REGISTER
Join us on Monday, November 17 at 12pm for a Matrix Teach-In, part of 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.
This Matrix Teach-In will feature Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who will present 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 is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Service Center.
Abstract
How can undergraduate research at UC Berkeley contribute meaningfully to community activism in Oakland and beyond? In this talk, I reflect on several years of collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland’s Fruitvale District. I briefly discuss course curriculum on recent patterns of racialized criminalization, exclusion, and banishment in Oakland. I then consider ongoing collaborative mapping and filmmaking projects. These address restorative justice, housing access, and environmental remediation for an array of stakeholders, including formerly-incarcerated men of color and activists involved in indigenous sovereignty, climate justice, and housing rights. Beyond intersections of coursework and community, I assert that this collaborative research provides spaces of public scholarship, critical acknowledgement, and generative healing that are perhaps more vital now than ever.
Biography
My experience growing up in the East Bay shaped my academic interests in the historical roots of contemporary urban transformations in California. These interests structured my B.A. and Ph.D. in Geography at U.C. Berkeley, as well as my M.A. at California State University, Northridge. My dissertation, Iron, Oil, and Emeryville: Resource Industrialization and Metropolitan Expansion in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1900, combined urban and economic geography to study the role of industrialization in both regional capitalism and metropolitan growth. I am currently building on this research by writing about urban politics, commercial entertainment, and popular culture in a book manuscript, Sin Suburb: Manufacturing Vice in Emeryville and the San Francisco Bay Area. New projects on the early high explosives sector and specialized Bay Area corporations depict the decisive but overlooked role of innovative industries in not only California’s development but also in broader patterns of U.S. economic expansion during the late-19th century.
Participation in the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship Program (ACES) has enhanced my teaching and helped me continue exploring issues of power, race, and class in the contemporary city. Drawing on my experience in the nonprofit sector, I have designed and implemented student partnerships with artists, activists, and community organizations that are confronting gentrification, displacement, and homelessness in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and SOMA districts.