Congratulations to the following Center for Ideas & Society award winners!

✪ CONFERENCE AWARD 

Nicolas Valdivia Hennig (Hispanic Studies)
Ilya Brookwell (Media & Cultural Studies)
California Games and Interactive Media Conference

The field of Game Studies has grown exponentially over the past two decades, emerging as a vital interdisciplinary area that intersects with the humanities, social sciences, arts, and technology. Despite this growth, UC Riverside remains one of the few UC campuses without a formalized program, designated degree, or research hub dedicated to Game Studies. The California Games and Interactive Media Conference seeks to address this gap by positioning UCR as a central node for academic collaboration and innovation in the field. Building on the success of our previous event (Latin American Games Studies Conference), which attracted over 70 attendees-including faculty, graduate students, and international participants -this conference will serve as a platform to map the current state of Game Studies in the region, foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and establish UCR as a key space for this expanding field.

Samantha Griggs (Study of Religion)
Matthew King (Study of Religion)
The Critical Yoga Studies Conference 2026: Reflecting on 15 years of Race & Yoga

The Critical Yoga Studies Conference marks the 10-year anniversary of Race and Yoga journal and the 15-year anniversary of the Race and Yoga Working Group, both of which have shaped the field of Critical Yoga Studies. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars, practitioners, and activists to reflect on the journal’s contributions, explore emerging research, and strategize future directions for the field. The conference will feature a keynote from Dr. Blu Wakpa reflecting on the founding and evolution of Race and Yoga and future possibilities for decolonizing yoga practice and scholarship. By fostering dialogue across disciplines and communities, this conference will celebrate Race and Yoga’s impact while envisioning new possibilities for the field and the future of public scholarship.

Paulo Chagas (Music)
Liz Przybylski (Music)
Nikolay Maslov (UCR ARTS)
Ivana Petkovic Lozo (Musicologist)
Co-Creativity in Music and AI: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition

“Co-Creativity in Music and Al: Improvisation, Interaction, Composition” is an interdisciplinary initiative focusing on Somax2-a pioneering Al-driven improvisation system developed by I RCAM-to explore how artificial intelligence reshapes musical creativity. By uniting ethnomusicology, musicology, and media arts, this conference fosters dialogue on Al’s role as a cocreative partner in composition, performance, and research, rather than a mere technical aid. Presentations, workshops, and live demonstrations will highlight Al’s capacity to engage across genres, from classical and experimental music to hip hop and popular forms, emphasizing real-time interaction, cultural context, and innovative sonic aesthetics. Through a flexible format, the event aims to inspire new research collaborations, attract external funding, and expand community involvement. Ultimately, “Co-Creativity in Music and Al” envisions a future where human and machine collaborate symbiotically, opening novel frontiers for artistic expression and scholarly inquiry.

✪ WORKING GROUP AWARD

Trisha Federis Remetir (Comparative Literatures and Languages)
Boundless pages: A Books-in-Progress Workshop for Interdisciplinary Scholars

Over 6 meetings spread across Fall 2025, Winter 2026, and Spring 2026, a working group of four assistant professors in CHASS will convene at UC Riverside to workshop chapters from their in-progress monographs. The goal of these sessions will be to provide in-depth manuscript feedback from fellow pre-tenure scholars not in their immediate fields, thereby allowing them to refine their individual interventions in Abolitionist studies, Critical Filipinx Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicanx Studies, Queer and Trans Latinx Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and more. While workshopping chapters intended for publication with a university press, the group will also discuss the following questions: what does it mean to write for an “interdisciplinary” audience? How does an author develop their books’ interdisciplinary (and interaudience) commitments while learning about the expectations of a departmental discipline? Through this series, the working group aims to bring the values of praxis and collective care to the writing and review process.

Amy Skjerseth (Music)
Un(preset)dented: Default Gestalts in Art, Technology, and Culture

What do Duchamp’s readymades, synthesizer sounds, and microwave popcorn settings have in common? They are presets – default

settings that facilitate ready-to-hand use. Our uses of presets consent to norms designed for “standard” users; from Al content generators to Photoshop editing filters, presets on technology often replicate cultural biases of whiteness, sexism, ableism, and Western privilege. But artists can also recontextualize presets to interrogate entrenched conventions otherwise known as cultural presets. In this working group, UCR scholar-practitioners across art/art history, media and cultural studies, music, philosophy, and environmental humanities will host public roundtables and DJ and synthesizer workshops. Across these forums, participants will question: how have linguistic, technological, and cultural presets driven capitalism, colonialism, and state sovereignty? When climate disaster and political extremism threaten how we typically engage with our environments, can we program new presets? How can critics and creators produce multi modal forms of knowledge to disentangle presets from their deepseated norms?

✪ SYMPOSIUM AWARD 

Erith Jaffe-Berg (Theatre, Film, and Digital Production)
Illuminated Lecture: In Defense of Women

In Defense of Women: Women and Theater in the Age of Shakespeare is an event created by Erith Jaffe-Berg and Theatre Dybbuk, a Los Angeles-based theatre company which brings together a talk with performed readings and live music. The project is based on an early-modern theorist and playwright named Leone de’ Som mi who wrote a bilingual (Hebrew and Italian) treatise defending women that was widely disseminated and published starting in the 1550s. The poem braided together Jewish and Catholic culture in a time of increased segregation and ghettoization in many parts of Europe. In the poem, de’ Som mi championed women whom he saw as on an equal level with men in terms of their accomplishments, leadership ability and goodness.

✪ WORKSHOP AWARD

Kim Frost (Philosophy)
Moral Growth: Virtue and Disruptive Experiences

A two day pre-read workshop on the book manuscript Moral Growth: Virtue and Disruptive Experiences by Evgenia Mylonaki (University of Patras, Greece). Professor Mylonaki argues that moral growth is a disruptive experience that alters one’s entire vision of the world. The manuscript brings into sharp focus an understanding of moral growth and virtue as depending crucially on our capacity to think ourselves into the being of another individual. The workshop should be of interest to anyone interested in cutting-edge international contemporary ethics, as well as those interested in the value and significance of individuality or the way disruptive experiences are expressed and thematized in both fiction and philosophy.