| The 2005 UCSB Disorientation Guide (back to contents) |
|
UCSB FACULTY PROFILES
Dick Flacks For anyone looking to get acquainted with some combination of Santa Barbara progressive politics, US student political organizing, and the history and theory of US political organizing at large, the obvious place to start is inside the office of UCSB sociology professor Dick Flacks. Now entering his 38th year on the university’s faculty, Flacks was a leading activist of the ‘60s and a contributor to Students for a Democratic Society’s seminal 1962 Port Huron Statement. He draws on a unique range of personal experiences as a basis for one of his primary research and teaching focuses: the study of social movements. “My whole identity as a teacher and a sociologist was formed in [the ‘60s], and I still say the Port Huron Statement and the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ shaped what I think of as my work,” Flacks said. “I think that participatory democracy -- the concept that people should have control over the decisions that affect them -- is a standard you can apply to every kind of human institution and relationship.” Flacks arrived at UCSB in 1969, after completing a tumultuous year as a sociology professor at the University of Chicago (he was there from 1964-69). Only months before moving to the west coast, Flacks was brutally assaulted -- and nearly murdered -- in his sociology office by a man posing as a newspaper reporter. The man’s identity was never discovered. Upon arriving in Santa Barbara, Flacks and his wife, Mickey, hoping to attain some semblance of peace and quiet, instead received a scathing denunciation from then-Governor Ronald Reagan. That set the tone for what was often a controversial beginning to his tenure (the university even refused to accredit one of his courses in 1973). According to Reagan, bringing Flacks to the politically volatile UCSB campus was “like hiring a pyromaniac to be a fuse-maker in a firecracker factory.” Months later, UCSB student burned the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista to the ground. Naturally, Flacks was strongly involved in post-Bank Burning efforts to realize vibrant alternative institutions and community democracy in Isla Vista. “A lot of us had sort of romantic hopes that the counter-culture would spawn a kind of utopian local politics,” he said, “and for some period of time, that was the case.” In most respects, Flacks compares the social movements of today favorably to those in which he was so intimately involved in the ‘60s, particularly in regard to the protest movement leading up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003. “Even the biggest, most monumental demonstrations didn’t compare,” Flacks said. “Something’s there that deserves respect and understanding, even if we’re not in a revolutionary era.” At the same time, Flacks is somewhat troubled by the lack of current student organizing to oppose the Iraq War, a problem he says stems partly from a “willed detachment” on the part of many students, who prefer to think the war doesn’t affects them, lest the moral imperative to take action against it were to interfere with their day-to-day lives. However, the main factor he attributes the current lull in student political activity to is the economic stress of skyrocketing tuition and rent, which forces today’s students to devote considerably more time to earning an income. Flacks says his primary goal has been to encourage his students to take a critical stance on issues both inside and outside his classroom. “As a teacher, I think my job is to encourage students to be participatory citizens. Everything I do as a teacher tends to revolve around that, which I think it ironically what education should be about anyway, so I don’t see it as a very radical perspective.” Recommended Reading: Making History: The American Left and the American Mind, (1998) Fall courses: None, but will teach Political Sociology in Winter.
Eileen Boris
“The women’s movement was just beginning, and I was kind of interested, but for me in ’68, race was the burning issue – as inner-cities did literally burn. Race was just structurally and politically more important to me.” As a student at Boston University, Boris also participated in various anti-Vietnam, anti-draft, and anti-JROTC activities. But it was her various summer Work Studies jobs, most of which were related to racial issues, which she found the most instructive. In one case, she served as an intern at the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. “It was a real eye-opening experience because, as a new leftist, I learned that government agencies are contradictory spaces. They’re set up to stymie the very goals they are set up on the surface to address.” By the time Boris received her masters from Brown University and received a fellowship to study and teach in Chicago in 1974, the women’s liberation movement had long since emerged as a national powerhouse. She found her calling as a socialist-feminist -- a branch of feminism that stresses capitalism’s role in female oppression while critiquing traditional Marxism for failing to connect patriarchy and classism -- and became a member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation movement. “We used to say we had to go to double the meetings – we had to go to the feminist meetings, and we had to go to the male New Leftist meetings, too,” Boris said. After receiving her PhD in “American Civilization” from Brown in 1981, Boris went on to teach at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she spent 14 years. She moved on to spend two years on the University of Virginia Women’s Studies faculty, before arriving at UCSB in 2001 as the first endowed chair of a women’s studies program in the UC system, the Hull Chair, a position she says “gives me a certain kind of status that I’m willing to use.” Boris is widely known for her scholarship on welfare justice; women’s history; motherhood and the politics of industrial homework in the United States; and the intersection of race, class, and gender. She has authored six books, including Home to Work, which was published in 1994, only a few years before the global sweatshop issues it largely addresses became a dominant theme in grassroots social movements later in the decade.
