Recorded on November 17, 2025, this video features a lecture by Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who presented a talk reflecting on his experiences with collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland’s Fruitvale District. Lunine’s courses are part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program, which aims to transform how faculty’s community-engaged scholarship is valued, to enhance learning for students through a combination of teaching and practice, and to create new knowledge that has an impact both in the community and the academy.
In Fall 2024, students in Lunine’s Geography 50AC: California collaborated with Canticle Farm and Restorative Media, two nonprofits located in the Oakland Fruitvale District. ACES students developed story maps to represent the spatial histories of the Canticle Farm site. To create these story maps, they analyzed historical newspaper articles, real estate promotions, archeological reports, and city planning documents, revealing legacies of Indigenous stewardship, the Brown Power movement, redlining, and criminalization that has shaped Canticle Farm. Another group of ACES students collaborated with the Executive Director of Restorative Media, an organization led by formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people, to interview Canticle Farm stakeholders about their movement activism and life stories.
This event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Service Center, and presented as part of Matrix Teach-Ins, a new event series featuring talks by UC Berkeley lecturers and professors who earn praise from students for their teaching. The speakers are invited to deliver a favorite standalone lecture, reimagined for anyone curious to learn.
Podcast and Transcript
(upbeat electronic music)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MARION FOURCADE]
Hello, everyone. Welcome. My name is Marion Fourcade.
I’m the director of Social Science Matrix, and I’m really excited because we are starting a new program today that we call The Matrix Teach-Ins. These are events that are designed to spotlight Berkeley instructors known for their exceptional teaching. So we invite them to delve, to, to deliver a favorite lecture for anyone curious to learn.
And so today we welcome Seth Lunine, who’s a lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department and Geo– of Geography, and he will share his insight from his work connecting undergraduate learning with community-based research in Oakland’s Fruitvale district. So we couldn’t think of a better way of opening, opening this series than something that is really plugged into like the local community life. Seth’s courses are part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship Program, which integrates classroom teaching with collaborative projects that generate new knowledge for both the university and local organizations.
Note that today’s event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Public Service Center and also by the Department of Geography. As usual, before I turn it over to Seth, let me briefly mention a few other upcoming events. The last few, the last two events this fall semester, on December 2nd, we have Maximilian Kasy, who’s one of our alumni, like Seth.
He’s an alumni from the Economics Department, and who now teaches at Oxford, and he will present his book just out this month, The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works and Who Benefits. And then on December 4 we have Alexis Madrigal, who may be known to many of you because of KQED Forum, and, and he will actually speak on the topic that is very much related to this one today. It’s called “To Know A Place,” and the place in question is also Oakland.
Now, let me introduce our speaker.
Seth Lunine’s experience growing up in the East Bay shaped his academic interests in the historical roots of contemporary urban transformations in California. These interests guided his BA and PhD in Geography at Berkeley, as well as his MA at Cal State University, Northridge. Seth’s dissertation, ‘Iron, Oil, and Emeryville: Resource Industrialization and Metropolitan Expansion’ in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850 to 1900, combined urban and economic geography to examine how industrialization influenced both regional capitalism and metropolitan growth.
He is currently building on this research through a book manuscript titled, oh, I love the title. ‘ Sin Suburb: Manufacturing Vice in Emeryville and the San Francisco Bay Area’, which explores urban politics, commercial entertainment, and popular culture. His new projects on the early high explosive sector and specialized Bay Area corporations highlight the decisive but overlooked role of innovative industries, not only in California’s development, but also in broader patterns of US economic expansion during the late 19th century.
So without further ado, I’ll, let me welcome Seth to the podium, and I look forward to this fabulous lecture. Thank you.
(audience applauding)
[SETH LUNINE]
Thanks so much for the generous introduction and for having me here. Let’s see, I need another layer on my introductory description in the Geography Department, because much of my recent work has revolved around community-engaged scholarship, in addition to the coursework. And that I found over the last several years to be the most meaningful and consequential part of my work here at UC Berkeley.
Chloe, can you hear me okay in the back? Thanks. So let me see.
Thanks so much for having me and your patience in putting this together. And what I wanna do today, I’m splitting the difference a little bit. I wanna do a piece of sort of classroom teaching, right?
And then take a step back and look at how it syncs up in part with this community-gauged research that we’re doing. And structurally so I’m, I teach. Well, I have an incredible job here at UC Berkeley.
I’m really, I had a moment in looking at some of the work we’ve done over this is my 10th year here. And I felt a lot of gratitude about the opportunities that I’ve been given by the Geography Department, by Doug and Victoria and the AC Center, by Sandra Bass and Casey and folks at the Public Service Department. And we’ve gotten to do quite a bit of work, and there’s been quite a bit of patience and grace, ’cause a lot of our community engaged scholarship is novel.
There’s no template or equation. It’s a lot of learning by doing. And again, I think it’s amazing work.
And one thing I’ve found increasingly important for me, having gone to undergrad here, having gone to graduate school, being a product of fifth through high school, public schools in Berkeley as well. One thing I’ve thought is increasingly important is, as my role as a lecturer and now a continuing lecturer is, how can I create some opportunities for undergrads? What does that look like?
And this is one way as well. Again, I want to talk a bit about a little piece of classroom learning, and then sort of scale out and look at how that intersects with or informs some of our community-engaged scholarship. And what I was gonna say, I teach these days two large lower division classes that fulfill the American Cultures requirement.
One’s on California, one’s on the Bay Area. I haven’t strayed that far from home. And then I teach a couple upper division classes that are essentially field studies, which means we get to go on a lot of field trips and walk around the Bay Area together.
