Co-Sponsored Events: Spring 2022


Berkeley Center for New Media

Margarita Kuleva, “The Right to Be Creative”

Monday, March 14 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | Online

Find out more here!

How do you make art when the right to be creative is contested, and how do dissident artists in Russia make their voices heard? Margarita Kuleva will present her research on digital art communities in Russia who defy the government’s censorship and conservative understanding of creativity as ‘high culture’ only. Having the right to be creative contested, innovative artists in Russia revise notions of profession, social contract and solidarity. Rita’s presentation will incorporate an analysis of how Russian artists are showing their dissent and responding to Putin’s war on Ukraine.

An Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, the Department of the History of Art, the Arts Research Center, and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, presented with Berkeley Arts + Design as part of Arts + Design Mondays.


ARC is delighted to co-sponsor BCNM’s 2021/22 online event series as part of their exciting Indigenous Technologies initiative. For more information on all their ATC events, please visit here. For info on their History and Theory of New Media season, please visit here.

Tequiologies: Indigenous Solutions Against Climate Catastrophe, with Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

February 7, 2022 | Online

Introduced and moderated by Natalia Brizuela and Alex Saum-Pascual

Presented by BCNM in partnership with the Center for Latin American Studies. Co-sponsored by Alianza UCMX, Spanish & Portuguese, the Arts Research Center, and and The American Indian Graduate Program.


It is a myth of the West’s choosing: perpetual economic growth, advancing through a digestive system of sorts, one that uses technology as one of its core components. In its churn, ecosystems became goods; people, mere consumers. The myth turned the world into a place increasingly inhospitable to human life. An alternative, offered by Abya Yala, lies in separating economic development and the development of new technologies from consumerism. This would place technological creation and ingenuity once again at the service of the common good, not of the market. Technology as tequio; technological creation and innovation as a common good.


Culture capture, additive defacement, and other tactics towards realizing Indigenous futures, with Adam and Zack Khalil

April 13, 2022 |5-6:30pm |Online

More info and register here!


Zack and Adam Khalil will talk and share excerpts of new, old, and unfinished work that specifically relates to exploring the nuanced and complicated relationship between Indigenous epistemologies and settler-colonial institutions that produce knowledge. Ranging from more material concerns, such as the return and respectful reburial of ancestors to the communities they are from, to the more esoteric, presenting the concept of Savage Philosophy and how it could be a helpful tool in realizing ‘crimes against reality’. Informed by a process founded in Indigenous ways of gathering information – illuminating an issue from multiple angles before forming a thesis or argument or making a decision – their presentation will shine a light on how the history of science and colonialism form a double helix bind onto Indigenous epistemologies, while also presenting technological tactics for realizing Indigenous futures.

Presented as part of the ATC | Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium and the Indigenous Technologies Initiative and copresented by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), with co-sponsorship from American Cultures, The Arts Research Center, and the American Indian Graduate Program. 


Queer Alliance Resource Center

Calling the Elders: A Queer and Trans Writing Workshop

Thursdays Jan 27 – May 5, 2022, 5 – 7pm, in Dwinelle Annex Rm 126

Please note: the January 27 meeting will be held remotely on Zoom, beginning at 5pm. The link is: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/93493088553

Calling the Elders is a new writing workshop developed and run by Julia McKeown (they/them), Graduate Equity Director of the Queer Alliance Resource Center. Past writing prompts can be found here! Using a model of poetry workshops, it creates opportunities for QT students, faculty, and staff to use creative writing to build community, articulate needs, and collaboratively build an inclusive and ambitious vision of support. The workshops will be held weekly in the Arts Research Center’s Dwinelle Annex (please note: not Dwinelle Hall, location link on our About page); while Berkeley is online due to the surge in the pandemic, the workshop will be held on Zoom. Please contact Julia at julia_mckeown@berkeley.edu for more info.


Co-Sponsored Events Fall 2021

Berkeley Center for New Media

Indigenous Technologies

ARC is delighted to be a co-sponsor of BCNM’s 2021/22 event series as part of their exciting Indigenous Technologies initiative. For more information on their Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium events, please visit here. For info on their History and Theory of New Media season, please visit here.

September 13: How Can a Māori Girl Recolonise the Screen Using Mighty Pixels, with Lisa Reihana
Lisa Reihana is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text and photography. She says, “Inspired by the work of American and Canadian video artists fueled my interest in non-standard formats. The freedom the art world offered, and the ability to wrestle with the tools associated with cinema, the commercial realm, magazines and broadcasting provided an opportunity to challenge and further late nineteen-eighties New Zealand society. Here was an opportunity to colonise the visual language of the time which led to much self questioning: What does it mean to be a first gen urban artist in Auckland, New Zealand – the largest Pacific city in the world ? How does gender affect access to indigenous knowledge, and what is it’s impact on the stories you tell? The resulting strategies has led to a sustained practise that attempts to both normalise and transcend ideas of what it is to be Māori.” Event information here.

October 4: Colonial Practices and Cultural Repression by the Municipality against the Community Museum of the Valle de Xico but “It is our 25th anniversary and we are still here” with Maria Thereza Alves
Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves has worked and exhibited internationally since the 1980s, creating a body of work investigating the histories and circumstances of particular localities to give witness to silenced histories, including the history of Portuguese colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. Event information here.

October 25: Beyond Settler Sex and Family: Kim TallBear in Conversation
Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying the genome sciences disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena. More information here.


Latinx Research Center

Afro Mexicanidad: A Symposium

October 14, 2021

We invite you to join a virtual Symposium on Afro Mexicanidad hosted by the Latinx Research Center (LRC) in partnership with numerous departments and other units across campus on October 14th. The morning session (11am – 1pm) will provide a critical overview of race relations in México; the 2020 Mexican census which took Afro Mexicanos into account for the first time in history; and the social movements that made this unprecedented event possible. The symposium will be moderated by  Prof.  Tianna Paschel (UC Berkeley African African Studies and Sociology), Prof. Mónica Moreno Figueroa (Sr. Lecturer, Cambridge University), Prof. Emiko Saldívar Tanaka (UCSB, Sociology), and Juliana Acevedo (attorney and activist). The afternoon session (2pm – 4pm) will feature a talk and documentary screening of Beyond La Bamba  by Marco Villalobos, as well as a talk by photographer Hugo Arellanes Antonio  who will inaugurate three photo exhibitions that depict the lives and culture of Afro Mexicanos in Oaxaca’s Costa Chica and Ciudad de México.

Links to register: Session 1 here, and Session 2: here


Queer Alliance Resource Center

Calling the Elders: A Queer and Trans Writing Workshop

October 14, 2021 – May 5, 2022, 5 – 7pm, in Dwinelle Annex Rm 126

Calling the Elders is a new writing workshop developed and run by Julia McKeown (they/them), Graduate Equity Director of the Queer Alliance Resource Center. Using a model of poetry workshops, it creates opportunities for QT students, faculty, and staff to use creative writing to build community, articulate needs, and collaboratively build an inclusive and ambitious vision of support. The workshops will be held weekly in the Arts Research Center’s Dwinelle Annex (please note: not Dwinelle Hall, location link on our About page). Please contact Julia at julia_mckeown@berkeley.edu for more info & to register.