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 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.