Orfalea Center Thematic Research Cluster​

Social Data and the Archive: Rethinking the Politics of Knowledge Production

Sherene Seikaly

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, a slave holder and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, senior editor of Arab Studies Journal, and is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Utathya Chattopadhyaya

Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches the social and cultural history of South Asia, the Indian Ocean World, and the British Empire. His scholarship focuses on commodities, capital, and agrarian history in relation to empire and the global. He is also interested in the mobilization of archival traces by modern political movements and the possibilities and limits of such engagements.

Emiko Saldivar Tanaka

Dr. Emiko Saldivar is a Mexican Sociologist, currently Lecturer at UCSB. Her work has focus on race, ethnicity, mestizaje and anti-racism and research activism in Mexico and Latin America. She is co –founder of the Colectivo Para Eliminar el Racismo (COPERA) a Mexican anti-racist collective. Currently she coordinates the Red de Accion-Investigacion Antiracista de las Americas (RAIAR).

Juan Fernando Cobo Betancourt

Juan Cobo Betancourt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on questions of religion, colonialism, law, and language in colonial Latin America, with a focus on the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia). Alongside this work, he co-founded and runs Neogranadina, a Colombian non-profit foundation devoted to safeguarding the holdings of endangered archives and libraries through digitisation, and to developing tools and resources to make them available to broad audiences.

Amy Fallas

Amy is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara. She received her MA in History from Yale University in 2017 with a thesis on religious diplomacy in Egypt during the interwar period. She served as an editor of the Yale Journal for International Affairs and is currently an Assistant Editor for the Arab Studies Journal. Her research focuses on modern Egypt, religious minorities in the Middle East, missions and global Christianity, history of charity and her dissertation examines the development of faith-based charitable institutions in Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to her doctoral research, she also writes on human rights in Egypt, religious minorities in the Middle East, and US foreign policy in the region. Her work is published in Jadaliyya, Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, the Columbia Journal of International Affairs, Palestine Square, Hazine, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches and more.

Gerardo Rodriguez Solis

Gerardo studies a doctorate in anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara with the project “An Ethnography of Racial Capitalism in Mexico: labor exploitation and migration control.” He has a BA in Sociology at the Universidad of Guadalajara and a MA in Sociocultural Anthropology at El Colegio de Michoacán. His MA thesis received an honorary mention in the 5th annual competition of the Arturo Warman Award, Mexico. He has published in Revista Latinoamericana de Antropología del Trabajo and Journal of Development Studies, in addition to three book chapters about agricultural workers rights, microfinance, and public policy. He has participated in research projects about migrant rights, rural employment, and racial/ethnic statistics. Gerardo has also worked on evaluations of government programs and in civil association projects.