2024-2025 Programming
Post-Election Round Table Talk: On The Future Of Immigration
Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024 | 12-1 p.m. | King Hall, Rm. 1001 or via Livestream
Join us for an insightful discussion on the future of immigration policy in a post-election landscape. This round table will explore potential immigration priorities of the new administration, concerns about emerging initiatives, strategies for impactful advocacy, and hopes for positive change. Featuring leading immigration law experts—Kevin R. Johnson, Raquel E. Aldana, Holly S. Cooper, and Aidin Castillo Mazantini—and moderated by Beth Greenwood, this event is sponsored by the Aoki Center and California International Law Center. Don’t miss this chance to engage with top voices on the critical challenges and opportunities ahead for immigration reform.
The Genizaro Experience Feat. Dr. Andrés Reséndez
Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024 | 12-1 p.m. | King Hall, Rm. 1301 or via Livestream
The Aoki Center invites you to the screening of the documentary film The Genízaro Experience: Shadows in Light. This film explores the origins of Indigenous slavery and the history of an Indigenous group known as Genízaros (Heh-nee-sah-ros). It investigates duality in the human condition and related themes, including cultural hybridity, equality, genetic genealogy, and tribal recognition.
Followed by a discussion with Dr. Andrés Reséndez, an expert on European exploration and colonization of the Americas, the U.S.-Mexico border region, and the early history of the Pacific.
Power in the Process: Engaging Legal Systems for Indigenous Rights
Monday, Nov. 18, 2024 | 4-6 p.m. | King Hall, Rm. 2302 or via Livestream
There is power in the process of engaging legal systems to protect, recognize, and/or uphold Indigenous rights and responsibilities. This conversation with Professor Natsu Taylor Saito, hosted by Professor Beth Rose Middleton Manning and the Aoki Center, will consider three legal systems - Indigenous legal systems, Federal Indian Law, and International law focused on Indigenous Human Rights—centering examples of engaging and navigating these systems to reach empowering outcomes, even in the face of duress and resistance. While the US has not recognized international decisions in favor of Indigenous rights, the process of engagement and the outcomes still have powerful ramifications for Indigenous peoples, epistemologies, and homelands.
Speaker Bios
Professor Natsu Taylor Saito teaches public international law and international human rights; seminars in race and the law, federal Indian law, and indigenous rights; and professional responsibility. She has served as advisor to the Asian American Law Student Association, the Latinx and Caribbean Law Student Association, the Immigration Law Society, and the student chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Saito’s scholarship focuses on the legal history of race in the United States, the plenary power doctrine as applied to immigrants, American Indians, and U.S. territorial possessions, and the human rights implications of U.S. governmental policies, particularly with regard to the suppression of political dissent. She is writing a book on settler colonialism and race in America.
Dr. Beth Rose Middleton Manning (Afro-Caribbean, Eastern European) is a Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis. Beth Rose’s research centers on Native environmental policy and Native activism for site protection using conservation tools. Her broader research interests include environmental and climate justice, fire policy, intergenerational trauma and healing, Native land stewardship, rural environmental justice, Indigenous analysis of climate change, Afro-indigeneity, and qualitative GIS. Beth Rose received her BA in Nature and Culture from UC Davis, and her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley. Her first book, Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (University of Arizona Press 2011), focuses on Native applications of conservation easements, with an emphasis on conservation partnerships led by California Native Nations.
Redressing Internment: The Japanese Latin American Struggle for Justice
Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2024 | 4:30 -6:30 p.m. | King Hall, Rm. 1301 or via Livestream
It took nearly five decades of activism for Congress to enact the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which offered an apology and meager compensation to survivors of the United States' incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. Left out, not only from legal redress but also from the moral reckoning that comes from confronting wrongs, were the thousands of Japanese Latin Americans who were also interned in U.S. concentration camps after Latin American nations, including Peru, cooperated with the U.S. government to turn them over. This story is largely unknown to the U.S. and Latin American public but certainly not to the survivors who, treated as “illegal aliens” by the United States, are still advocating for legal redress and for public acknowledgment of their experiences. Please join us to hear from two daughters of Japanese Peruvian and Japanese American internees who came together in this transnational struggle for justice on behalf of Japanese Latin Americans.
Our Panelists:
Natsu Taylor Saito is a Regents’ Professor Emerita at Georgia State University’s College of Law, where she taught international law and human rights; race, ethnicity and the law; immigration; seminars in federal Indian law and Indigenous rights, and professional responsibility. She was also affiliated with Africana Studies and advised numerous student organizations. Natsu’s scholarship has focused on race, indigeneity, and colonialism in U.S. history; the suppression of political dissent; redress and reparations; and American exceptionalism in international law. She has published several dozen law review articles and 3 books, most recently Settler Colonialism and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists (2020).
Grace Shimizu is the daughter of a Japanese immigrant resident of Peru who survived the US-Latin American extraordinary rendition program during World War II. She serves as director of the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project and of the Campaign For Justice: Redress NOW for Japanese Latin Americans! and as Project Manager of the groundbreaking traveling and online exhibit, The Enemy Alien Files: Hidden Stories of World War II. She also serves as an executive committee member of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition-San Francisco Bay Area and is a supporter of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at San Francisco State University and its director, Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi.
Aoki Seminar Series Presents Professor Stacy D. Fahrenthold, UC Davis Department of History
Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024 | 12-1 p.m. | King Hall, Rm. 1301 and via Livestream
Professor Stacy Fahrenthold is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in labor migration; displacement/refugees; border studies; and diasporas within and from the region. Her award winning first book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2019) explores the war work of Arab emigres living in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, revealing the repercussions of their activism on the post-Ottoman Middle East. Her new book, Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2024) examines how Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian immigrant workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation in the textile industries of the Atlantic world. She is also Associate Editor of the leading open access journal Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Migration Studies, and a series editor of Refugees and Migrants within the Middle East with the American University of Cairo Press.
In addition to the Department of History, Fahrenthold is affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, the Global Migration Center, and the Human Rights Studies Program. Before coming to UC Davis in 2018, she taught at Stanislaus State University, Fresno State University, and Williams College.
Research Focus
Migration, displacement, and diaspora in the Middle East; Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine; the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean; Arab American studies; labor and working-class histories; ethnic and religious minorities; refugees.
More information to follow. Please contact Giselle Garcia with any questions.