Guest Speakers and Participants

Robert F. Barsky is Professor of Humanities and of Law at Vanderbilt University. The author of 10 books, including a collection of poetry and a novel, Professor Barsky works at the intersection of narrative and law. Barsky’s work relating to Noam Chomsky and his milieus, and his engagement with homeless and refugee populations, reflect his interest in the intersections of language, power, and storytelling as they relate to vulnerable populations. A Guggenheim Fellow (2022-2023), his most recent works include Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About Fleeing Persecution (2021), and a 68-page poem titled The BeltLine Chronicles.

Ben Beitler is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of French. He studies the treatment of environmental conflict in contemporary French film and literature. He is currently teaching a class on ecocinema and finishing a dissertation on pesticides and ecolinguistics. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paragraph, Continuum, Contemporary French Civilization and The Trouble, as well as the collective publication Living with Precariousness.

Stephanie L. Canizales is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Canizales  specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Over the last decade, Canizales has focused her research on the migration and coming-of-age of unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico. Canizales’ first book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, brings together six years of research to tell the stories of unaccompanied migrant youth in Los Angeles, California. Born and raised in L.A., Canizales is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth motivate her commitment to public scholarship. Canizales’ research has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. She aims to impact policy through her work as a resident scholar with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a Research Consultant at UNICEF.

João Pedro Rangel Gomes da Silva is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Italian Studies. His background is in social anthropology at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. For his master’s dissertation, he explored Asmara’s visual and material culture, examining how Italians and Eritreans have historically appropriated these images. This research offered deeper insights into Italian colonial experiences and the enduring impact of these visual, material, and urban legacies. His research interests remain in exploring Italian colonialism and its visual cultural heritages. (2023).

T. J. Demos is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (2013), which won the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project “Beyond the End of the World” (2019-21). His most recent book is Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (2023).

Layal Ftouni is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the recipient of the Dutch Research Council Veni grant (2021–25) for the research project entitled “Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival.” The monograph explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death (both human and environmental) in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine. She works across the fields/areas of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, political theory, critical theory, and critical race studies.

Sylvain George is a filmmaker, poet, and theorist with postgraduate degrees in philosophy, law, and political science, as well as in cinema. George has been making poetic, political, and experimental films since 2006, focusing particularly on the themes of immigration and social movements. His work has been presented at major festivals, institutions, and avant-garde venues around the world, and has been the subject of regular international retrospectives since 2008, including at the Cinémathèque Française, Doc’s Kingdom, Courtisane Festival, Ljubljana Cinematheque, Punto de Vista, Milano Film Festival, Museo Reina Sofia, Kinoarmata/Manifesta14, Mostra de São Paulo, and Efebo d'Oro. In 2023, he was honored by the 47th São Paulo International Film Festival (Mostra Internacional de Cinema em São Paulo), where he received the Humanity Award for his lifetime achievement. That same year, he was awarded the Efebo d'Oro Nuovi Linguaggi – Città di Palermo Award by the Efebo d'Oro Festival, also for his lifetime achievement. George teaches at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and regularly leads masterclasses and workshops around the world.

Ari Gizzi is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Italian Studies. She received her B.A. in International Relations and Italian Studies from Tufts University, where her senior thesis used postcolonial theory to explore how citizenship and racialization have constructed Italian national identity. Her current research interests include cultural and performative citizenship, urban space and spatial identities, and afterlives of Italian colonialism. Prior to joining the Italian Studies Department in 2024, she lived in Bologna, Italy, working as a translator for the architectural magazine The Plan, as a research assistant at the Università di Bologna, and as a program assistant and academic advisor for university study abroad programs.

Deniz Göktürk is Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Department of Film and Media. She works on cultural and media studies with a focus on moving images, documentary forms, polyglot literature, and theories of migration, social interaction, and aesthetic intervention in a global horizon. Göktürk’s publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture, translations from Turkish literature, and numerous articles and edited volumes on transnational migration, culture, and cinema. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (2002; expanded 2nd edition 2019), Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (2007), Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011), Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (2010), and Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken der Gemeinschaft (2019). Her most recent book is Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders (2023). Göktürk is currently working on a project on “Poetic Truth in Documentary Cinema” and co-curates the film series Documentary Voices at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the UC Berkeley German Department’s electronic journal (since 2005).

