Charles Underwood

Charles Underwood was Executive Director of University-Community Links at the Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley, until his retirement in 2020. Since 1996, he has directed a number of University of California statewide initiatives (including University-Community Links) developing innovative uses of digital media for teaching and learning, both in and out of school. An anthropologist (Ph.D., Anthropology Dept., UC Berkeley) and classical scholar, he is the author of Mythos and Voice: Displacement, Learning and Agency in Odysseus' World. His research focuses on social displacement and learning, the sociocultural context of learning, and inter-institutional collaboration as a cultural historical process. As an anthropologist, he has worked in Scotland, India, Brazil and in diverse communities in California. He continues to work with community and university partners throughout the world to address social and educational inequities through sustained collaborative efforts that reach across cultural, institutional, and geographical boundaries.

Publications

A Cultural Historical Approach to Social Displacement and University-Community Engagement: Emerging Research and Opportunities
Charles Underwood, Mara Welsh Mahmood, Olga Vásquez. © 2021. 300 pages.
In a time of worldwide turmoil and pervasive social displacement, universities and communities have come together to meet these urgent challenges in order to support the academic...
The Tools at Hand: Agency, Industry and Technological Innovation in a Distributed Learning Community
Charles Underwood, Leann Parker. © 2011. 14 pages.
This chapter presents an anthropological case study of the response to rapidly changing technologies by members of a distributed network of 35 technology-based afterschool...