Maryam Griffin: “Of Boxes and Pen: Forged and Forging Categories at a Wartime U.S. University”

IAS faculty member Maryam Griffin published a book chapter, “Of Boxes and Pen: Forged and Forging Categories at a Wartime U.S. University,” in the edited volume Education at War: The Fight for Students of Color in America’s Public Schools. Griffin’s chapter is based on research conducted with undergraduate student organizers at UCLA. It explores the complex and deeply global ways that students of Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) descent worked to expose the forgeries of an existing racial regime that demonized them while simultaneously categorizing them as white. In response, they organized to forge and demand their own alternative, non-white representational category, SWANA, on the UC admissions application.