The Berkeley Engaged Scholarship Initiative video project was designed to assist in narrating the meaning of engaged scholarship in UC Berkeley research and teaching. BESI became the foundations for our ACES Program offered today. The final Video Project, features a series of interviews with UC Berkeley faculty discussing their research as it relates to questions of public, community, and accessibility.
The ACES program appoints an Artist-in-Residence for ACES to work with Berkeley faculty, fellows, community partners, and students, in the integration of new media supporting the courses and collaborative relationships that constitute the engaged scholarship program of the AC Center. The ACES AIR is integral in the development of creating dialogues with campus partners, local artists, and community leaders.
The AC Course spotlight series is an opportunity for faculty members to discuss how their classes bring their research interests with community partners together to teach undergraduates. If you are interested in featuring your class for an AC course spotlight, please email americancultures@berkeley.edu.
FIRE: Past, Present and Future Interactions with the People and Ecosystems of California
Description: Most Californians today fear catastrophic wild-land fires that each year scorch millions of acres of land, cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fight, and destroy human lives and property. Yet people have not always lived in dread of conflagrations. This class emphasizes how our interactions with wildfires in California have changed dramatically over the centuries, and that there is much that can be learned from earlier fire management strategies—...
The AC Podcast was developed so that students, faculty, and community partners could share their experiences in American Cultures courses. If you are interested in participating in a podcast, please contact the American Cultures Center.
This spotlight feature includes American Cultures Engaged Scholarship faculty member Dr. Sean Burns's course "Social Movements, Urban History, and the Politics of Memory" (IAS 158AC / PACS 148 AC). This course examines the extensive multi-racial social movement history of the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary assignment of the course is a student-defined research project where students, in collaboration with local activists and community partner Shaping San Francisco, carry out original research and writing...
"ACES is critical in bridging classroom and community."
"This is the most supportive teaching environment I've ever been in"
"This past year [ACES] courses...worked with community organizations building student and faculty research into the developing fights for Environmental Justice, Prison Abolition, Indigenous movements, the fight for K-12 Education, and the Arts and Social Justice."
The ACES Program Today, ACES courses continue to be...
Although Professor Niemeyer has taught this course for over ten years, both in an in-person and hybrid format, Spring 2014 marked the first time an AC course was offered entirely online. Fittingly enough, the course examines how the growth of online participation influences the development of and intersects online and residential communities. Students participate in online discussions surrounding internet culture or cyberculture within a modern context, as well as categories of personhood that make up the UC Berkeley American Cultures rubric (race and ethnicity), as well as gender,...