So our ACES work, American Cultures Engaged Scholarship, which most generally is collaborative research between students in the class and community partners. And those community partners take a lot of different forms. For us, it’s primarily you know, NGOs or nonprofits and artists.
Okay? And I’ll talk more about the specifics in a moment. But the way it works, it’s a breakout group of students within the larger class.
So the larger classes are typically between 100 and 160 students. And from that group, we have a breakout. Today, we have a couple students, including Chloe in the back, who has done amazing work within the context, the broader coherence of a class.
So they’re doing essentially an extra section per week. They’re doing a lot of BART rides and visits. They have to deal with me quite a bit, which is a challenge in itself.
So these students do a lot of extra amazing work. And I can’t say enough about them. And then also, this is an interesting picture, right?
This is rigorous academic work. Um, but I had kind of a facile question in the description, something like, how can undergraduates at UC Berkeley meaningfully participate in community activism, or can they or something? And the answer is, of course.
And that takes a lot of different forms. But where I arrived just recently, looking at a lot of the stuff, is that moments like this are indispensable. They can’t be replicated.
That was lunch on International Boulevard, right? But this was one small group. They just did about four or five hours of interviews of stakeholders and community members at Kanikul Farm in Fruitvale.
Formerly incarcerated men who had been paroled from life sentences, right? A lot of young people involved in, um– And I know we have some friends of Kanikul Farm here as well, right?
Um, and let me say at the front end, I’m no expert. I claim the East Bay in terms of my own biography and where I’m from. I’ve lived, like I said, in the East Bay pretty much my whole life, except for six years in LA, which I enjoyed quite a bit, right?
But I’m a East Bay person. I have a lot of experiential knowledge, a lot of library knowledge, but I’m no expert on this stuff. I’m learning like everyone else.
We learn together, right? But this moment, they did all the interviews. This is Troy Williams of Restorative Media.
And that is, he’s the executive director and founder. He was incarcerated for 25 years and learned a lot about media production, and now has a media production company, nonprofit, that does an incredible array of filmmaking. They also do the formerly incarcerated speaker series on Alcatraz, which got a lot of publicity lately, as I’m sure you can imagine.
But Troy guided the students through every facet of production, from narration, interview questions, lighting, sound, directing, recording, conducting the interviews. But that was just sort of the icing on the cake. The students got to work with Troy, who’s a world-class educator and mentor.
Restorative Media. And that’s Robert, who recently finished his work, undergrad work in geography here at UC Berkeley, right? And he’s intimately involved with Kanikul Farm as well, right?
And he did amazing work at Kanikul Farm on daylighting the creek and environmental restoration. And he’s the real bridge between the classroom at UC Berkeley and the site in Fruitvale, right? But they had just done four or five or six hours of interviews that was the culmination of some of their work with Troy.
And then we got a celebratory lunch that I paid for. That was my big contribution, right? But the point is, this is the moment, and the type and caliber of work that I think matters most for us.
And that’s sitting down together, food or no food. That’s the conversations. That’s the learning by doing.
That’s sort of the critical reflection, right? So whether it’s a formal meeting, or whether it’s lunch, or whether it’s the work we’re doing together, where I’ve landed at the moment is that it’s the face-to-face conversations. It’s how we respond when one of our other partners tells us, ‘Yeah, they were in solitary confinement for 32 years at San Quentin.’
Or another one tells us about he was the only person who escaped from San Quentin and the story of his life. Or these young people who are working on Land Back, or these people who are open and show us the meaning of the word vulnerability. And then something shifts, and we are collaborators.
And I’m proud to say I’ve made a lot of friends. But that’s the stuff. There’s the work and the deliverables, and the outcome that’s integral, of course, but I think this is the stuff that we can’t really replicate, but it’s the hardest to create, right, in terms of planning and coursework, appointments the kind of appointment that syncs up with pay and salary, and stuff like that, and just the rigors of the semester.
So this is that moment. And I wanna talk about these students briefly, ’cause they’re young and dynamic and incredibly bright, but a lot of these students, they have real connections. They’re system impacted, right?
They fled areas of acute danger and arrived here. They’re from countries where there’s real oppression, especially in terms of gender, so there’s incredible overlap as well. So, hold on.
I found the more experience I have, the worse my time management is, so let me keep it moving. Here’s what I want to do. Again, talk a little bit about just the sort of blip of classroom material, okay, and then pull out a little bit and talk about some of these projects.
And what I wanna do, as long as this is a bit experimental in the format and things like that, I think if there’s a question of clarity, what I’m saying, what I’m referring to, would you just let me know in the moment? If there’s feedback or critique, there’ll be time for that too. But, like I said, I’m feeling incredible gratitude, Conticle Farm, Public Service Center, AC Center, of course Troy, and Restorative Media, right?
’cause I didn’t do that much. I often feel awkward talking about this stuff because, you know, I do my part, but it’s really without these partners, we wouldn’t have any projects. We wouldn’t have this work together.
They’ve created space for us in meaningful and durable ways over time. This bit on classroom material, this is from lectures that are oriented towards lower division undergrads at UC Berkeley. Okay?
This isn’t for faculty. This isn’t to create insiders and outsiders. I don’t try and do that in my classes.
This is to bring everyone along within the AC curriculum. And then, like I said, it’s not a seamless connection to some of the work we’re doing, but that’s how I chose to structure it as far as some of this experimental stuff. We talked about Troy.
The other thing is when I talk about some of the actual scholarship, and oftentimes there is a deliverable, there’s a product, there’s the embodiment of all this research we’ve done together. I’m not showing you that today. One, it’s not complete.
Two, we need consent before we show anything.
[LECTURER]
So I can show you pieces and talk about it and some older examples as well. So that’s what we’ll do. So I wanna know what you see.
