With 200 faculty affiliates, UCSB’s Area Global Initiative supports scholarly connections across world regions. AGI serves as a hub within the university for area and global studies, providing facilities and resources that enable collaborative research, while coordinating public facing programs that make that research available to broader publics. Our faculty and students engage in innovative and consequential research on such topics as environmental justice and public health; conditional citizenship, migration and refugees; race and racism, indigenous rights, and resistance; securitization, abolition movements, and carceral states; feminism, transgender studies, queer theory, and intersectionality; creativity and activism in the global south and its diasporas.
The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting and Bilingualism, co-edited by Aline Ferreira (LAIS)
Co-edited by Aline Ferreira (Department of Spanish and Portuguese), The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting and Bilingualism (2023) is the first handbook to bring together the related, yet disconnected, fields of bilingualism and translation and interpreting studies.
The Tropical Silk Road, co-edited by Paul Amar (Orfalea Center & CMES)
With thirty short essays, The Tropical Silk Road: The Future of China in South America (2022), captures an epochal juncture of two of the world's most transformative processes: the People's Republic of China's rapidly expanding sphere of influence across the global south and the disintegration of the Amazonian, Cerrado, and Andean biomes. The intersection of these two processes took another step in April 2020, when Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a "New Health Silk Road" agenda of aid and investment that would wind through South America, extending the Eurasian-African "Belt and Road Initiative" to a series of mine, port, energy, infrastructure, and agrobusiness megaprojects in the Latin American tropics.
The Virus Touch, by Bishnupriya Ghosh (CMES)
In The Virus Touch (2023) Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates.
The War in Court, by Lisa Hajjar (Orfalea Center and CMES)
In The War in Court (2022), sociologist Lisa Hajjar traces the fight against US torture policy by lawyers who brought the "war on terror" into courts. Drawing on extensive interviews with key participants, her own experiences reporting from Guantánamo, and her deep knowledge of international law and human rights, Hajjar reveals how the ongoing fight against torture has had transformative effects on the legal landscape in the United States and on a global scale.