In her teaching, Boris stresses the importance of theory not for theory’s sake, but as a means of social change. “I’m interested in using theory as a tool to understand the world so we can act within it – not just theory for the sake of theory. But we’re all doing theory all the time – it’s just not explicit, it’s implicit.” Recommended Reading: Home to Work (1994)
Howard Winant The son of Jewish refugees from fascism, sociology professor Howard Winant learned at an early age that US society is structured along racial lines. When he was 15, Winant joined the front lines of the Civil Rights movement, thereby setting him out on a lifelong struggle to see racial justice realized in global society. Today, Winant serves as the director of the New Racial Studies Project, a UCSB-based think tank he founded in 2002. The goal of the project is to develop new academic perspectives on race and its social construction. This field of research is especially relevant, Winant says, in a post-Civil Rights era where growing numbers of people claim to be “color blind,” and anti-racist movements are struggling to move beyond the fruits of past victories. “I don’t know how many people tell me, ‘I’m not a racist — I see everyone as an individual.’ That perspective tends to paper over the ongoing nature of racism and white supremacy. ‘We’re not seeing color now; it must be their own fault — their own fault — that they don’t have equal opportunities.” According to Winant, much of the trouble faced by current anti-racist struggles stems from an inherent dilemma faced by virtually all social movements. “There’s a kind of a trajectory that critical struggles go through where, when you win something, you want to get incorporated into the institutions you’re fighting against — getting a civil rights law passed by Congress, for example. But once that happens, it diffuses the struggle in some ways.” Among the research focuses of New Racial Studies are the meaning of mixed-race identity, the nature of whiteness, the link between race and empire, and the “intersection” between race, gender, and class. In analyzing the notion of white supremacy, Winant’s perspective in some ways diverges from that of most of his colleagues, many of whom see no inherent value in what is known in sociological terms as “white racial identity.” “There’s a part of blackness that’s tied to Americanness that’s not entirely alienated — that’s where the claims for justice and equality come from. ‘I’m an American, so how come I have to drink from a colored fountain?’” Winant said. “White people, too, I think, experience some form of double-consciousness. Otherwise, where would white people’s notions of anti-racism come from?” In striving for social justice, Winant emphasizes the dynamic nature of radical social change, which he sees as perpetually unfinished business, rather than merely a series of set goals and accomplishments, victories and failures. “I think we have to be conscious of the processual aspect of politics, that politics is a process. As you move forward toward your horizon, the horizon doesn’t just stay there — you can see farther now. We want to accomplish a little bit more than what’s possible, and when we have accomplished it, we will see that there were limits to what we thought was possible.” According to Winant, the struggle against racism in the US is as old as the US itself, a factor in this country’s life that has strongly influenced everyone, regardless of racial identity. “The US is such a fundamentally racially structured society. Settlers and slavers — that’s the dynamic that made us who we are today. But also the resistance to that made us who we are today. It’s not a question of getting beyond race — it’s a question of reinventing race.” Recommended Reading: The World is a Ghetto (2001)
Cedric J. Robinson & Elizabeth Robinson
Born in Oakland, California, Professor Cedric J. Robinson’s activism go back to his days as a high school and then university student in the Bay Area, where he joined with other Black radical students in struggle for justice and intellectual freedom on college campuses, and protested the iniquities of American foreign and domestic policies. He received his BA in social anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and completed his graduate work at Stanford University in political theory. Professor Robinson came to UCSB with his wife, Elizabeth (Station Advisor to KCSB-FM), in 1979, five years after the birth of their daughter Najda. Cedric and Elizabeth are co-founders and regular correspondents of “Third World News Review,” a weekly television program on SB Community Access Channel-17 and the oldest public access television show in the country. In addition to serving as Station Advisor to student and community programmers at KCSB-FM, Elizabeth co-hosts a weekly news and public affairs program there, No Alibis. She serves as Treasurer on the International Board of AMARC, an international non-governmental organization serving the community radio movement. For the past several years, Elizabeth has given life to her belief that “another world is possible” by participating in the World Social Forum, an international peoples’ movement dedicated to sustainable development and social and economic justice. She continues to share her knowledge and real-world experiences with members of the campus community through presentations at conferences, talks at the Women’s Center, through her community activism, and her ongoing mentorship as campus advisor to S.C.O.R.E. and budding media-makers. Robinson cites his grandfather, Winston Whiteside, C.L.R. James, and Terrence Hopkins as individuals and thinkers who have had the greatest influence upon his work. He was most recently honored in 2004 at a two-day conference organized at UCSB by colleagues and former graduate students which established an annual lectureship in his name. The conference on “Radical Thought and the Black Radical Tradition” was attended by more than 100 scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students in celebration of the 20th anniversary of his seminal book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Originally published in 1984, the book is considered to be one of the most important works on radical black thought in print. Robinson is also the author of The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, Black Movements in America and The Anthropology of Marxism. He is currently working on a book about early black films in the United States. Recommended Reading: Small samples of Elizabeth Robinson’s work can be found at www.kcsb.org, in the archives of ‘Voices Without Frontiers’ at http://rvsf.amarc.org/site.php?lang=EN, and in the hearts and minds of those who know her. Also, check out Cedric’s Black Marxism (2000). Fall Courses: None, but check out the Winter catalogue!
