In June 2000 U.C. Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society was awarded a multi-year research grant for this project, which focuses on the lived experience and cultural expressions of migrants, border workers, and immigrants as they transform and are transformed by life in a new land.  In a time of increasing transnational flows of culture, people, and capital, “home” has become a borderland where cultural traditions, values, and ways of life come together, clash, meld, and are transfigured.  Nowhere is this truer than in Southern California and the U.C. Riverside region, at the crossroads of Latin America and the Asian Pacific and home to many first and second generation immigrants from both, as well as from Africa and the Middle East.  U.C. Riverside is the most ethnically diverse in the U.C. system, serving a largely working class population of first-generation college students, many of whom are also first or second generation Americans.  It has attracted a faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences whose research and creative work explore this diversity and how people come to be “at home” with it, addressing issues of migration and immigration, cross-cultural exchange, border work and border culture, and cultural transmission and transformation that are at the heart of the Rockefeller-funded project, which runs through June 2004.

Each year, the work conducted under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation grant has a different emphasis:

• 2001-2002:  Migration, Immigration, and Social Transformations

• 2002-2003:  Cultural Diversity and the Arts

• 2003-2004:  Social Change and Cultural Transformation

The Center welcomes applications from scholars, artists, and professionals in any field who are open to diverse interdisciplinary perspectives on these themes.  Possible topics include:

• Comparative global migrations and diasporas

• Premodern migrations and social change

• Localizations and their transformations through transregional “traffic”

• Exile, dislocation, and identity

• Migration, immigration, citizenship, and human rights

• Transregional or transnational imaginaries and communities

This year’s focus is on scholarship and creative work in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that engages these and related issues as they inform the visual and plastic arts, literature, music, dance, theater, performance, media, and multimedia.  We are equally interested in “high,” “popular,” “folk” and “mass” culture and their producers and consumers.