In my classes, some of you have seen this before. We mix it up a lot. We mess around.
So a little bit on Oakland, right? Let’s talk about Oakland a bit. And again, well, at any rate, what do you see here?
This is public art. This is a mural. This is saying a lot about Oakland, its history, its authenticity, but what do you see in this street art?
Or what might raise a question to you? What are some of the references? We’re all East Bay people in one way or another.
What do you notice? Or what question might arise in terms of this authentic place? Yeah?
[STUDENT]
I see a Black Panther.
[LECTURER]
Absolutely. The Black Panther Party emanating in many, you know, certainly from West Oakland, although some of the origins in Bayview-Hunters Point and elsewhere are often overlooked, but certainly engendered by state violence, the failure of urban renewal, and more in West Oakland. So that iconic symbol of the Black Panther Party.
Thank you. What’s your first name?
[NIYAH]
Niyah.
[LECTURER]
Lila?
[NIYAH]
Niyah.
[LECTURER]
Laya?
[NIYAH]
Niyah.
[LECTURER]
Niyah. That’s how we do it in my classes, and then I forget. Excellent. What else do you notice here? Or questions that might come up? Yeah?
[LARISSA]
I see the shoe from Children’s Fairyland.
[LECTURER]
Nice. The shoe. Who’s been to Children’s Fairyland? Excellent, yes. It’s a must see. But the shoe from Children’s Fairyland by the lake. And what was your first name?
[LARISSA]
Larissa.
[LECTURER]
Thanks, Larissa. What else do you notice here? Or questions? Yeah?
[ELLEN]
I noticed something I noticed about my own work as a city planner for a long time, which is an absence of people.
[LECTURER]
Interesting. Not a lot of human beings depicted. What’s absent as well. And what was your first name?
[ELLEN]
Ellen.
[LECTURER]
Ellen? Thanks, Ellen. What else do you see? Yes.
[STUDENT]
Next to the tree. Is that like a weapon or something?
[LECTURER]
A what? Sorry?
[STUDENT]
Is it a weapon?
[STUDENT ONE]
Like a military next to the tree?
[LECTURER]
Well, it probably derives from military technology, but I think it’s the Chabot Observatory. Yeah. But good, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What else do you notice? Yeah, yeah, Gabby.
[GABBY]
Kind of two of the focal points are like the water and then the oak.
[LECTURER]
Yeah, it has this sort of flow to it as well. And the oak that’s been appropriated by Oaklandish, but we still like it, right? So the oak itself. Excellent. What else do you see? Yes.
[STUDENT TWO]
The BART.
[LECTURER]
The BART. Yeah. Absolutely. A lot of connection to other places. Other thoughts? Yeah, Doug.
[DOUG]
The Bay Area slang. The hello, the yee, the how it is.
[LECTURER]
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of their, I’m not authorized to use slang anymore, I’m too old. But a lot of the regional vernacular, right?
Hella took me so long to weed that out of my vocabulary when I came here for undergrad. Town biz and all that, so the authenticity, right, of Oakland itself, yes, what else? Any other thoughts?
Yeah, Jordan.
[JORDAN]
I’m curious about the giraffe.
[LECTURER]
You know, the zoo, I’m not sure. Interesting what the giraffe is eating which is another element as well. Any other thoughts?
[STUDENT THREE]
Is it the, the beast from like, mechanical beast from Star Wars?
[LECTURER]
Yeah, the AT-AT or AT-AT, I’m not sure which. I get called out one way or the other by the Star Wars aficionados, right? But that, it represents the containerization of the port, speaking of Alexis Madrigal amazing work, right? Yeah. How about this? What’s this represent?
[STUDENT FOUR]
Chinatown.
[LECTURER]
Chinatown, absolutely. So looking at this, right, it’s interesting ’cause it has a lot of form in terms of, you know, local culture street art, right? It’s really playing up on the authenticity of Oakland as well.
In many ways, what makes Oakland Oakland? What’s the intent of it? Is it some local artist from the ground up?
A piece they threw up or something like that? No, it says, “Visit Oakland,” right?
[SETH LUNINE]
And who’s seen this image? It’s a selfie wall at the Marriott, right? So one way in talking, and it’s obviously, it’s beautiful work, the– the point is getting at, well, these are largely Black cultural forums.
This is highlighting and representing the authenticity of Oakland, right? At the same time, it is veiling processes of gentrification, displacement, racial banishment, the loss of a lot of the people who are responsible for the formation of these things and their representation over time, right? So again, for students who are new to the East Bay and new to, well, what do a lot of undergrads here aren’t from the Bay Area know about Oakland?
They know they shouldn’t go there ’cause it’s not safe. Right? That’s not our message, of course, but that’s the social fact, right?
So again, how do we approach and begin to enter some of this discussion about what’s happening in Oakland today, right? And this notion of how the city is marketing and selling itself, and how that authenticity is in part veiling some of these processes. So Black, Latine, and other nonwhite aesthetics are increasingly appropriated to both fuel and veil gentrification, ’cause you know the story of Oakland in the last 20 years is a precipitous decline of nonwhite, particularly African American communities.
So sometimes we’ll enter into these conversations in a somewhat oblique way, right? To think about their interaction and experience in ways that some of these things are being represented. I should mention Dr. Summers, who recently, well, was at UC Berkeley and now is at Columbia, had this notion of aesthetic emplacement.
I didn’t cite her ’cause I’m not doing it justice, right? But we talk a lot in our classes about modes of erasure. And this is something a little bit differently– different, ’cause again, it’s representing the authenticity, grittiness, allure of these places, and at the same time, the symbols can veil, or hide, or obfuscate the loss of the people themselves.
