Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructor: Greg Castillo, Scott Saul

Term: Spring 2020

Course #: American Studies 102 / Environmental Design 109

Why Read This Case Study?

Cities of the East Bay, such as Oakland and Berkeley, were well-known as centers of political, social, and cultural activist in the 1960s. But less well known is the fact that the East Bay continued to be a site of radical movements throughout 1970s.

The undergraduate studio, East Bay Revolution, was led by Professor of English Scott Saul and Professor of Architecture Greg Castillo, both experts on local social, political, and countercultural movements in the Bay Area and beyond. They immersed students in archival place-based research related to the history of East Bay activism of the 1960s and 1970s. These students came from diverse fields of study - American Studies, Urban Studies, History, Music, Architecture, Geography, Art Practice, and Conservation and Resource Studies.

Drawing on rich community-based archives in Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, as well as archival materials from institutional archives such as Berkeley’s Public Library, students worked together in teams to undertake archival story-telling projects. These projects focused on particular social, cultural, and design movements that gained traction and altered the political consciousness of the Bay Area and beyond. The students began their work in a studio setting, but when the COVID-19 pandemic shifted in-person instruction and studio work online, students adjusted quickly. Learning from each other as well as their professors, students gained expertise in a range of methods: how to analyze print, audio, and visual archives; contextualize archival materials by drawing on other historical sources; and build digital archives. With remarkable creativity, and unwavering determination to track down ephemeral historical materials, they produced powerful multimedia stories about the East Bay’s mid-20th century activist movements.