New Series to Shine Light on Activism Among UCSD Students

Christine Clark | December 10, 2007

What role does activism play on UC San Diego’s campus? Does it leave a mark on the people who participate in it? These questions were raised in the senior seminar Social Movements in San Diego taught by UCSD professors Jorge Mariscal and David Pellow last year. The seminar is the basis for a new series on UCSD-TV, “Growing Activism: People’s History of UC San Diego.” In the series, Pellow and Mariscal explore how UCSD students connect to contemporary issues and how local activist organizations in the region address these issues.

The series debuted Nov. 26 and will run throughout the month of December. It features filmed seminars, events, interviews and footage of students engaging in activism.

“We hope to reinvigorate a passion for the broader relevance of a college education in the United States today,” Pellow said. “Education, in my experience, should be about critical thinking, engaged learning, listening and transformative action aimed at improving societies. Anything less than that is unacceptable.”

As associate director of the California Cultures program, Mariscal had the idea to develop the series and presented it to Pellow, director of the California Cultures Program. Both Pellow and Mariscal were teaching the senior seminar on social movements in San Diego when they created the series.

UCSD students had a strong response to the seminar and they have been the driving force behind the “Growing Activism” series, according to Mariscal. “Some of them went on to work with the organizations they learned about in the class,” he said.

Katie Erickson is a senior who was enrolled in the Social Movements in San Diego seminar. “I loved it,” she said. “I thought it was one of the most valuable classes I have taken here by far. Pellow and Mariscal are two of the greatest professors on this campus; they personally engage with their students, they are helpful, they really care and they are brilliant.”

On the series, Pellow and Mariscal frequently invite guest speakers into the classroom, including Arek Strzelecki and Dilkhwaz Ahmed. Both Strzelecki and Ahmed are from License to Freedom, an organization that offers services for domestic violence survivors in San Diego’s immigrant and refugee communities.

Professors Pellow and Mariscal on set in the UCSD-TV studio.

Pellow said that all of the guest speakers have impressed him. “Our guests are leaders in their field and have distinguished themselves by combating extraordinary odds to provide services for the vulnerable and marginalized communities in the county,” he said. “They do work that is exhausting, low paid and often thankless.”

Shannon Bradley produces the series in collaboration with professors Mariscal and Pellow. She films their seminars and events and she supplements their lectures with additional footage of students participating in activist activities. The series also contains follow-up studio interviews with the professors to put the events in context. “My interests in this were sharing their work with a wider audience,” Bradley said. “Both regionally on UCSD-TV and nationally on UCTV.”

Mariscal said that many activists tend to be young people because every generation usually produces a cohort of youth that is willing to enact its values by actively agitating for change. “Students in particular have the resources and collective energy to have a real impact on their historical moment,” he said.

UCSD has a long history of student activism dating back to the first demonstrations in the mid-1960s, Mariscal said. “There was one against US intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. That history continues today.”

Mariscal added that he hopes the series inspires students to find issues they care about and to become actively engaged on campus and in local communities. “It definitely inspired me to engage in more community and campus issues,” Erickson said.