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Dr. Shannon Speed Receives President’s Award from American Anthropological Association

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Dr. Shannon Speed, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center and professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology, recently received the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) for her work bringing together scholarship and activism in advocating for Indigenous and Native American women. This award is given annually to encourage and reward an AAA member’s excellent contributions to the anthropological field.

To read more about Dr. Speed’s work and this award, check out the UCLA Newsroom article by clicking HERE.

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LA Social Science Book Series About Incarcerated Indigenous Women Migrants with Professor Shannon Speed

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UCLA Professor Shannon Speed‘s new book, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, examines the myriad forms of violence that Indigenous women from the Americas face. Dr. Speed, UCLA American Indian Studies Center Director and Gender Studies and Anthropology Professor, characterizes the structural violence these women endure as “neoliberal multicriminalism” where economic and political policies render them vulnerable. Her book uses a critically engaged, activist-research approach, specifically ethnographic practices, to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention. Dr. Speed demonstrates that these women’s vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.

Interview Chapters:

0:04 – Introduction

0:51 – What are the myriad forms of violence that Indigenous women from the Americas face?

4:05 – What do the women’s stories reveal?

5:22 – Can you elaborate on your term “neoliberal multicriminalism”?

11:15 – What nuance can you get out of a critically engaged, activist-research approach?

12:55 – How does the book help us understand contemporary times? And how does it challenge and combat “multicriminalism”?

To learn more, check out Professor Speed’s book, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State.

 

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LA Social Science Presents “Conversations with Changemakers” Featuring Dr. Shannon Speed Discussing The Hate Crime Map Project

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LA Social Science recently spoke with Dr. Shannon Speed, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, about the newly launched Hate Crime Map. This research and application looks to address the need for a publicly available resource documenting hate crimes.

Hate Crimes are a national and global human rights problem. According to the latest FBI statistics, hate crimes in the United States rose almost 22% between 2015 and 2018, with the vast majority reported as motivated by race, ethnicity or ancestry bias (59.6% in 2018). However, due to under reporting and inconsistent definitions of hate crime among states, statistics are notoriously unreliable, while the need for a publicly available resource documenting hate crimes is great.

The Hate Crime Map addresses this need by offering an anonymous, crowd-sourced platform for victims of hate-based assault and crime to record their experiences. In addition, the map includes a subset of COVID-related hate crimes. It is searchable, producing pie charts and tables that break down the types and causes (race, gender, religion) of the attacks by state so that researchers and policy makers have more complete information. The map includes data provided by ProPublica, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center, and from published and online sources.

www.hatecrimemap.com

Stop Hate: Map the Attack!

To read the UCLA Newsroom story about the launch of the Hate Crime Map, click HERE.

 

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UCLA Project Tracks COVID-19 Case Rate by Tribal Nation

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As many states begin to reopen after the coronavirus shutdown, American Indian communities are reporting some of the highest rates of COVID-19. With Professors Randall Akee, Shannon Speed, and Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear as the lead researchers, UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies are working to comprehensively document the disparate impact of the pandemic on Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized communities. They have created this publicly-accessible resource where the COVID-19 cases and deaths can be tracked by tribal nation and states on a weekly basis.

Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of American Indian Studies IDP, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs, discussed the importance of this project and shared the following with LA Social Science:

“The AISC and our faculty at UCLA care deeply about serving American Indian Communities. Our expertise in research combined with communities needs to do what we do best in mapping the [COVID-19] data in AI communities—provide reliable and important information that enhances solutions to our most difficult and current issues we face. The data on American Indian communities is often sparse and inaccurate, this project is exemplary in the Data Sovereignty movement where UCLA has strong leadership by Randall Akee and Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear who represent us on the global level.”

 

Professor Akee, one of the lead researchers, told LA Social Science the following about the project:

“This is work that is based off of data that an online newspaper called Indian Country Today has been collecting and verifying by tribal reservation affiliation or location for American Indians and Alaska Natives that are reported to have COVID-19 as either a case of death. It was our idea at the Bunche Center and American Indian Studies Center to put this into a usable format (graphically) for others that might be interested in this topic at the reservation-level. Thus, these figures, to the best of our knowledge [are] the only depiction of the progression of cases at the tribal/reservation-level for American Indian and Alaska Natives. We’ve all seen the state graphs and those for other countries, but this is the first for these tribal governments. it is hoped that we can continue to update this weekly with their data and this may be useful for administrators in these communities.”

To learn more about this tracking resource and to check out the interactive graphs, click HERE.

 

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