TWTT Archive

What to Do If ICE Comes to Campus: Rights, Recommendations, and Resources

The ongoing national conversation about immigration status lies across a bipartisan political landscape, but statements made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Thomas Homan indicate that enforcement will be significantly increased and specifically target California.

On February 26, 2018, in response to the increased and specifically targeted immigration enforcement in California, across the U.C. system broadly and at U.C. Berkeley specifically, procedures and recommendations were shared on best preparing to support all members of our undocumented community...

Understanding UC Berkeley Students and their Experiences

This event was an open dialogue, supported by campus climate data from several recent surveys. Together, the speaker and attendees considered whether the survey results support their own experiences; how the data might shift expectations of relationships with students; and what resulting efforts individually and collectively could be designed to provide an equitable and fully inclusive classroom.

Event Outline California Demographics Berkeley Undergraduate Demographics Race/Ethnicity Gender Sexuality Socioeconomic Status (SES) Disability Intersections of Race...

Meeting the Moment for Trans Justice and Solidarity

This hybrid session offered a space for dialogue and building solidarity around trans justice in the current moment. The session featured a panel of content experts who shared theoretical, political, personal and legal analysis related to trans experiences on our campus and in our communities, contextualizing them within broader work for belonging, social justice, and liberation. Panelists explored what it means to “meet the moment” for trans justice today, how to safeguard the work on trans topics and activism amid backlash, and concrete actions on how to support in...

Difficult Knowledge, Trauma Informed Pedagogy and Safe-ish Spaces

Violence and trauma are all around us—fatal shootings by police, sexual violence, family separations, addiction, abuse, displacement of refugees. Often, these situations give rise to individual healing journeys and collective efforts to create change. But the pain and loss embedded in them also have a damaging effect long after the events have passed.

We invite many difficult experiences into our classrooms, historically intimate and distant, often through written and visual text depicting traumatic events and experiences. At the same time, we have many students bringing a history...

What We Want, What We Need, What We Have: Knowing Our Rights in Uncertain Times

This session featured a panel of campus experts who are actively engaged with the theoretical, personal and legal dimensions of federal actions on immigration as they impact our campus, contextualizing them within broader work for belonging, academic freedom and social justice. Speakers explored what protections exist, where and how to advocate, and how to mobilize around our values. Drawing on the insights and resources shared during the What to Do If ICE Comes to Campus event, we created this page to continue building and expanding resources using insights from our panel experts shared...

More Than Words: In Conversation with the Language of Racial and Social Justice-Making

During this event, the discussion focused on unpacking the relationships, motivations, and genealogies between diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging/justice, anti-racism, anti-Blackness, anti-white supremacy, and abolition frameworks and how they help us better understand and situate the work and the questions that they generate. When we think about the relationships that we hope to foster with and between students, how do we use these frameworks to inform our practice? How do these frameworks evolve and enhance our already hard-earned/created work? Or realize that we might move our...

Teaching and Working in a Time of Technological Determinism

This panel brought together students, faculty, and organizers to examine the presence of AI in campus work. Panelists discussed and explored what is at stake as AI shapes teaching, learning, and labor, surfacing dilemmas across intersecting structures of power, access, and survival.

The urgent and swift adoption of AI in higher education has focused conversations on compliance and institutional data security, overshadowing the need to contemplate this moment's historical and sociopolitical depth. We know that AI serves as a vehicle for perpetuating biases and untruths,...

Beyond Both Sides: Advancing Spaces for Exploration and Not False Binaries

Berkeley faculty and staff discussed how the concept of binaries shapes the work to advance justice and equity on campus, reflecting on how they contend with the binary thinking and discussed recommendations for how faculty and staff can meet political moments by analyzing, challenging, and thinking beyond the institutional and cultural binaries.

How to Have Political Conversations in the Classroom?

Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 marked the largest National Voter Registration Day on record. Over 800,000 people updated their registration or registered to vote for the first time. At the same time that so many Americans are involved in ballot box politics, the country is polarized, partisan and politicized. On the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, with so much at stake on the national, state, and local level, this panel and community discussion considered how faculty are navigating the nation’s thorny politics and supporting political conversations in the...

Beyond Accommodation: Changing the Disability Frame

Berkeley faculty, graduate student instructors, staff, and students sought to expand the dialogue around disability on college campuses, which often focuses on how we can support and accommodate individual needs and meet compliance requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Participants were invited to think in creative ways about culture, structure, teaching and learning, and broader institutional transformation. Some key discussion questions included:

How can we as a campus start to look at disability from a framework of equity, belonging and social justice, rather...