Events

Please join the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity for the Afrofuturism[s] Zine Showcase. This is a community gathering celebrating the winter 2025 Afrofuturism[s] cohort taught by Eve L. Ewing.

Join RDI on Wednesday, March 5 from 6:30-8 pm at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at 5733 S. University Ave, Chicago IL.

Persons with disabilities requiring assistance or
accommodations please contact RDI 72 hours in advance of this event at RaceDiasporaIndigeneity@uchicago.edu

This chapter is from my current book manuscript tentatively titled “Musubu: Knotting History at the Gila River Incarceration Camp”. This book combines archaeological, archival, and oral historical research to understand the confinement of Japanese Americans at the Gila River Incarceration Camp, built on the land of the Gila River Indian Community. Framing the incarceration camp as a tangle of knots, it examines the people, landscapes, materials, and histories which came together to produce the camp and their afterlives in the present. This chapter looks to the ways that diaspora shaped the practices of incarcerated Japanese Americas, materially linking the camp to multiple sites nationally and transnationally, while simultaneously forming new relationships with Indigenous communities and land.

: Koji Lau-Ozawa is a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for American Cultures. His research focuses on the archaeology, history, and memory of Japanese diaspora, especially as it intersects with Indigenous land. Lau-Ozawa received a PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University, an MA in Anthropology at San Francisco State University and an MA(Hons) in Archaeology and Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. 

Please join the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity for the annual Allison Davis Lecture with Dr. Shailaja Paik who will be giving a talk titled: “Radical Dalit Humanism: Towards Anti-caste, Anti-race, and Anti-patriarchal Futures.” The lecture will take place on May 15, 2025 from 4 pm in Swift Hall, 3^rd floor lecture room with a reception to follow from 5:30-6:00pm in the Swift Hall common room (1025 E 58th St, Chicago, IL)

The interlocking technologies of caste, gender, sexuality, and humanity continue to shape identity, agency, and citizenship in South Asia and beyond. This talk focuses on radical Dalits’ critique of the caste system and their engagement with the transformative potential of the interlocking politics of gender, sexuality, and the human. It demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and the violence of caste in our everyday lives.

Dr. Shailaja Paikis Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Associate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” Fellow, 2024 . Her first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination(Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit (“Untouchable”) women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity (Stanford University Press, 2022) focuses on the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. The book won two prestigious awards: the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards prize and the Association of Asian Studies Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy prize. She is currently working on new book projects: Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India; the Cambridge Companion to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar; and Caste, Race, and Indigeneity in South Asia and Beyond.

Persons with disabilities requiring assistance or accommodations should contact RDI 72 hours in advance of the event at: racediasporaindigeneity@uchicago.edu