CALIFORNIA STUDIES

The University of California (UC) California Studies Consortium (CSC) supports collaborative research by UC faculty, graduate students, and their colleagues at other institutions as part of a new University-wide California Studies research initiative for the humanities, arts and social sciences. The UCCSC is governed by a Steering Committee of faculty representatives from various UC campuses and is administered by the Humanities Research Institute under the purview of the Office of the President. It offers competitive grants totaling nearly $80,000 annually, including support of an online journal which will be called California Cartographies.

The goal of this new initiative is to bring together the many interesting projects and discussions afoot on most of the UC campuses, and to facilitate their development and elaboration in robust and creative ways by providing support for new projects to emerge. This system-wide multi-campus program in California Studies aims to sustain innovative scholarship, teaching and outreach. 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 Steering Committee 2010-2011

Mariam Lam, Convener, UC Riverside, mariamb@ucr.edu

Robert Alvarez, UC San Diego, r1alvare@dss.ucsd.edu

Catherine Candee, UC Office of the President

Jan Goggans, UC Merced, jgoggans@ucmerced.edu

Kerwin Klein, UC Berkeley, kerwkl@sonic.net

Kim Robinson, UC Press

Catherine Mitchell, California Digital Library

David Wellman, UC Santa Cruz, wellman@ucsc.edu

Lynne Withey, UC Press

Clyde Woods, UC Santa Barbara, cwoods@blackstudies.ucsb.edu

David Theo Goldberg (ex officio), Director, UC Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine

Dante Noto (ex officio), Associate Director, UC Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine