Bay Area Studies Working Group

Working Group Description

We, the members of the Bay Area Studies Group, have newly founded a research group that aims to advance our common intellectual interest in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Our members have broadly interdisciplinary research interests and projects but are united in our common drive to produce critically engaged, theoretically innovative, and geographically grounded work that speaks to the region’s ongoing cultural and political economic transformations.  The working group will provide an important forum for members to negotiate our common interest in understanding how the cultural, economic, and environmental politics of these transformations can be reshaped for social and environmental justice along many axes of difference.

Members will use the working group to create a forum for regular discussion of our research projects.  We plan to coordinate our local knowledge to establish a richer common understanding of the Bay Area’s cultural, political economic, and environmental history and current developments.  And with many researchers working in the field, we may pool our resources to suggest relevant contacts, sites, and opportunities for community engagement.  Members will present ongoing research projects to the group and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary audience.  Although the founding members of the group are Geographers, we plan to enhance the already considerable intellectual diversity of the group by seeking additional Bay Area-engaged participants from other UC-Berkeley departments.

The structure of the group is to meet about twice each month, over dinner, from September 2011 through April 2012. We have funding for some meals; others will be brown-bag style. We also have plans to bring two speakers to campus in the 2011-12 school year, once each semester.

For more information, please contact the working group coordinators:

Rachel Brahinsky  -- rbrahinsky@berkeley.edu

Sarah Knuth -- sknuth@berkeley.edu