California Cultures in Comparative Perspective

California Cultures in Comparative Perspective is a program at the University of California, San Diego in California dedicated to fostering creative and activist interdisciplinary research, teaching, and collaboration among California’s communities, faculty, and students. California – in all its dimensions—is the object of its focus.

Cal Cultures (as it is also known) grew out of a concerted effort to explore new epistemological, conceptual, and methodological challenges created by the diverse demographics of a new and changing California. Central to this effort are the stratified economic conditions, resulting power relations and social formations that have reconfigured California at the nexus of local struggle and global process at the turn of this century.

California is the prism through which the program explores these challenges specifically in the ways they intersect with immigration, the environment, health, education, language, cultural production, citizenship, democracy and diversity. Cal Cultures remaps California within the complexity of global cartography and accentuates the state’s multiple geopolitical borders and transnational frontiers, including Mexico and the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, and regions represented by emerging diasporic relations such as Africa and the Middle East.

The program's ultimate goal is to foster new dialogue, frameworks and collaborations in research and practice at both the University of California and with the broader regional, international and global communities of which all Californians are a part. Cal Cultures emphasizes the need for new and inclusive knowledge and practical engagement. Local communities are not only instrumental in this design but are at the heart of this understanding.

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