This research cluster explores the impact of migrations on populations and environments around the world. It welcomes research on various types of global migration, including internal, labor, economic, and religious migration and forced displacement. This research cluster is particularly concerned with the rise of social and economic inequality as both a driver and an outcome of migrations.

The number of refugees worldwide is at its historic high, following mass displacement from Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ukraine, South Sudan, and beyond. We are also witnessing a rising tide of anti-refugee xenophobia and racism, including in the United States, the European Union, and Turkey. This cluster calls for more research on refugees and undocumented migrants, particularly on immigrant integration and acculturation, border-crossing and detention, access to healthcare, education, and labor markets, and histories of immigration and asylum legislation around the world.

Today’s most pressing environmental problems come to us nested inside a historical moment characterized by growing racial and gender formations of economic inequality, increasingly neoliberal and authoritarian political institutions, degradation of human rights and public discourse, and pernicious forms of institutional violence that cut across and exacerbate each of these concerns.

EJ/CJ brings together scholars to engage with these global drivers of environmental and climate crisis and investigate their deep structures and histories. We produce critical knowledges at the intersection of the Humanities and Social Sciences, build transformative knowledge networks that bridge academic, social movement, and policy domains, and actively intervene publicly in each of these crucial zones of conflict.

To access archived EJ/CJ websites, please visit:

• EJ/CJ Website

• NXTerra

This cluster aims to (1) globalize scholarship on genders and sexualities and discourses of gender that facilitate settler colonialism, colonialism, and white supremacy; (2) bring area-studies research into transregional dialogues; (3) employ the methodologies of literary studies, cultural studies, history, and anthropology; and (4) disrupt the Global North/Global South order directing attention to locales that are in historically and/or presently ambiguous positions with regards to the politics of genders and sexualities. Historically, the concepts “queer” or “transgender” are not particularly novel. The ways different generations in different parts of the world think about and practice sexuality has remained in flux, including both forward-leaps and reactionary backlashes. We also see how normative ideas of what is considered gender progress are deployed to delimit the bounds of the liberal, demarcating those who are open to progress and those who are considered enemies. Also, these metrics of gender progress serve to police racialized, indigenous bodies who are rendered inherently queer and deviant and unworthy of political self-determination.

Countries worldwide face the challenge of bridging differences and reducing disparities between groups. The Orfalea Center’s year-long thematic conversation on building plural institutions in diverse societies will tackle this issue. We live in a time where ethnic nationalism is rising, the consensus on globalization is weakening, and migration shocks are testing societal cohesion. These forces are polarizing politics, fueling political violence, and eroding trust in democracy. How can societies build social trust across differences? How can we nurture and protect the pluralist values in our key institutions? What lessons can diverse societies offer from their past and present? Graduate students interested in exploring the practice of pluralism within state (including security forces) and social institutions, as well as the threats posed by political violence, are encouraged to apply.

This research cluster focuses on carceralism—that is, forms of un-freedom and repression—in its various dimensions. Some of the most high-profile global events in recent years are either manifestations of anti-carceral politics or implicate carceral projects by states. We will develop a research agenda that critically and comparatively analyzes carceralism through a global lens. Rather than following the conventional approach of tracing carceral regimes from the Global North to the Global South, thereby maintaining the centrality of the former in understandings of carcerality, we insist on attending to the multidirectional flows that constitute carceral systems in ways that are truly and inherently global and transnational. Our plan is to engage in research to investigate and discern manifestations of global carceral states and to engage and mentor students to design and conduct their own research on prisons, detention camps, police forces, surveillance technologies, and for-profit agencies that actively participate in policing and imprisonment, to name a few.