So in our classes, we talk a lot about, “Well, what does this look like?
[PRESENTER]
How does it work, right? And you’ve all heard the term ‘gentrification.’ It’s sort of so ubiquitous, it’s lost its meaning to some extent, but it’s still important, especially more recent iterations looking at race more explicitly, looking at the role of state governments, and with our lower division students, we start at the start.
So the point is, well, what is some of this artwork in this very particular way veiling? Well, it’s the, like I said, drastic decline of the African American population in Oakland. And of course, we can get into a lot of intersections of race and class over time, but just some numbers, right?
Blacks in Oakland fell from about 43% to 21% of the total population during most of your all lifetimes, right? And more, and we talk about spatial histories of displacement, disinvestment, abandonment and the like through you know, certainly things like redlining restrictive covenants, urban renewal in West Oakland, and then this contemporary moment. We talk a lot about actual mechanisms, like how does it work, through things like, no-fault evictions, right, and urban entrepreneurialism, the role of the local government in facilitating gentrification and the like.
And increasingly, in our class right now, and how it syncs up with some of our community-engaged scholarships, we’re talking about houselessness and criminalization. So we’re talking about the criminalization of poverty, right? You can see in Oakland, the rate of housing insecurity has a far out.
The increase has far outpaced San Francisco and Berkeley, right? This is a bit dated necessarily ’cause a lot of the numbers stemming from the pandemic haven’t quite settled, right? But you can see Oakland’s per capita homeless rate was, higher, the rate was higher, larger than San Francisco and Berkeley.
It rose roughly 47% in two years, and that’s a lot about how that data was collected. Here’s the source, right? 70% of unhoused people in Oakland are Black, while the loss of the Black population is increasing, right?
So we can get a sense of the racialized violence and injustice. This is 2020, former Mayor Libby Schaaf, you know, luckily, Oakland is answering this crisis with a sense of urgency and innovation, right? What did that look like?
Who’s seen this before? Right? This was city of Oakland encampment management policy, which was deployed at the height of the pandemic, right?
And here’s a map of Oakland. There is an encampment management policy, which allows the city to remove people who are occupying urban space, essentially encamping or not consuming anything. And based on the language of the policy, this map is showing, the turquoise areas are where encampments could exist, and the red are high sensitivity areas are areas where people who were occupying urban space, who were involved in an encampment, could be swept off.
That’s all it’s saying. But where do you see the areas in turquoise as far as areas where people were allowed to occupy space or encamp, and the like, at the height of the pandemic?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
It’s the highways.
[PRESENTER]
Yeah, infrastructure, for sure. Any other thoughts? Getting to know Oakland in different ways. Yeah, Tyell?
[TYELL]
Industrial zones.
[PRESENTER]
The what?
[TYELL]
The industrial zones.
[PRESENTER]
Yeah, certainly in West Oakland, right? So-called Lower Bottoms and the edge of industrial areas. Deep East Oakland as well, a little area around Laney, right?
So, sort of the increased concentration of poverty in already impoverished areas and the like, right? So we begin to sort of map the city and see how it works. And I want to point out a recent undergrad, Cole Haddock, and another amazing student, Maria Toldi, recently sort of updated this mode of analysis, and seeing as far as the enforcement of anti-encampment policies and the ways in which we’ve kind of gone from a spatial reshuffling of housing-insecure people to just the outright banishment or sweeping away, as it says, “Swept off the map.”
So that’s brand new, but it used similar datasets to do a much more fine-grain analysis, and it’s really amazing work, right? So we’re talking about the criminalization of poverty, we’re also talking about more overt modes of criminalization that relate directly to some of our work. Who’s heard of the gang injunction safety zones?
Has anyone heard of those things? Interesting. Yeah, a bunch of people.
So again, taking a page out of the class, just so you know, this is a gang injunction safety zone in Fruitvale, right? Here’s our partner’s site, right in the middle of things. Okay.
And again, this is getting a little bit more into the crux of the issue, so we’ll talk about, you know, what is the role, when we talk about race, we’re talking about crime, right? And what is the role of something like criminalization in enabling, in this case, real estate capital to extract value from racialized difference? What is the role of the state in criminalizing people?
How does that embellish or precipitate increasingly profitable real estate development and the like? And this begins to touch down directly on our site and our partner’s work. So you can, and then this is a little foreshadowing of some of our original map icons that Chloe did, Chloe Bauer, that are really amazing.
I need to point that out ’cause some of these students have untold talents across the board. And these are we’re like, “Chloe can you do something?” Like, “How can we talk about gentrification, criminalization, do a camera or something.”
And next week, Chloe came back with this for a map icon that’ll prob, be part of our online presence and platform. So again, mapping the area. Some of these pieces will come together.
And this is a horrible slide, I feel like. There’s all this text. I’m talking, you’re reading.
Here’s the challenge in this day and age of AI and the like and engagement and getting back in classes and everything. I don’t allow digital devices. Well, we, the students consent to a no digital device policy, except for a pad to write ’cause I want students present and engaged.
And usually they like it. I give them an opportunity for rebellion. They have to organize collectively, there’s been nothing persuasive, right?
But the point is, no digital devices. Pen and paper, or a pad, an iPad and a digital pen writing notes, right? They consent through coercion.
The problem is sometimes I have, I want them to have the equivalent of a handout, I post the slides. There’s no async, I want us all together. There’s no async, but I’ll post the slides, so they don’t have to frantically scribble everything, so sometimes I have a slide like this.
So what are these gang injunction safety zones, right? So while they’re a mode of hyper-policing and surveillance, according to the City of Oakland this is a so-called safety zone that’s designed putatively to break up gang activity by imposing restrictions on gang members within a clearly delimited area, right? This is a civil lawsuit brought by the city against a group of alleged gang members, right?
