January 30-31 2025. Sixteen University of California faculty and graduate students gathered on the campus of UC Davis to share research and talk about the role the history and memory of past human rights struggles play in contemporary human rights mobilization, tactics, and advocacy?

Following a Thursday afternoon of graduate student presentations, and on the heels of the amazing and inspiring evening with Yupik artist and storyteller Chuna McIntyre, faculty gathered at Delta of Venus for coffee and  a wide ranging conversation on research, shared goals and concerns and participated in the kind of face-to-face talking and listening that is critical to strengthening collegial bonds among humanities and social science scholars. 

Under the leadership of Marian Schlotterbeck (UC Davis,) we hosted the first two faculty conversations.  In the first, Alice Yang (UC Santa Cruz), Robin De Lugan (UC Merced),  Kevan Aguilar (UC Irvine) and Lucia Luna Victoria Indacochea (UC Davis) brought research and experience from Japanese internment, to violence in Central America and the Caribbean, attacks on museums in South America and Mexico to unpack a wide range of ideas about connections between mass atrocity and nation building, intergenerational solidarity and mobilization, and how digitization makes memories vulnerable to authoritarianism.

In the second panel, chaired by and Michael Lazzara (UC Davis), three University of California scholars of the Middle East, Mark LeVine (UC Irvine), Jennifer Mogannam (UC Santa Cruz) and Keith David Watenpaugh (UC Davis) had a intense conversation about trying to make sense of past and ongoing genocide in the region they study, both by bringing into that effort a broader legal and geographical comparative framework as well as an effort to better engage indigenous voices and thought in the scholarship. The scholars also raised concerns about the growing interference of the UC Board of Regents in teaching and research on conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere, and similarly expressed worries that the University of California will not act to protect the speech rights and right to education of UC students.
 

Full Conference Program

Conference One

January 30-31, 2025
The Role of Memory and Historical Consciousness in Understanding Regional Violence, Conflict and Peacemaking

What role does the history and memory of past human rights struggles play in contemporary human rights mobilization, tactics, and advocacy? Conversely, is there an ethic of comparison when bringing the memory of past atrocity to bear on contemporary episodes of mass atrocity? How do we understand the use of history by states in the re-traumatization of populations for political or policy ends?

Local Chair: Marian Schlotterbeck, UC Davis — Human Rights Studies and History

Conference Program:

Graduate Student Symposium
Thursday January 30, 2025 Noon – 4:00 PM - 912 Sproul Hall

Hannah Bacchus - UC Irvine
Conscious of Alienation: Navigating Black Consciousness in Native Son
Eliana Fonsah - UC Merced
The Role of Historical Consciousness and Memory in the Cameroon Anglophone Movement
Camellia Haghverdian - UC Merced
Living Archives of Defiance: Women, Resistance, and Social Memory in the Middle East
Sekou Jabateh - UC Berkeley
Fragmented Memories, Unified Futures: Memorializing Civil War in Liberia and Sierra Leone

Emily Nelsen, discussant – UC Davis
Chandler Thompson, discussant – UC Davis
Adam Zientek – chair – UC Davis

Human Rights Film Festival

Thursday January 30, 2025 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM – Cruess Hall 1002

So Surreal; Behind the Masks (2024) The film chronicles efforts to track the influence of art created by Yupik, Kwakwakaʼwakw and other Coast Salish peoples on German Surrealism, and the broader story of genocide and reparation. With special guest indigenous artist and master storyteller Chuna McIntyre (Yupik) in conversation with Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Director of the Gorman Museum of Native American Art.

In cooperation with Cinema and Digital Media, German and Russian, Native American Studies, Art and Art History and the Gorman Museum of Native American Art.

University of California Faculty in Conversation

Friday January 31 2025 Noon – 5:00 PM — International Center

Kevin Antonio Aguilar – UC Irvine
The Mexican Dirty War on Palestine
Robin Maria De Lugan – UC Merced
Can remembering past state violence create more just and inclusive nations?
Mark LeVine — UC Irvine
Bearing Fruit: Indigenous Epistemologies and Making Use of Collective Memory - Palestine/Chiapas
Jennifer Mogannam – UC Santa Cruz
Reframing Violence and Grassroots Wajeb in People-Centered Knowledge Production
Lucia Luna Victoria Indacochea – UC Davis
"I would rather the LUM disappear than have its narrative change." 
Keith David Watenpaugh – UC Davis
The Story of the Stones: Disciplining Memory and Unresolved Genocide - Hama, 1982
Alice Yang – UC Santa Cruz
"Stop Repeating History:" Japanese Americans Protests at Fort Sill in 2019

Marian Schlotterbeck chair/discussant – UC Davis
Michael Lazzara chair/discussant – UC Davis