Public Programs

The Underground Scholars Initiative's mission is to build community, awareness, and support among formerly incarcerated and system impacted students into higher education and proliferate the concept of a "Prison-to-University Pipeline." Founded in 2013 at UC Berkeley, the Underground Scholars Initiative has spread across the state with chapters at community colleges and UC campuses at UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Merced, and UC Santa Cruz.

Join us on May 18 for a conversation about the role of sound and music in the struggle for prison abolition with participating musicians including Lisa Fischer, Kris Davis, Val Jeanty, Lily Finnegan, Maimouna Youssef aka “Mumu Fresh”, Queen Cora Coleman, Nicholas Payton, Jason Moran, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Nicole Mitchell, Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Elena and Samara Pinderhughes, José James, Dianne Reeves, Camila Cortina Bello, Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. 

In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, setting them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, their seven-year art and exhibition project with performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. 

Conceptualized in the 1950s by cosmic philosopher and jazz giant Sun Ra, Afrofuturism is a wide-ranging social, political, and artistic movement intent on imagining a world where African-descended peoples and cultures can live and flourish. Join us for a discussion with musicians, artists, and dancers working in the Afrofuturist tradition about their creative endeavors aimed towards a better future.