Who are named individually or as John Does and Jane Does, right? Much of the information is engendered by, the Gang Affiliation Database, State of California, which is inherently flawed. But at any rate, when you’re named on that list, right?
You lose a lot of your civil rights. You cannot appear in public with other alleged gang members. There’s a curfew, you can’t be outside after 10:00 PM.
You can’t loiter, right? And you can’t mar, these are some of the stipulations. You can’t wear certain colors and the like, right?
So what these gang injunctions are doing, is essentially rendering people guilty until they’re proven innocent and giving the state ways to target populations, right? In ways where they don’t need to break a law, in order to be a criminal. So, there’s several in Oakland.
This technique was really developed in LA, places like Oakwood and the like, right? But this was something that’s really particular to our work in Fruitvale ’cause this is the gang injunction safety zone. The thing that’s interesting, is that these gang injunction safety zones aren’t effective and they’re not implemented in the area with the most crime.
[SPEAKER]
And that’s pretty consistent throughout California. Here is Fruitvale. And sorry, this is a little scrappy.
It’s some police reporting from the city. And you can see there’s a lot of variation in the numbers, but it doesn’t appreciably change over time with its inception of the injunction itself, right? So, one way that we’re looking at this, again, as a way in class and with our partners to put a fine point on certain methods and modes of gentrification, is looking at this gang injunction, not as the cause, but one element of gentrification, the increase in property values, the re sort of mapping discursively of the Fruitvale neighborhood.
So, this notion of a privileged adjacency, right? The gang injunctions are often implemented in neighborhoods adjacent to areas with higher property values, right? Rather than neighborhoods with the highest crime rates.
The intentions of the gang injunction zone is not necessarily reducing violent crimes for a city’s most vulnerable residents, but rather making neighborhoods appear safer to attract investment, wealth, and increasing property values, right? And again, this isn’t the cause, but it’s an element, right? In Oakland, we can see two neighborhoods where gang injunction safety zones were implemented briefly, and again, it’s not the core.
It’s not the cause. But it’s more than simply correlation. In Fruitvale, in North Oakland, both these areas, property values doubled, right?
In North Oakland in particular, you can see the Longfellow and Bushrod neighborhoods saw some of the most drastic rates or losses of African American folks, right? So, there it is. Like, what do we do with that, right?
And in our class, we talk a lot about solutions. We talk, you know, some actual existing meaningful policies around just cause evictions, around upzoning, around these very meaningful, real strategies, sort of from the top down. We certainly look closely at Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, at Moms 4 Housing what does land beyond property mean as a more conceptual or broader approach, right?
[PRESENTER]
But again, when we get into the ACEs work, it becomes much different. It becomes much more real. So, here’s this sort of disjuncture.
This is just a little component of the class, but I wanted to use that to quickly dovetail into some of this work that we’re doing. But let me take a second. Are you still with me?
More or less? Okay. Sometimes it’s hard to know up here.
Any questions or comments before we move forward? And I have this goofy beanie on ’cause everything’s fine, but I had a surgery a little while ago, and I’m still dealing. It’s mainly the patch on my head.
It’s not particularly interesting, but someone the other day asked me if I’m a hipster.
(laughs)
And I was like, ‘I never was, and if you have to ask, that’s probably a problem, and blah, blah, blah.’ But any questions or comments at the moment? Okay.
So let’s make a awkward pivot into some of this work, okay? This community-engaged scholarship, and again, it’s an outcropping of the course. It’s students who self-select to apply.
They self-select to do a lot of extra work. They do it in lieu of a course project. Now it’s multiple mini-projects, right?
And again, it’s a big chunk of time. They tend to be happy they did it, is my sense. And again, I think it’s one of the more rewarding aspects of my teaching practice, largely because it’s not about me.
You know, I don’t have to carry all that stuff around, right? I think we all do a lot better in some capacity when we’re working in the service of something other than or greater than ourselves. And I know the students, some of whom have been up here and spent time with us and our partners, something shifts.
It’s all exciting and interesting. Some students have direct experience with these issues in other places. And the issues is, are, vast.
Some have incredible curiosity. I think Berkeley students, you can’t teach that, right? They bring that with them.
Some you know, they’re just really, again, engaged, curious. There’s a values match and the like, right? So they’re bringing all that in, but once we get together, once we take BART.
We take BART to the BART station, and then we walk up, talk about the neighborhood, get to know each other, and walk up to our site. It’s about 20 minutes, but the first time we do it, it’s interesting. The students from LA talk about how Fruitvale reminds them of LA.
The students from the East Bay, many of them, talk about how they’ve never been here before. Then we have a debate on the best Mexican food, whether it’s LA or Oakland, or San Francisco, and the like. But it’s that experience.
It’s the experiential work, and it’s the time together, right? So at any rate, let me talk a bit about this what we’re actually doing. So there’s Canakel Farm, and another icon, um, which I thought was ingenious.
But this is Canakel Farm. It’s right on the edge of Foothill Boulevard, 36 in Harrington. And let’s see.
So, Ann S– uh, Sims-Bucher, the executive director who works a lot with us directly, if you ask her what’s Canakel Farm all about, she’ll just say, “It depends who you ask,” right? It’s very multifaceted. Let me talk a little bit about it.
So what this family did, they’re five, now I think seven generations of Fruitval– Fruitvale. You know, they had lived here and nearby, but recently, beginning, I think about 15 years ago, they started acquiring properties adjacent to their own home as part of a community-based nonprofit. And over time, it’s this entire area, and this is part of our work, looking at sort of different modes of real estate development, housing trust, working with the Unity Council, you know, really innovative things to create affordable housing, ’cause their programs include housing, right?