Cathy Park Hong is Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Hong is a writer and poet who has published three volumes of poetry, including Translating Mo'um, Dance Dance Revolution, and Engine Empire. Her creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings (2020) was both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list, as well as a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Hong grew up in Los Angeles before earning her B.A. from Oberlin College and MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to coming to UC Berkeley, she was on the faculty at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program for poetry.

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Jackson’s research focuses on two overlapping domains: collaborations across visual, performing, and media art forms; and the role of the arts in social institutions and in social change. Her most recent books are Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and the Social (2022) and The Human Condition: Media Art from the Kramlich Collection (2022). Her previous books include The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (2015), Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon(2016), Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (2011), Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004).

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Thematically, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, African-based spiritual traditions, ecology, black place-making, and the everyday ritual aesthetics of diasporic communities. She explores how we inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. This interplay between landscapes and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that she uses her own body to reimagine black people’s relationships to the complex social and natural landscapes in which they live. She has shown work at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, the Photographic Center Northwest, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum, Fototeca de Havana, the Museum of the African Diaspora, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, JACK, SOMArts, C3A, A.I.R. Gallery, Performance Space New York, and the Berkeley Art Center. She is a national member of the A.I.R. Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project, founded by Omi Jones and facilitated by Sharon Bridgforth.

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Zaffaroni Family Chair of Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at the University of California, Berkeley. She is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute of European Studies, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Her first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (2006), reclaims Baudelaire's aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (2015), addresses the transnational, anti-colonial deployment of complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah. Her most recent book, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (forthcoming, fall 2025) addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics, and aesthetics in Europe’s current refugee “crisis,” and was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022).

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a writer and Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, UK and Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. Her latest book, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (2024), was a finalist for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2024, and long-listed for The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2025. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and lives in London and France.

Christina Varvia is a Lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been a member of the Forensic Architecture agency since 2014 and formerly acted as its deputy director. Currently, Varvia is completing her Ph.D. at Aarhus University where her research focuses on feminist notions of the human body within a context of investigative practice. She is a founding member and the chair of the board of Forensis, the Berlin-based association established by Forensic Architecture, and the co-founder and co-director of the Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIĀ). Her work on airstrikes, detention, right-wing politics, police, and border violence has been submitted to courts and other political forums, and exhibited and awarded internationally.

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where her research and teaching focus on questions of immigration, citizenship, culture, and identity. She is the Director of the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley and is an affiliated faculty member of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for European Studies, the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award, and the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award. Volpp is the coeditor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (2019) and Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (2006). Her writing has been widely published in journals including the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, Citizenship Studies, PMLA, Law, Culture, and Humanities, differences, Critical Analysis of Law, and many others.

Rhiannon Noel Welch is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair in Italian Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, Film and Media, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Program in Folklore. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics (2016) demonstrates how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration. It received an Honorable Mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize in Italian Studies and a Special Mention for the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in Modern Italian Studies. Her current book manuscript, Reverberation and the Anticolonial Imagination, proposes reverberation as a conceptual intervention that addresses how aesthetics—etymologically, relating to perception by the senses—holds and transmits historical violence in the present. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.

Originally from Addis Ababa, Dagmawi Yimer is co-founder and vice president of the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti (Migrant Memory Archive) in Rome. He has taught cinema and migration at the University of Venice and various other schools. After leaving Ethiopia in 2005 due to political unrest, Yimer crossed the Libyan desert and Mediterranean Sea before reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa on July 30, 2006. Following a video-making workshop in Rome, Yimer co-authored Il deserto e il mare (The Desert and the Sea) with five other refugees. His acclaimed works include the award-winning documentary Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth, 2008), C.A.R.A. ITALIA(Dear Italy, 2009) and Soltanto il mare (Nothing but the Sea, 2011). He coordinated the collective film project Benvenuti in Italia (Welcome to Italy) and directed Va' pensiero (Walking Stories, 2013), which interweaves accounts of racist attacks in Milan and Florence. His 2015 short film Asmat (Names) commemorates migrant lives lost at sea.