The American Cultures Student Prize recognizes and celebrates undergraduate achievements within American Cultures courses. The prize is awarded annually to undergraduates for projects they develop in an American Cultures course that promotes understanding of U.S. race, ethnicity, and culture and exemplifies a standard of excellence in scholarship. Prior award-winning submissions have included essays, poetry, films, reflection statements on live performances, among other work produced for American Cultures courses. Read more
Fallon Burner (2020 Prize)
Fallon's submission examines the history of language revitalization in the Wendat Confederacy, an Indigenous group that spans North America with nations in Québec, Ontario/Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Her project started in an American Cultures course and culminated in years of library research at UC Berkeley and field research in the Wendat Confederacy in Oklahoma, Toronto, and Québec. During her field visits, Fallon conducted oral history interviews and partook in lessons in Waⁿdat and Wendat, the two languages of the Wendat Confederacy. Among other things, Fallon's project argues how small shifts in language can powerfully transform who feels heard and, thus, empowered to speak.
Jed Lee (2020 Prize)
What was once an abandoned railroad line in Richmond, CA is now a beautiful stretch of walking path decorated with gardens, murals, and parks. Richmond's Greenway is a testament to the city’s rich history of community organizing, as it takes a sustained collaborative effort between the City of Richmond, over 17 nonprofit organizations, and community members to maintain it. In his film, Jed Lee documents how the Greenway was born from community grassroots organizing, and the knowledge and collective memory of community members that have contributed to its development.
Chloe Chan (2019 Prize)
Chloe’s graphic novel panel is based on her analysis of literary texts and films that are intertwined with and working through, specific American histories of genocide, racism, and misogyny. The panel represents how, in some respects, we are already living in a post-apocalyptic world. Drawing inspiration from Chang-Rae Lee’s dystopic novel “On Such a Full Sea,” Chloe’s spatial arrangement creates an interaction between the agents of “history from above” and “history from below” within their various environmentally and historically determined constraints. The genius of her panel captures how one’s socioeconomic position—always-already buoyed to one’s race, gender, and class—can dramatically transform one’s path through, and perception of, the same moment of American history.
Erik Phillip (2019 Prize)
During 2001-2012, UC Berkeley increased recruitment of local Black football players to strengthen the Cal football team. The presence of local Black football players like Marshawn Lynch at UC Berkeley has not only become heroes to Erik and people from his community in Oakland, CA, they inspire him and others to see themselves as students and athletes on campus. However, once here, Erik found himself on a campus disconnected from his community, with an embarrassingly low percentage of Black students, and lacking in resources to support local Black athletes. During his senior year, Erik left the Cal football team so that he could develop “The Bay’s Team,” a documentary centered on the experiences of black football players at UC Berkeley from 2001-2012. This complex documentary explores the disconnect between the athletic and academic community.
The American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program offers students and faculty the opportunity to work with community organizations to develop cutting edge research projects associated with some of the nation's most pressing social issues. The following are a collection of our growing ACES course offerings and previous student projects from these community-learning classes. Read more
Public Health 105E
Using the Federal Reserve Bank’s Health and Wealth Inequities Across Bay Area Rapid Transit Stations as a starting point, journalism graduate student Jake Nicol worked with students from Public Health 150E (Introduction to Community Health and Human Development) and Professor Bill Satariano to produce an interactive documentary. The team built a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) map website with embedded video stories from individual community members and organizations. To highlight the wide range of health inequities, these stories focused on individuals representative of some of the most disparate Bay Area communities in terms of both wealth and health outcomes. Through partnerships with community organizations and in collaboration with the Journalism School, the group gathered data, testimonies, and video components for the project.
To learn more, please visit Station to Station: Health Inequities in the Bay Area
IAS 158AC
In the ACES Course, Social Movements, Urban Histories, and the Politics of Memory
(International & Area Studies 158AC), students work with community organizations to address questions related to how and why progressive social movements in San Francisco Bay Area emerged, what kind of knowledge and institutions were created by these movements, and how have these legacies shaped the culture and politics of the area. In this ACES Student project, students worked with Indian People Organizing For Change (IPOC) to develop social movement documentation about Shellmound Peace Walks. These walks, which circumnavigated the entire San Francisco Bay Area, visited sacred shellmound sites and raised awareness of Native American history, culture, and rights. Concerned with the continued erasure of their cultures and history, IPOC elected to have a peace walk, visiting the major shellmounds (ancestral grounds) of the Bay Area. Supporters flew in from Japan, South Africa, Australia, Italy, and elsewhere, to walk in solidarity with IPOC.