So they acquired multiple sites. They tore down all the fences. Robert Day lit the creek.
They planted a lot of native plants, right? They opened it up, and they have a number of programs, right? Canakel Farms, there’s a very self-conscious and critical, uh, Franciscan orientation to their work, the Canakel of the Sun.
[SETH LUNINE]
There’s a whole cosmology that’s fascinating relating to the sites, to the programs, and the like. But the point is, they have a number of programs. They have a program for formerly incarcerated men, which is where Troy works out of, and we’ve worked closely with folks in that program.
They work with Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and gave them well, rightfully so, conveyed property to that group and members. They have some work that we can’t talk about right now that’s incredibly formative. They have a lot of young people.
It’s all young people. Now everyone’s young to me, but a little older than a lotta undergrads, but young folks, deeply engaged in a lot of different types of activism, much oriented around climate change, social justice in its many guises, Louaya, and the Peace Poets from the Bronx in New York, an incredible array of people living there, passing through, and the like, right? And then some of the on-site work again in terms of environmental remediation, daylighting, and the like.
And the point is, there’s incredible attachment and deep roots to this land. So a lot of the work we are doing, half of it is about the spatial history of this site. But here’s the site.
Again, you wouldn’t know walking by, right? Was that fair to say, Jordan? And Chlo– you wouldn’t, and some of you wouldn’t.
It looks like some really nice houses, dense, older neighborhood, but when you get inside, it’s a lot different, right? This is springtime. It’s very lush, but it’s not a farm.
But there’s a lot of en– environmental activities and then those spill over into Robert’s work, into a lot of our partners’ work as well, right? So just getting a sense there’s frogs. There’s arboreal salamanders.
There’s a whole array of birds and its own sort of ecosystem that’s emerged with the daylighting of this creek, and with the implantation of native plants and the like, right? So we have laid out this project, and these are notes that a student was nice enough to transcribe. What we started with was, I’m someone, I’ve done a lot of archival research.
So one group of students, we want to tell a spatial history of this site, right, in order to explain what’s going on today. So these are all the layers and topics they tackled. And these, again, it’s shorthand, but the pre-invasion landscape and traditional ecological knowledge, right?
Stewardship and the like. You know, what was going on during the mission system? And we approach that in terms of mass incarceration, penal labor, and some important questions about genocide.
What was going, and that’s a little bit broader scale, but then we come right back to the site and the immediate area in terms of the land grants, right? And making connections with Verona, right? And some of the Indigenous folks that are stakeholders.
And let me be really clear about something. People consented to our work, but we don’t do anything. We offer them the work for their feedback, for their acceptance.
Whatever they want to do with it, it’s their call. We just have these amazing resources that we engage with, work together, but we don’t– the first thing I learned about this stuff is that we engage as humble visitors. And then we can talk about what that means.
But this isn’t our stuff. We’re not the experts. We present what we find, and we frame it all as much as possible in terms of some of the lit with people who represent, who are survivors, who are representatives of some of the issues, moments, and people that we’re talking about.
So we looked a lot about, you know, unfree labor and the like, and then we get into issues of real estate development. It just keeps going, right? You know, extractive economies apply to real estate.
A lot on immigration history over time, some of the older families there, ’cause that’s important to our partners. A parish history, ’cause that was a real anchor of the community, and it continues to be so. I’ve certainly learned a lot about the radicalism and rebellion of the Church over time, certainly in terms of what’s going on today internationally and how the Catholic Church undergirded a lot of the work of Cesar Chavez and the like.
A lot of ugliness.
[LECTURER]
A lot of original research on, you know, exclusion in this neighborhood over time from the restrictive covenants, to the KKK in East Oakland, to redlining and the like. And then a really important chunk derived a lot from Juan Herrera, who did his PhD in ethnic studies on sort of the Latine community formation, and then getting back into issues of contemporary gentrification or criminalization, racial banishment, however we wanna put it. And then full circle back to some of the environmental remediation and work, and really highlighting Robert’s work, ’cause he has just really taken off and done amazing stuff.
So we have all these topics, and then it’s the question, well, how do we map this stuff? And we’re using a platform online called StoryMap. And I don’t like it, but I’m grateful we have access.
And there’s issues of scale, and we couldn’t put it together, so we, these are just sketches. We have an amazing, you know, one other amazing incredible thing about this ACES work is that I get to work with many graduate students and advanced undergrads who are Chancellor’s Public Fellows. And I’m working right now with Angelina Springer.
She’s our fellow. She’s a returning student in geography and art practice, and she’s really sorta like a deeply informed project manager for the work. But the point is, we had different sketches and renderings of the site, and we can’t map the places.
So what we settled on was sort of a sedimented history, thinking of the layers of development that culminate, right? In the contemporary scene. And these are different drafts.
So each layer will be one of these slices, right? And the whole point of this sort of conceptual mapping is acknowledgment, and that’s a lot of the work that Kanikul Farm is doing, is to acknowledge these spatial histories and modes of oppression, right? And foregrounding the meaning of self-determination, but to enter into modes of conversation and restorative justice to engender healing.
[PRESENTER]
So on the top level, it’ll bring in the work of Kanikul Farms, the work that Troy is doing through interviews, through video snippets, through the constellation of activists, and young people, and programs that get into the healing of these layers. And it’s not all negative stuff by any means, but, but much of it is modes of acknowledgment. So that’s sort of the digitized platform.
But I just want to show you some examples of student work. Some of it’s ready to go, some of it isn’t. And it’s really, when we think about public-facing deliverables, it introduces a whole nother layer of work, of expertise, and the like.
