Debra Klein

• Anthropology Ph.D.
• Professor at Gavilan College

The California Community Colleges (CCC) system plays a pivotal role as an engine for economic and social mobility in California and as a driver for the fifth largest economy in the world. In the past two decades, the CCC system has undergone significant “reform,” narrowing students’ educational opportunities and shrinking the student body by over o...

The largest system of higher education in the nation, the California Community Colleges (CCC) has disappeared over one million students in the past 15 years, a 35% decrease in its student body since 2008 despite California’s population increase. This dramatic shrinking of the CCC system was not an accident. It was manufactured by a vast neoliberal...

The largest system of higher education in the nation, the California Community Colleges (CCC) has disappeared over one million students in the past 15 years, a 35% decrease in its student body since 2008 despite California’s population increase. This dramatic shrinking of the CCC system was not an accident. It was manufactured by a vast neoliberal...

The California Community Colleges (CCC) system plays a pivotal role as an engine for economic and social mobility in California and as a driver for the fifth largest economy in the world. In the past two decades, the CCC system has undergone significant “reform,” narrowing students’ educational opportunities and shrinking the student body by over o...

The California Community Colleges (CCC) system plays a pivotal role as an engine for economic and social mobility in California and as a driver for the fifth largest economy in the world. In the past two decades, the CCC system has undergone significant “reform,” narrowing students’ educational opportunities and shrinking the student body by over o...

Civic and community engagement opportunities are transformative and empowering for students, faculty, staff, the college, and our communities. When students become empowered to participate in their communities as agents of change, the possibilities are endless. This presentation makes the case that a civic and community engagement program at Gavila...

In this virtual presentation, Debbie Klein discusses the impact philanthrocapitalist foundations have had on California Community Colleges over the past 20 years. Philanthrocapitalist-funded nonprofits have claimed to promote equity but have implemented policies that apply corporate efficiency models to public education, resulting in a disconnect b...

My comments during the book launch, hosted by the University of Regina, for *The Cinema of Tunde Kelani: Aesthetics, Theatricalities, and Visual Performance*. Tundé Kelani’s body of work, mobilized through Èṣù-like storytelling, offers new myths that awaken our spirit and desire to create a more balanced and beautiful world. Thank you, Oga Kelani,...

This article opens with the suggestion that the art of world-renowned and critically acclaimed Nigerian filmmaker, Tundé Kelani, is analogous to the work of Òrìṣà Èṣù, supernatural trickster who opens the portal to the spirit realm, the past, and the future. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research with Yorùbá performing artists in Òṣun and Kwa...

Why have so many advocacy organizations whose decision makers have little, if any, direct experience within the California Community Colleges, successfully determined the policy and funding direction of the system over the past few decades? In 2020, I began researching a range of California-based advocacy organizations which have redefined the miss...

A proliferation of popular music genres flourished in post-independence Nigeria: highlife, jùjú, Afrobeat, and fújì. Originating within Yorùbá Muslim communities, the genres of fújì and Islamic are Islamised dance music genres characterised by their Arabic-influenced vocal style, Yorùbá praise poetry, driving percussion and aesthetics of incorporat...

The California Community College system’s over-reliance upon part-time faculty is the most chronic and systemic inequity of teaching in the California community colleges. Although the Education Code deems part-time faculty temporary, part-time faculty are not only permanent but have comprised 70 percent of all California community college faculty f...

Just as the coronavirus crisis magnifies systemic inequities in societies across the globe, it also magnifies systemic absurdities. Now the absurdity of pouring taxpayer dollars into Calbright, a project that is fiscally wasteful, is impossible to ignore. As taxpayers who love and benefit from the community colleges, we have an opportunity to addre...

The California Community College system is one of the most significant and vital engines for educational, economic, and personal growth opportunities in California, and particularly for Residents of Color and low income. While many faculty are actively working to create more equitable college cultures and classrooms, transformation will only happen...

During the 1960s in post-independence Nigeria, Síkírù Àyìndé Barrister (1948-2010) pioneered and coined the term fújì, a Yorùbá genre of popular dance music. While Barrister was a soldier in the Nigerian army in the late 1960s, he transformed wéré/ajísari music, songs performed by and for Muslims during the Ramadan fast, into this new style of danc...

Èrìn-Òṣun, Nigeria is renowned for being home to lineages of traditional drummers and masquerade dancers. Since the 1960s, Èrìn-Òṣun artists have collaborated with European and U.S. artists and scholars. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork from 1995 to 2005, this chapter analyzes Èrìn-Òṣun artists’ strategic collaborations with a pro...

Review of Yorùbá Music in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Agency, and Performance Practice by Bode Omojola

This article celebrates and pays tribute to the work of Karin Barber by joining analyses of the history of political and economic conditions with analyses of the relationship between people's lifestyles and aesthetic forms of production. This paper analyzes a Yorùbá alárìnjó (traditional singing, dancing, drumming, and masquerade) performance and a...

Làmídì Àyánkúnlé (1949-2018), a master bata drummer and broker of Yorùbá culture, was born on 6 August 1949 in the town of Èrìn-Òsun in present-day Òsun State, Nigeria. Àyánkúnlé was born into a large extended family of traditional bàtá (double-headed, conically shaped drum ensemble) and dùndún (double-headed, hourglass-shaped drum ensemble with te...

Barber’s latest book provides a call and prescription for a renewed focus on the analysis of texts and the conditions of their production and reception. Building on her extensive fieldwork in the Yoruba town of Okuku, Barber’s numerous publications analyzing African oral and written texts have already modeled such an anthropology. In order to produ...

The most recent generational shift in the culture of Yorùbá Bàtá performance has provoked frustration in older artists who are worried that their tradition is dying. The generation of artists in its twenties fuses traditional bàtá, with popular musical genres, creating a fusion style I call “pop tradition.” “Pop” signifies the young artists' desire...

Based on two and a half years of fieldwork in Osun State, Nigeria, this dissertation tracks histories of collaborative performance among Erin-Osun bàtá artists and their European, US, and Yoruba co-performers, patrons, students, and fans. An essential component of an ever-changing, centuries-old traveling theater and religious tradition, Yoruba bàt...