Contact Zones: California Public Schools and Encounters Across Lines of Racialized Ethnicity, Gender, and Social Class

Colloquium | November 5 | 4-5:30 p.m. | 691 Barrows Hall

Sponsor: Race and Gender, Center for

The Relatively Hidden, but Tectonic, Dynamics of Social Class in the Experiences of Elementary School Children in California
Prof. Barrie Thorne, Sociology

More info coming soon...

Negotiating "Otherness": Exploring the Contact Zone of University-Community Partnerships in an Urban Context
Emily Gleason, Education

This presentation reflects a portion of a larger qualitative study of two models of university-community collaborations. Each collaboration created “contact zones” between undergraduates from a prestigious urban university and local high school youth from the surrounding inner city environs. The research explores the engagement between young people from disparate social and cultural backgrounds, with an eye on how they make sense of each other, their own identities, and their “place” in the world. Magnifying tensions around racial, class, ethnic, geographic, and cultural differences, these partnerships produce spaces in which relations of power are negotiated and contested. This presentation focuses on one of the study’s larger questions: How do youth and university students theorize about “Others” and “Otherness” through the course of program involvement, and how are constructs of “difference” negotiated in the “contact zone”?

Event Contact: centerrg@berkeley.edu, 510-643-8488