But a group of students, they did sort of a model of riparian woodlands, pre-invasion as part of our traditional ecological survey, right? It’s pretty lush. But this was based on, t’s sort of a model, right?
And here’s our icon. I’m really going in, all in on the icons at the moment. Here’s some archival research.
They’re getting primary sources. It’s, again, this is decontextualized. They have an awful lot of writing that’ll all be presented, but this is the neighbor, the area–
Uh-oh. I did it. It’s not focusing.
We’ll scan back out. This is, it’s 1852, but this is a Peralta land grant. We call it settler colonialism in our class.
But it shows the sorta– Oh, up here. Here’s sort of the Mexican era, and this is where a lot of indigenous people who lived in Alisal or then Verona would work seasonally in modes of unfree labor.
So the point is there are students with maps, students at the Bancroft, Earth Science Library, Map Library, Oakland History Center, doing really in-depth research around this. This was, we had an amazing experience at the Earth Science Library at the Bancroft finding some very particular subdivision maps naming the neighborhood, ’cause we couldn’t get any information. We didn’t know the name.
It’s called Boulevard Park, right? So they did this, and this encompasses our site. And then got into other sources.
This is ugly. Right? It says, “No Mongolians need apply.”
This is the current side of Kanikul.
[SETH LUNINE]
Then we found the restrictive covenants dovetailed into redlining, and Angelina was doing a lot of work on the KKK second revival in Oakland in the ’20s, talking about exclusion. And then more recent stuff, and this is amazing research that students did in a mapping project. Some of it’ll filter through, some of it won’t.
Well, but the big thing about this work is, unlike a lot of my classroom stuff, there is learning by doing, there is problem-solving. There is challenges, right? It’s innovative work.
It’s collective learning. There’s not a script, right? So again, and then getting into some of the videos, some of the other types of media that in place on the top of the map some of the contemporary work, right?
And this is Robert. We had an entomologist come out and do a survey. We had some Alan Shabel, Shabel in integrative biology do some work, just beginning to look at this space in different ways.
And then of course you learn, well, if you wanna do a good job, well, that’s why we’re in our seventh semester, I guess, or something like that. But this is the real part. That’s Troy, that’s Annie, other community members sitting down.
They’re so generous in creating space with us. The restorative media side with Troy, I just get out of the way, right? They have done an array of interviews, and now they’re doing some work with another nonprofit on how we come to understand and see parenting among formerly incarcerated folks.
They’ve done work on his own website. They’ve done work to publicize the, Formerly Incarcerated Speaker Series. And again, depending on the group of students, he works with them as far as video production, as far as using their skills, as far as teaching them skills.
And he’s, has a bunch of snippets that’ll be part of our website that’ll be public-facing for Canticle Farm, and then he has some of his own documentary work, right? And like I said, well, I need to say Troy comes here almost weekly to work with our students.
[SPEAKER]
He’s recognized and we create some funding for him, but it comes nowhere near covering his time, and expertise and his mentorship. And a way to understand it, in the spring, he was working with a group of students, and they came at me ’cause they wanted more time with Troy in their incredibly impacted schedules. And then I said, “I don’t know about that.
You’ll have to talk to Troy.” And they said, ‘We did.’ I said, ‘What did Troy say?’
And they said, ‘That sounds fine.’ You know? So he keeps doing it.
He comes here, you know, and he works with these students weekly for hours and hours, and we need to foreground that. And he has his own interests and it benefits him, of course, but that’s the nature of it, right? What I’m saying is these projects would be nothing without the partners and their generosity and the like.
And really quickly, in putting this interesting talk together, I just had a moment ’cause I’m a continuing lecturer, there’s no sabbatical. I love my job and I’m grateful for it, but there’s not a lot of detached reflection. Just starting to look at some of the things we’ve gotten to do thanks to the Public Service Center, the AC Center, Geography Department.
We got to do some work with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project early on. We got to work with Ramon Quintero Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation. He’s not a real estate person, well, he’s at the Othering and Belonging Institute.
He’s an incredible scholar, but he’s also a community planner and organizer. And that’s when I found when we go to the Tenderloin and we sit down with residents of affordable housing, that’s how we learn, and that’s how we develop projects together. What do you need?
Well, the nonprofits and residents, they wanted a directory, cross-pollination of all the different folks doing work in the Tenderloin. It’s geography, so we went ahead and mapped it as well with Alex Stewart, our graduate fellow that semester. We kept on with TNDC, right?
And did a lot of community planning. We got to meet with planners City of San Francisco, right?
[SETH LUNINE]
We got to talk about how certain city planning initiatives to do remodeling at the Civic Center might affect folks in affordable housing in the Tenderloin, and promote some of that stuff. We got to work closely with the Creative Fellows. Formerly Adobe Fellows.
But the point is, we got to teach students, I use “we” pretty loosely, how to use different online platforms in the service of our work. Some students did interesting ecological survey of People’s Park, of all things. We did, I know a bit about Illustrator.
We worked on some infographics, pretty straightforward public stuff, but in the service of the basic Student Advocate’s Office, Student Legal Services, Basic Needs Center at UC Berkeley. More recently, online or during remote learning, we worked with folks who provide mindfulness and sort of trauma healing to youth, in the juvenile justice system. And also folks down in the Antelope Valley, doing work with really vulnerable people.
Many young people out of the foster care system around. The Hook is classic car restoration and job training, but they provide wraparound services. So, for this, it was disjointed, at least spatially, but they, we did a lot of work in curriculum development, in syllabus development, in sort of, they called it rebranding some of their educational stuff as well.
So it was pretty intensive. But I just want to leave it at this. Like, this is Brenda, an amazing artist at Kanekal Farm.
