PROJECTS
Principal Investigator: Michel S. Laguerre, Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology, University of California at Berkeley.
The American Metropolis and The Internet: The Rise of the Digital City
This research project on information technology and society seeks to understand some aspects of the digitization of the American City. The transformation of various sectors of society brought about by the advent of information technology (IT) and the virtual mode of communication that the Internet makes possible provide the frame of reference for the study of the nature of this change and their implications for daily life in the contemporary American metropolis. This research focuses on actual information technology practices in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco metropolitan area, documenting and explaining how those practices are remolding social relations, global interaction, and workplace environments.
Research Assistants: Jodie Atkinson, Raymond Pascual, Sarah Razavi, Jennifer Yee, Debbie Yeh
Principal Investigator: Michel S. Laguerre, Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology, University of California at Berkeley.
Diasporic Politics: Homeland and Hostland
In order to explain the specific nature of diasporic politics and to develop a theoretical framework to guide our analysis, this research project will identify the transnational parameters that distinguish diasporic engagements from domestic politics and international relations. It will establish that diasporic politics partakes in both hostland and homeland politics, which provides it with a spatial basis of operation and mechanisms of political intervention. The model of diasporic globalization provides the frame of reference within which the meanings, operation, and dynamic interaction of diasporic politics can be interpreted, inferences about its systematic deployment can be made, and the itinerary of its trajectory can be understood.
Research Assistants: Bethany Burns, Raymond Pascual, Debbie Yeh
Principal Investigator: Michel S. Laguerre, Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology, University of California at Berkeley.
Jewish Quarters in the European Union: Berlin, London, and Paris(1945-2004)
This project shifts the emphasis from assimilation theory to globalization theory as the proper frame of reference in the study of locality. Paris, Berlin and London have been selected for this study because of the role of these metropolitan centers in European Jewish life. Berlin's Scheunenviertel presents the most dramatic setting because of the Holocaust and because the devastation of Jewish life has been the most visible there. It is in Berlin that forms of reparation (providing citizenhip to displaced Jews, paying the expenses of some to visit their former homeland, and rehabilitating some sites/construction of museums) have been the most engaging and visible because of governemental publicity. Paris's Pletzl in Le Marais is also important because of the large numbers of North African Jews that came to live there side by side with Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans who came as refugees to the enclave. London's Whitechapel is interesting because the Nazi forces never penetrated this Jewish quarter which was somewhat protected or spared from the ravages of the "final solution." The research will focus on delineating specific themes that will allow us to compare the fate of these neighborhoods, their insertion in the national space of either France, Germany or England, and the networks of their transnational relations.
Research Assistants: Jodie Atkinson, Nancy Duong, Raymond Pascual
Principal Investigator: Minoo Moallem, Associate Professor of Women's Studies
San Francisco State University
Email: Minoom@sfsu.edu
My research project focuses on the emerging forms of transnational governmentality, consumerism and citizenship in relation to globalization as experienced by immigrants in general and the Iranian diaspora in particular. I am investigating those social and virtual spaces where taken-for-granted boundaries separating states, nations and civil societies are blurred and replaced by new spaces of daily life and new sources of economic, cultural and political agency. By examining the deployment of new information technologies among, and the importance of cyberspace for, immigrant and diasporic communites, I analyze the parallel constructions of nationalized and transnationalized cultural and economic formations with respect to gender, race, ethnicity and class. My methods of inquiry include the exploration of representational practices employed in these spaces as well as semi-structured interviews and ethnography to illustrate the ways in which immigrant subjects constitute, and are constituted by, new regimes of governmentality, consumerism and citizenship.
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