Transcollege Clusters

Faculty Coordinator: Gregory Downs (History)

In the period after the 13th (1865) and 14th (1868) Amendments, the abolition of legal slavery (with an exception for convicted felons) and the definition of some federal rights of both citizens and residents created a new set of legal and political and social questions that continue to shape the United States today: What does freedom mean in the absence of chattel slavery? Which rights adhere to all free people, and which rights functioned more as privileges belonging to a narrow few? How did the establishment of birthright national citizenship in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and 14th Amendment transform the legal rights both of citizens and of so-called aliens? These questions were sharply contested in the lead-up to the Civil War, in the battles over the citizenship of former Mexican nationals after the U.S. annexation of large parts of Mexico, over Chinese and Irish immigration on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in struggles over Native American sovereignty and belonging, in debates over the rights of married and single women, in laws over apprenticeship for minors, in statutes that segregated races by place and privileges and rights, in the end-of-the-19th century arguments over the residents of former Spanish imperial territory and Hawai'i after the Spanish-American War and Hawaiian annexation, and in the reform of prisons and jails across the country. 

Faculty Coordinators: Emily Merchant (Science and Technology Studies), Meaghan O’Keefe (Religious Studies)

In the nearly two decades since the  completion of the Human Genome Project, DNA has found its way into ever more intimate aspects of our lives, from our racial identities to our reproductive decisions, even as scientists and doctors struggle to make sense of the nucleotide sequence it comprises.  With uses of DNA traveling far beyond laboratories and clinics, new kinds of actors are being enrolled into the postgenomic project, requiring new types of expertise to critically interrogate it. This cluster brings together faculty members, postdoctoral scholars,  and graduate students from across UC Davis — including the College of Letters and Science, the College of Biological Sciences, the Law School, and the Nursing and Medical Schools — to explore new applications of DNA at the intersection of race and reproduction  from a variety of disciplinary and professional perspectives. Our ultimate goal is to publish an edited volume that brings our diverse perspectives to bear on the role of DNA in reproduction, in race formation,  and particularly in the reproduction of racialized bodies. As an interdisciplinary group of scholars, the members of our cluster typically read different journals and publish in different venues, foreclosing opportunities for meaningful cross-disciplinary  knowledge generation. Our volume will unite and juxtapose viewpoints that do not typically interact with one another in order to untangle some of the knottiest questions that are emerging from new uses of DNA in a growing number of domains.

Faculty Coordinators: Jessica Perea

Indigenous communities regard traditional foodways as core components of community health and wellness, yet traditional foods such as those made by fermentation practices are threatened by settler capitalist nation states that continue to legislate away Indigenous People’s rights to ancestral lands and waters. This goals of this transcollege research cluster includes curating a year-long series of convergence research activities that center radical and relational Indigenous knowledges and ways of fermenting foods. Ultimately, our cluster seeks to unsettle and expand dominant modes of knowledge production in food science research in ways that advances food sovereignty, an issue of urgent global significance for all peoples. 

Faculty Coordinator: Teresa Steele (Anthropology)

In our quest to understand the past, the field of archaeology draws on the expertise of a wide variety of disciplines. Such research is conducted in the context of on-going, persistent collaborations. The goal of the GeoArchaeology Working Group is to facilitate the transfer of information through the development and implementation of projects among archaeology and paleoanthropology, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Mechanical Engineering. Current projects include identifying the presence of human-made fires in archaeological deposits, the use of fire to alter the magnetic and mechanical properties of stone, and the impact of incidental burning as well as accounting for post-depositional process when sampling materials and using isotopes for reconstructing mobility and environments.