This is what we’re trying to do in one way or another, create some connection, give some students stuff to carry with them. For me, it’s entirely selfish. It’s the benefits I derive from it.
But I thought, this is some new artwork at Kanekal Farm, and really powerful, and I think it might not be the crowning, the jewel on the crown for a lot of students, but I think for most of them, it’s meaningful, generative, formative stuff. And it’s all enabled by our partners, of course, and by the outfits at UC Berkeley, I’ve said, I mentioned a number of times. So I’m of course running late.
What are your questions or comments, or things like that? And thanks for coming at this moment in the semester.
(audience applauding)
The rainy season and all that. I really appreciate it. Questions?
Questions? Or feedback? I should say also, I got some wonderful emails about folks doing work in Oakland, and I think it’s clear, but as far as the announcement, I didn’t mean for there to be anything definitive, as you can tell.
There’s no expertise. But a lot of amazing work that they wanted me to be aware of, and I’m glad they made me aware of, cause, you know, I didn’t mean that there’s nothing comprehensive or definitive here. Yeah.
Any questions or comments, or interventions? There needs to be one, I feel like. Oh, oh.
(chuckling)
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
So, thank you. That was really wonderful. Do the students bring projects to you? Or, you know, how did it all start? You know, these different places that you have identified.
[SETH LUNINE]
Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Is it something that you, you know, you had connections to before? Or is it sort of a back and forth with students?
[PRESENTER]
Well, initially, it was really challenging. Doug and Victoria at the AC Center facilitated some of the connections. Increasingly, I was able to draw on my own connections.
And what happened, it was really hard to find partners, cause we can’t impose too much. Oftentimes, our work with the partners represents a lot of extra work for our partners. So Ramon Quintero, at Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, he was a former GSI.
And then he created space for us. He saw the connections, he facilitated it. And then Robert was a former student, and I went to Kanekal Farm for his graduation party.
So that was sort of not the most precise. So increasingly, And I’ve had students who wanted to participate, who formerly did ACE’s work. So we had a little side grant.
It’s like, cause I’m not the best at networking, I said, “Well, see what you can make happen.” And they were responsible for the mind-body awareness and Lost Angels projects during the remote learning.
[SETH]
So when we sit down together, a lot of our work is designing the work we’re gonna do together. We collaboratively create the projects, and that’s, I think, some of the most meaningful piece of the work, because it’s the face-to-face engaged part. Yeah.
So we work it out together. The students bring their own skills, their own background, sometimes specialized, sometimes more just rearing to go. But the students bring in an incredible amount, but the actual formal projects that are eventually culminate in a deliverable, that’s stuff that we develop in collaboration.
Yeah, yeah. Lakshmi.
[LAKSHMI]
Thank you, Seth. So I guess I had one question and then a thing to propose, or how you might see something. So my question is, it sounds like there’s been a lot of unpaid labor from a lot of different people, and but you’re creating such interesting work, right?
And so I guess one of the questions I had is about scalability. How is this something that you think should be scaled up, or should be increased, more people should get involved? And if so, how?
And then secondary, if you were in– in charge of something at the university, and you had a bunch of money to do stuff with,
[SETH]
You’re saying I’m not?
[LAKSHMI]
Oh, okay, sorry.
(laughs)
So, how would you put the money in a way that–
[SETH]
Gotcha.
[LAKSHMI]
Scalable or something?
[SETH]
I’ve honestly never thought about that.
(laughs)
Well, I do think, I think it’s challenging as far as the time commitment, and I do think it doesn’t fit neatly into a lot of our existing structures and coursework. So I know there’s a lot of grad students and faculty who incorporate engaged scholarship into their knowledge production, into their publications. That’s their research.
When then I think it’s a little bit more seamless. For me, it’s been a add-on, not in terms of energy or intent, but in terms of fitting it within courses that exist. I know if I got in front of it, the Department of Geography would create extra coursework I could add to my appointment to hold it, I would suspect.
[SETH LUNINE]
But the point is that I think it’s a really great moment ’cause we are more and more embracing this work as a public university as considering sites of knowledge production and authorship that is non-typical, heterodox or something like that. But it i– there’s no way I’ve found around the time commitment. So, I think it needs to be recognized more in terms of time, method, and even legitimacy.
And I think it needs to be foregrounded, not as an add-on. And they do this in AC, don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of ACES courses, right?
I’m just talking about my own very narrow experience. But I do think increasingly there’ll be more space for it. And I think a big part of the challenge is a lot of it’s novel.
It’s new stuff. It’s not like drawing directly on antecedent models or something like that. So if I had money, I’d create more, more, more time for people to do it in terms of appointments, in terms of coursework and the like.
And I think that’s out there. It’s just sort of the bureaucratic wrangling. But AC Center does this through their grants for graduate fellows and community partners, right?
I’d want to compensate our partners more. But again, there’s mutual benefits. That’s part of the whole idea.
It’s just the better the partner, the more energy and time. Luckily, we have a lot of people that work with us. So it’s sort of who’s available when, but that would be a big thing for me.
And maybe creating more time for reflection, taking a step back, and synthesizing some of this stuff. So more money, more people, but I think we need to foreground and acknowledge this work. Is that fair, do you think?
For like acknowledge the rigors of this work a bit more, not tacking it on to existing coursework. Yeah.
[MARION FOURCADE]
So unfortunately, we, we are out of time, but I encourage those of you who still have questions to come and ask them to Seth. I just want to thank you very much for teaching us that another way to teach is possible, and also for being the first person to inaugurate this new series. Thank you, Seth.
[SETH LUNINE]
Thanks for having me.
(upbeat electronic music)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