The four overarching sets of issues are (a) the ways and reasons states and other types of authorities confine people (and categories of people) deemed to be dangerous, hostile, or superfluous in prisons, detention facilities, encampments, or enwalled lands; (b) the strategies and technologies developed and used to manage and treat people within carceral settings (e.g., isolation, torture, police brutality, surveillance, abandonment); (c) the multiple ways in which carceralized populations resist these repressive conditions individually and collectively (e.g., hunger strikes, clandestine organizing, boycotts, demonstrations) or devise strategies of survival and empowerment (e.g., prison writing and art-making, self-education, collective care); and (d) the formation of communities of solidarity and social movements that seek to confront carceral regimes and alter carceral landscapes (e.g., prison abolition, police defunding, decolonization, disability justice, and bodily autonomy movements, anti-racism and anti-apartheid activism). By integrating these four sets of issues, our aim is to investigate carcerality through multiple scales and perspectives, and to compare carcerality in different settings around the world.

This cluster ties two related sites of knowledge, social data and archives, in one frame of analysis. We are interested in bringing together different kinds of knowledge producers to explore the promises and potential of democracy through archives and data. Additionally, this research cluster studies how archives and social data are sites for globally informed anti-racist scholarship and critical writing.

Probing the relationship between information and freedom, we aim to interrogate how digitization of archives, accessibility, and empowered political organizing can advance popular sovereignty. While cognizant of how statistics have been useful vehicles for representing local and global inequities and state-making ambitions, we are also interested in the use of quantitative data  by social movements, worker unions, and environmental activists. Collectives and organizations that use statistics as a political tool to expose and transform unequal and oppressive conditions remind us of the importance of socialized data.

The socialization of research data through democratic and collaborative practices are also critical to recognizing activists and organizers as knowledge producers. However, both processes can also be implicated in regimes of information and surveillance. Such  double  edges  only  highlight  the  importance  of  the  contexts  and  politics  of counter-reading and data democracy. As we learn from movements using data and archives to make political claims, we remain vigilant and curious about the challenges these new modes of making and distributing information have generated for activists, scholars, and journalists.

The members of this research cluster are fully cognizant of the fact that enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism are global pathologies of power and exploitation that transformed the world as they traveled.  As such, this cluster seeks a broad and deep time accounting of histories of resistance, quests for autonomy and struggles for self-liberation by formerly (and still, in some cases) enslaved, colonized or otherwise oppressed peoples of the world.

We ask:

• What are the key philosophies of resistance, autonomy, decolonization and self-liberation?

• What  are  some of  the  most  crucial  sites,  itineraries,  landscapes and  models  of  self-liberation?

• What is the nature and location of the archive of self-liberation?

• What is the unfinished business of self-liberation?

• What are the legacies and lessons of self-liberation?

• What  are  the  key  institutions  and  partnerships we need to engage with or build to effectively research and teach liberation studies?

Engaging the increasing worries about our futurity, this research cluster will focus on the interactions between the following categories: Uncertainty regarding what the future holds, Risk as the basis of managing futures, Displacement as a condition fundamentally connected to uncertainty, Security as the antidote to uncertain futures, as protection against coming harm, and Speculation as a mode of engaging uncertainty, of filling in the gaps. While speculation is generally associated with the predatory capture and monetization of futures, it is also possible to speculate otherwise, in ways that proliferate potentialities rather than closing off futures. Whereas much of risk discourse locks us into specific pathways, and approaches to security espouse exclusionary, combative, or carceral techniques, more playful, open-ended speculative approaches inspire imaginative insights about virtual states and generate as-yet-unthought possibilities. Instead of surveilling, disciplining, and controlling, such an affirmative speculative mode liberates the future from the tyranny of the past and the present.

This cluster will develop new critical and creative research practices in the social and environmental impacts of water infrastructure (such as sanitation services, container shipping, hydroelectric dams, and “green infrastructure” that uses plants to mitigate stormwater, or other waterways), and energy infrastructure (such as oil/gas extraction sites, mineral mining, pipelines, solar grids, nuclear energy, etc.). We will pursue these questions by organizing our collaboration around three distinct yet interconnected themes: (1) the scales of largely invisible water and energy systems and substances, from cells to oceans and cities; (2) the mediations of infrastructure, negotiating elements, multispecies life forms, technology, and culture; and (3) the participation of impacted communities and citizens in the deliberations on and implementation of decisions about water and energy infrastructure.