About the BPOCSRC

Learn about the cluster's background and view the BPOCSRC team members and previous years' fellows in one place!

The proposed Black Panther Oakland Community School Research Cluster will involve undergraduate and graduate students with faculty, staff, and community scholars to support the creation of public humanities projects. These include:

1. An interactive “yearbook” website, featuring digital content (photos, video segments, audio clips) of former students, teachers, and parents. This digital archive features past and present narratives and images of the people involved in the OCS. It will serve as a database for future researchers and a companion resource for the documentary film;
2. An OCS traveling exhibit featuring never-before-seen images from the rare BPP collection kept in custodial care of a former BPP photographer for more than 40 years;
3.
A documentary film/video series about the OCS.

What is the OCS?
In 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) founded its longest running social service program, the Oakland Community School (OCS), which operated for eleven years and served as a model for education for Black and poor children living in urban communities. The school’s innovative practices of mindfulness and restorative justice appear in educational institutions today. The UCI research cluster will partner with the Oakland Community School Documentary Project, led by community-based scholar Angela LeBlanc-Ernest with the support of and in consultation with former Panther leader and OCS director, Ericka Huggins. The UCI partnership with the OCSDP will provide undergraduate and graduate students substantive opportunities to access the rich archival and oral history collection that LeBlanc-Ernest acquired over three decades of research. In addition, the university-community partnership will model the principles proposed by the research cluster: a centering of community archives, a recognition of community activists, and the process of creating meaningful stories through film and public humanities projects.

Centering Community and Activism in Research, Preservation, and Storytelling
This research cluster fundamentally reorients the approach to intellectual and cultural production. Whereas “traditional” scholarship tends to posit a disconnect between the researcher and the researched, this cluster seeks to form collaborations that bring together the university and the community. The principles that our research cluster seeks to promote include:Listening to and working with the community to preserve important experiences and stories and to facilitate public access to these materials. Recognizing activists as organic intellectuals who identify forms of inequality, develop solutions, and work collectively to affect change. Ethically amplifying these stories through the creation of cultural and intellectual work by filmmakers, creative writers, and academics. Our research cluster seeks to explore these approaches to intellectual and cultural production and to involve researchers (faculty, students, and staff) to draw linkages between creating community-centered archives, the process of documenting experiences and visions of activism, and utilizing these materials for transformative storytelling.

Research Cluster Team

Tatiana Bryant
Director of Teaching, Learning and Research Services
Barnard College
Library Department

Desha Dauchan
Assoc. Prof of Teaching
UC Irvine Film and Media Studies Department
Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest
Program Director
The OCS Project
Krystal Tribbett
Research Librarian, Orange County Curator
UC Irvine Libraries
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Professor
Depts. of History & Asian American Studies
Assoc. Dean, School of Humanities
Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, & Belonging (C-LAB) Director
UCI Humanities Center Director

Summer Fellows

2021

Alexandria Fakayode
2022
Drama
Chinaenye Ibeanusi
2023
African American Studies
Anthropology
Dashia Wright
2022
Psychological Sciences
Donavian "Navi" Huskey
PhD Student
Psychological Sciences Department
Evelynn Cuautle
2021
Chicano, Latino Studies
Public Health Policy
Haleigh Marcello
PhD Student
History Department
Iyanna Blackburn
2021
African American Studies
Film and Media Studies
Micherlange Francois-Hemsley
2022
Criminology, Law and Society
African American Studies
Nervana Fadle
2022
Environmental Science and Policy
Political Science
Trinity Hunt-McGuiness
2022
African American Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies

2022

Ali Chak
2023
English & Criminology, Law & Society
Brie Smiley
PhD Student
Culture and Theory Program
Chasia Jeffries
PhD Student
Culture and Theory Program
Kaye Regalado
2024
Literary Journalism & Film and Media Studies

2023

Elliott Yu
2027
Visual Studies (1st Year, PhD Student)
Gabriella Straughn
2027
History (2nd Year PhD Student)
Johnny Vu
2023
Criminology, Law and Society
Psychological Science
Makyla McLeod
2025
Literary Journalism
International Studies
Miya Rosenthal
2023
Public Policy
Media Studies
Tristen Cousins
2023
Politics, Philosophy, and Law
Classics

Humanities Out There Undergraduate Interns

2021 - 2022

Gabriella Marquez
2022
Ruth Dinong
2022
Meganne Rizk
Kyara Corralez