Professor Grace Chang Women’s Studies Professor Grace Chang often tells her students that political activism doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Every individual needs to find out what form of activism works for them. Her first political action was participating in a “Take Back the Night” march in Washington, D.C. “At the time I felt more comfortable just walking, not screaming or chanting,” she said. After participating in a number of campaigns and actions, she has since “liberated her mouth,” for a variety of political causes. As a graduate student working towards her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, she saw clear links between her academic research, politics, and personal struggles as a single mother and woman of color. “Graduate school and my political involvement coincided because I was studying immigrant women workers’ rights while observing how parents managed to work and raise children,” she said. “I found that one of the most prevalent solutions was to exploit immigrant women of color.” Around this time, Proposition 187 was introduced in California, an initiative to exclude undocumented people from social services and public assistance, including public education, healthcare and welfare. Grace commented, “The irony was that immigrants were doing all the work to support the economy, yet Proposition 187 grew out of the attitude that immigrants should not even have their basic needs met.” So Grace joined this campaign; phone banking, canvassing and talking to people on street corners. She dragged her children with her to organizing meetings and outreach efforts, and still doesn’t regret a moment of it, even after Prop 187 passed in 1994. Soon after Grace arrived at UCSB in 2003, she became acutely aware of predominantly white, western-centric perspectives presented in the Vagina Monologues, which she says portray women of color as the most oppressed, but don’t represent the many ways these women lead resistance movements for their own liberation. Grace was active in creating an alternative called the Vagina Dialogues, a “venue for women of color and allies to express their struggles in their own words”. When Grace first began offering a critique of the Monologues in her classes, she encountered a lot of resistance from students. “I think [some students] think [the Monologues are] the gospel, which was exactly my fear, because there are many problematic aspects to them and they’re being taken for truth.” Grace says, “I think that Eve Ensler [producer of the Vagina Monologues] does a disservice to many women when she puts out these misrepresentations that get so widely consumed, because the Vagina Monologues are everywhere.” Grace’s aim in the Vagina Dialogues is to provide a more accurate representation of the issues facing women of color. The first showing of the Dialogues last spring, received very positive feedback from viewers. As her work on the Dialogues reflects, Grace is a great resource for students. “I always tell students, there are lots of ways to be political — it doesn’t mean you have to be yelling and screaming on the streets or chaining yourself to a building, or getting beaten up by cops. There are so many ways you can participate, like writing, speaking, doing outreach, research or popular education”. This coming year, Grace plans to continue her active role in countering people’s misconceptions about women of color. The Vagina Dialogues is open to on campus and off campus women. Organizing for this year’s production will begin in the fall. See page 30 for more information if you are interested in any aspect, including writing, performing, directing, outreach, or tech support, contact Grace Chang at gchang(at)womst(dot)ucsb(dot)edu
|
|
|
When UCSB Women’s Studies Professor Eileen Boris was first cutting her teeth as an activist, racism -- not sexism -- was her primary concern.
At UCSB Cedric Robinson has served as director of the Center for Black Studies, the chair of Political Science; and then chair of Black Studies. He is currently Professor of political science and black studies, teaching and researching questions of modern political thought, radical social theory in the African Diaspora, comparative politics, and media and politics. Professor Robinson teaches BLST 5, “Blacks & Western Civilization,” a popular lower-division course satisfying one of several GE requirements.