In the last three years, Latinx and Latine have become increasingly popular substitutes for gender-non neutral words such as Latino and Latina and for the neutral but dichotomous Latin@. The words Latine and Latinx are thought to be more inclusive for speakers who are LGBTQ or gender non-conforming. Indeed, Latinx circulated in LGBTQ communities long before it gained broader usage. At the same time, the prominence of the word Latinx has generated backlash. Members of the Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies community at UK have considered replacing the word Latino with something else. Indeed, informal communications over the past two years have used both Latinx and Latin@ in place of Latino.  LACLS is proposing a panel that would explore the scholarship and identity politics surrounding the issue and lay the groundwork for a potential change to LACLS’ official name.

Every year, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) invites an outstanding anthropologist from outside the university to give a public talk as part of our Distinguished Lecturer Series. For 2020, we are pleased to host Dr. Khiara Bridges, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and former Associate Dean of Equity, Justice, and Engagement at Boston University.

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning, race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared or will soon appear in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.