Engineering 157AC
Dr. Khalid Kadir, leads a group of qualified engineering students in his ACES course, Engineering 157AC / International and Area Studies 157AC: Engineering, The Environment, and Society at UC Berkeley. The course challenges students to look beyond the technical elements of their work and recognize the deeply social and political nature of engineering questions. With help from Berkeley Ph.D. student and Chancellor's Public Fellow Lara Cushing, Dr. Kadir has established partnerships with local and regional African-American, Asian-American, and Latino community groups, through which students have the opportunity to engage in multiple real-world projects affecting these diverse communities. Projects address a variety of environmental and social justice issues including contaminated drinking water, industrial pollution, and air pollution.
Click here for the products of the students' and community partners' work.
IB 35AC
In IB 35AC, students are exposed to modern human biological variation from historical, comparative, evolutionary, biomedical, and cultural perspectives. It is designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of comparative biology, evolutionary theory, and genetics. A sound understanding of the biology that underlies human variation is essential for grasping the superimposed concepts of ethnicity and self-identity. As such, this course provides an essential foundation for understanding which components of human variation are biological and which are cultural, and how they have affected each other during the course of our evolution. Students in the course have created/edited wikipedia pages in order to share their Berkeley-gained knowledge with the world through the improvement of Wikipedia. With a climbing total of 6,000 people visiting Wikipedia every second, it is one of the most visited sites in the world. By
publishing thoughtful knowledge students are able to impact those across the globe.
The Creative Discovery Fellows (CDF) Program offers students the opportunity to complete courses with innovative assignments that leverage digital design tools in service of instructional goals and the core principles of discovery--intention, immersion, and reflection. CDF Program partners with faculty to implement these assignments, providing students with individual and group consultations, design/story feedback, workshops and trainings, in-class demonstrations, tutorials, and other resources to ensure that novices and experts alike are supported and encouraged to utilize the full range of their creativity. Read more.
Mothering in the United States of America from Mexico
From the course: Chicanx Studies 159AC: “Mexican and Central American Migration” -- This Spark video tells the story of the student’s mother and her experience as a young mother and immigrant.
How Does Ethnic Art Envision a Future?
From the Spring 2020 AC course: Ethnic Studies 176, "Against the Grain Ethnic American Art and Artists": "Ethnic art holds an amazing power to challenge nationalist and eternalized narratives that center white patriarchal power. It has the power to highlight the racialized nature of genocidal acts and structural disenfranchisement of communities of color." In this Spark presentation, Kennedy discusses how art gives "oppressed voices not only the opportunity to speak but to also "re-member" and claim agency over narratives that have been told about them in order to suppress them."
Persecution of Chinese American Scientists and Researchers
Throughout history, discrimination, racial profiling, and political scapegoating of Asian Americans have largely impacted and led to the persecutions of Chinese American scientists. Our video project will address the questions of the historical roots of racial profiling, the impacts of it, and how community reacts to it. One thing it discusses is how the fluctuating relations between China and the U.S. affect how a Chinese American is viewed as — an ally and then a spy. Yet, while as an ally, and seen as a model minority, Asian Americans are still seen as the perpetual foreigner. This film was developed by an undergraduate student team for Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies 121, 'History of the Chinese in the U.S.'
Environmental Justice for Treasure Island Map
From the Course: International and Area Studies/Engineering 157AC: "Engineering, Environment, and the Society" -- Out of partnership with Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, students developed this interactive map that highlights the environmental disparities and cumulative hazards occurring on Treasure Island. The students also drafted a 41 page report highlighting the ways that Treasure Island has been exploited and ignored through paradigms of delusion and disposability.
Decolonizing Brujeria: The Gestures of Spiritual Indigenous Practices
From the course: Theater 25AC: "Performance in América" -- This essay seeks to demystify and debunk the negative connotations surrounding brujeria by arguing that the reason for condemnation of these practices is entirely due to institutions of whiteness and imperialism.
"Bears in History" Website and Acrylic Images
From the course: College Writing R4B: "Images of History" -- The students collectively decided to work on creating life-sized acrylic images that would be placed in locations on UC Berkeley’s campus where the figures commonly worked or studied to raise visibility for the impacts and legacy of Japanese incarceration during World War II. Additionally, the class wrote historical and biographical context for each figure that is contained in the website and Spark presentations.
Young Environmental Justice Activists Political Posters
From the course: ESPM 50AC: "Introduction to Culture and Natural Resource Management" -- This student chose to create political posters using Adobe Illustrator to uplift the voices of young activists, particularly juxtaposing the voices of young activists of color with Greta Thunberg who is being uplifted by the media.
The Masked Conditions of the Restaurant Industry
In this Ted-style Talk, undergraduate Deven Radfar highlights the working conditions of servers in the restaurant industry, while focusing on the experiences of women and teens.
In the past, "AC Student Fellows" have also partnered with the American Cultures Center staff to develop community resources that can help the campus community better understand the history of communities such as the Black communities in the city of Berkeley, and to develop resources guides that assist friends and family members of people who are incarcerated, and undergraduate to balancing academics and community organizing.
