Home /Lisa Garcia Bedolla, UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education & Dept. of Political Science

Lisa Garcia Bedolla, UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education & Dept. of Political Science

A Holistic Approach to Advancing Diversity in Graduate Programs.

Description

Semester: 
Fall 2021
Lecture Time: 
Friday, November 5, 2021 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Lecture Location: 

R0220, Ross Building

Introduced By: 
Andres Pinedo

Abstract

The first round of attempts to diversify the academy, what we call Diversity 1.0, largely entailed attempting to remediate underrepresented students, through program support and other efforts, so that they could thrive within the academy. By and large, these efforts did not consider the biases embedded within institutions of higher education and the institutional changes that need to happen in order for minoritized students to feel they belong and can thrive within these institutional spaces. That deeper, institutional work is what we call Diversity 2.0 -- the process of evaluating and addressing the structural factors that make departments and campuses feel unwelcoming and unsupportive to minoritized students. To address this challenge, we suggest a holistic approach, one that includes a focus on admissions, belonging, climate, and data equity, as the best approach for creating the institutional transformations needed to make departments and campuses truly inclusive.

Recording & Additional Notes

Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley's Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS) – to shed light on this question.

She has published four books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.

Her current projects include: a multi-year study of Integrated Voter Engagement efforts conducted by six community organizations in California (with Marisa Abrajano, UC San Diego); the development of a multi-dimensional data system, called Data for Social Good, that can be used to track and improve organizing efforts on the ground; and the creation of a university-based center (the Center on Democracy and Organizing(link is external)) to support academics interested in conducting research in partnership with practitioners and that centers addressing inequality (with Hahrie Han, Johns Hopkins University; and Taeku Lee, UC Berkeley).

Professor García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.