Selected Publications

Collins, C. (2023). Water Berth: My Journey to the Black Pacific as a Site of Memory and Futurity. Public: A Journal of Imagining America, 7(1). Spring 2023.

The origins of Black people in the United States are primarily told as a story of trans-Atlantic travel tethered to enslavement. However, Black people’s relationships with water and watercraft extend beyond the trans-Atlantic slave ship. Likewise, beyond the Atlantic Ocean are numerous seas, oceans, rivers, and waterways through which Black bodies, minds, spirits, practices, and cultures traverse. This essay charts a developing multimodal project, Black Mariners of the Black Pacific: Reimagining Race, Migration, and Diaspora which explores (trans)national inheritances of the Black Pacific by examining sixteenth to mid-twentieth-century maritime practices of people of African descent, including whalers, commercial mariners, fishers, explorers, shipbuilders, dockworkers, soldiers, and sailors, who settled along the Pacific Coast of what is now the United States. As the project’s methodologies include scholarly writing, public exhibition, a vessel build, and a short documentary, this essay explores the significance of the project’s political praxis of public-facing scholarship.

Collins, C. (2022). When Do You Stop Arriving?: The Project “We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Histories in Rural California,” California History (UC Press). Issue 99.4. Winter 2022.

This article highlights a new public history project, “We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Rural Histories in California,” which examines hidden histories of African Americans who have shaped California’s food and farming culture from early statehood to the present. I detail the project’s archival content, including an overview of its methodological framework and the stories featured in its public components. I also pay special attention to the design of the project’s public engagement, including its recently launched traveling banner exhibit, accompanying podcast, and in-development digital exhibit. This essay thus illustrates the dynamic opportunities that public humanities projects like this one present in amplifying important, under-told state histories.

Anderson, P.; Aushana, C.; & Collins, C. (2022). When We Are in Crisis: Youth-centered Transitional Justice, Police Violence, and Political Imaginaries. International Journal of Transitional Justice. Spring 2022 Special Issue.

This article describes youth involvement in the voter-mandated transition to a fully independent, powerful community commission overseeing the San Diego (California) Police Department. We begin by describing the historical context of police violence against communities of color in San Diego, and previous attempts to practice transparency and accountability in public safety. We then situate our work with local high school students to engage directly in the transition process, and to imagine future models of public safety with youth justice at its core.

Deepening Perceptions of Learning: Studying and Designing Ethical Practice with Researchers, Teachers and Learners. (2020). Proceedings of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, USA.

(With Bang, M.; Booker, A.; Halle-Erby, K.; Marin, A.; McDaid-Morgan, N.; & Ng, M.) Building on recent efforts to center questions of power and politics within the learning sciences, this symposium brings together a set of papers that seek to analyze and surface the ethical dimensions of human learning. Collectively, the papers ask: What becomes visible, analytically, when we take learning to be politically and ethically laden? What do we miss when we don’t attend to these dimensions of learning? What does foregrounding ethics mean for how we design and study human learning and meaning-making?

Each paper addresses these questions by providing key empirical examples drawn from ethnographic research on the activity, relationality and learning of 1) researchers; 2) teachers; and 3) students. Our analysis is aimed at constructing lenses that challenge the politics of neutrality in research on learning, and that deepen our analytic perception by helping us attune to intellectual and relational dimensions of learning that we may not otherwise see.

Collins, C. I. (2019). Manifest Re-destined: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in the American West [Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, San Diego].

This dissertation focuses on one particular (re)telling of the American West: the ‘birth’ of California as historically and culturally located in San Diego, the site of Europe's first permanent settlement on the Pacific Coast. This examination traces how a particular cultural remembrance of the West remains culturally entrenched not only because of continuous reiteration, as prevalent scholarship generally discusses American Western mythology (Limerick, 1988; Brown, 2007; Smith, 1950), but also on the important ways in which this origin story adapts and shifts over time when aspects of it are no longer serviceable.

Charting this adaptation through specific cultural, historical, and civic projects of remembrance, this dissertation examines what falls in and out of this narrative in the face of sociocultural, economic, and political change. And it reveals how this origin story’s recalibrations not only ensure its survival and keep the past relevant, but how, despite these repairs, the overall cultural work of the story remains intact: reaffirming notions of American exceptionalism. In doing so, this examination interrogates the ways in which recalibrated forms of racial, social, ideological, and political power work and operate, even--and especially--within seemingly celebratory, festive, and ‘innocent’ American commemorative practices, foregrounding the entangled relationship between memory and politics at the core of our national imagination.

Collins, C. (2016).  Cooperative Measures: NGO and Institutional Educational Partnerships in the US. In C. Brock (Ed.), Education and NGOs. Bloomsbury Publishing.

This chapter investigates the complex and diverse relationships that exist between educational institutions and non-governmental actors in attempting to collaborate for change.  Specifically, it: (1) explicates the ways in which both “education” and “NGOs” are defined and delineated for the purposes of this chapter, (2) briefly illustrates the broad history of NGO influence upon higher education in the US, and (3) examines one such partnership between an US institution of higher learning, the University of California San Diego and a non-governmental organisation, InterTribal Youth, as they both attempted to address the low university matriculation and retention rates of American indigenous students.

Collins, C., Vásquez, O. A., Bliesner, J. (2011).  Bridging the Gaps:  Community - University Partnerships as a New Form of Social Policy.  In Bowdon, M. & Carpenter. R. (Eds.), Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, Community Partnerships: Concepts, Models, and Applications, IGI Global.

The following case study chronicles the activities of a community-university partnership that supports the University of California, San Diego’s threefold mission of teaching, research, and service while directing educational resources to underrepresented communities. This partnership, instantiated in a research project widely known as La Clase Mágica, involves a broad spectrum of institutional units seeking to bridge the digital, educational, and employment gaps that exist between middle-class mainstream communities and those at the margins. The case study examines the project’s history and philosophy, theoretical framework, commitment to collaboration, assessment, and impact over the past two decades.