Film screening of First Time Home and panel discussion

First Time Home, an award-winning film directed and shot by Noemi Librado Sanchez, Heriberto Ventura, Esmirna Librado and Esmeralda Ventura, follows four cousins who are Indigenous Triqui and second-generation immigrants.  They travel from their immigrant community in California to their family's ancestral village in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the first time, after learning their grandfather is gravely ill.

Join us for a screening of the film followed by a panel discussion with Cristiana Giordano, Debarati Sanyal and Svati Shah chaired by Leti Volpp, in conversation with the film's producer, Seth Holmes.

Seth M. Holmes Seth is a professor in the Division of Society and Environment and the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. A cultural and medical anthropologist and physician, he has worked on social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the context of transnational im/migration, agro-food systems, and health care.  He has received national and international awards from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and geography, including the Margaret Mead Award.

Cristiana Giordano is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. in philosophy from the University of Pavia, Italy. She works on foreign migration, mental health, the body, and cultural translation in contemporary Italy. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion/exclusion of foreign others, and through the lens of research on the human microbiome and migrant health in Europe.

Svati Shah is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They are an anthropologist and queer feminist scholar who works on questions of sexuality, gender, migration, and caste capitalism in India. Dr Shah earned their doctorate in Columbia University’s joint program in Anthropology and Public Health and, previously, a master’s in public health from Emory University. They are an undergraduate alum of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Department of Anthropology.

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Director of Berkeley's new Center for interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, and European Studies. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; aesthetics and biopolitics; post-war French and Francophone culture; transcultural memory studies. She is completing a book on migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe's current refugee "crisis." 

Leti Volpp is Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice. She is a scholar of immigration law and citizenship theory whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity. Volpp currently directs the campus-wide Center for Race and Gender, and is an affiliate of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for European Studies, and is a core faculty member of the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.