At the American Sociological Meeting 2019, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Vilna Treitler. In this conversation, she discusses her experiences with trauma and resilience, mentorship, her work as a visual artist and her newest project: her memoir. [*Cover Photo: Vilna Treitler Self Portrait] Vilna Bashi Treitler is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, a sociologist, and an artist. Her scholarship theorizes about international migration, race and ethnicity and the dynamics of hierarchical socioeconomic structures, and she has earned distinctions for expertise in qualitative methods. Bashi Treitler is the author of The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions, a comparative historical analysis of US ethnic groups’ racialization and the antiblackness it produces, and Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World, a study of the help immigrants get from the transnational aid networks they create for themselves. She is also editor of the book Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption, on the racialization of children made available domestically and internationally by displacement and misfortune, and a monograph issue of Current Sociology entitled Dynamics of Inequality in a Global Perspective. She has served as Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society, and as Vice Chair of the UN NGO Committee on the Elimination of Racism, Afrophobia, and Colorism. Her art centers on oil painting and glasswork, and she cares deeply about social justice and human rights, so she moves in and out of activism as much as her other obligations allow.

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