black mothering, black maternal necropolitics, healing, and legacies of transnational African diasporic research. Her scholarly works have been published in the journal, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and the anthology, Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline. Through her diverse career paths, she has served as a: NYC public school teacher, social-emotional learning facilitator for teens and young adults, psychotherapist, art therapist, and employment specialist. She currently coordinates UCSB’s African diasporic Cultural Resource Center.
Using AI to Enhance Learning
MCC Lounge
Insights from brain science and educational research
Combine the science of learning with the power of technology for less stress & more success!
CLAS Workshop: Code 146G, THU FEB 12TH, 12-1:30PM
Whether you’re new to AI or looking to strengthen your study strategies, this interactive workshop will help you combine the science of learning with the power of technology to make your college experience more efficient, engaging, and sustainable. You’ll explore how tools like ChatGPT and other AI platforms can enhance your learning when used thoughtfully and responsibly—and discover how your brain learns best through insights from neuroscience and
educational research.
SPECIAL OFFER: SPACE IS LIMITED!; SIGN UP NOW
Co-sponsor: Campus Learning Assistance Services (CLAS)
Douglass Day Community Event and Transcribe-a-thon featuring the Colored Conventions Project
MCC Lounge
You’re invited to Frederick Douglass’ birthday party! Help us celebrate Douglass Day and Black History Month by participating in a national transcribe-a-thon. You’ll learn how to bring 19th century Black history to life by transforming digitized Colored Conventions documents into legible text. There will be birthday cake, music, and more! Just bring your computers, yourselves, and a friend. (UCSB affiliates can also check out a laptop at UCSB Library.) No experience necessary. Free and open to the public.
Opening remarks will be made at the start of the event and guests are welcome to drop-in as their schedule allows. Registration is recommended, but not required: https://douglassday.org/ucsb/
Co-Sponsors: Department of English, Office of Black Student Development, African Diasporic Cultural Resource Center, UCSB Library
