Covid-19 Pandemicene Podcast

Posted on October 10, 2020December 7, 2020 by Colleen Stone

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

The SJRC Pandemicene Podcast

Podcast Episodes

Each new episode airs Sunday evenings, 6:30 – 7 pm, on KZSC Santa Cruz.

Episode 1: Isa Ansari with Kim TallBear and Jessica Kolopenuk on Indigenous led Techno-Scientific Innovation

Episode 2: Kathia Damian with Joan Donovan on State-sponsored Misinformation

Episode 3: Maryam Nazir with Misha Angrist on Thinking Beyond Bioethics

Episode 4: Gina Barba with Sharon Daniel on Public Art and Carcerality

Episode 5: Maryam Nazir with Rebecca DuBois on a COVID-19 Vaccine.

Episode 6: Gina Barba with Erin McElroy on Housing Justice and Big Tech

Episode 7: Tee Wicks with Owain Williams on the Political Economy of Global Health

Episode 8: Paloma Medina with Martha Kenney on Building Community Resilience

Episode 9: Isa Ansari with Ruth Müller on Collaborative Thinking

Pandemicene Project Information

Graduate and undergraduate student interns in the Pandemicene Project and Theorizing Race After Race groups have co-created this podcast series based on interviews with SJRC’s robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners. Our goal has been to capture everyone’s unique quarantine experiences, interests in understanding local responses to the pandemic, and the world-building projects they have been undertaking!

Our special thanks go to S&J undergraduate researcher Kathia Damian (Literature, Talk and News Director KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM)

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

Forthcoming Book release! Hillary Angelo on How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Posted on October 8, 2020April 9, 2021 by Colleen Stone

About the Book

Book Cover for Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2021)

As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

Hillary Angelo is Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated with the SJRC at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The book is available at: The University of Chicago Press (use discount code UCPSOC for 20% off)

Science & Justice Training Program celebrates 10-year anniversary

Posted on October 1, 2020November 12, 2020 by Colleen Stone

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The SJTP is creating the next generation of path-breaking researchers who have the tools needed to not only be powerful stewards of socially robust science, engineering, and technology but to become more engaged as citizens concerned with racial, gender, and economic justice.

The introductory seminar of the SJTP, Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration, will be offered again Winter 2022 as BME/FMST/SOCY 268A and ANTH 267A and taught by James Doucet-Battle (Sociology). The course brings early career science and engineering graduate and masters students together with social science, humanities and arts students to foster experimental collaborative research practices and models collaborative conversations that pair a science and engineering scholar with a scholar from the social sciences, humanities and arts. Students develop the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, social and political analysis. Enrollment is by permission and limited to 15. Contact James Doucet-Battle and Colleen Stone to get on the list for a permission code (once available).

Learn more about our History, the Training Program, a cross-comparison study of the program, and meet the 10th anniversary cohort.

DONATE NOW to support the Science & Justice Training Program!

Prospective Student Opportunity | history of science, medicine, environment in the Global South

Posted on October 1, 2020October 5, 2020 by Colleen Stone

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz is recruiting the first in a series of PhD students to begin in the fall of 2021 to pursue research on the history of science, the history of medicine, and/or environmental history in the Global South. Applicants may specialize in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, or indigenous communities across the globe.

The online application is available beginning October 1st (unless otherwise noted), and closes at 8:59 pm PST on December 10th.

UCSC is known for its reputation as a center for the study of science (e.g. feminist science studies, multispecies studies, the study of race and genomics). The successful applicant will become part of an interdisciplinary community of scholars whose work is focused on questions of science, medicine, and the environment.

In pursuing a research agenda situated in the Global South, they will have the opportunity to join researchers across the university and to participate in various transdisciplinary forums that include the Science & Justice Research Center, the Center for Cultural Studies, the program in Global Community Health, the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions, and events sponsored by the Departments of Politics, Sociology, History of Consciousness, Feminist Studies, Anthropology, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

In addition to university support, the successful applicant will receive funding for language training and research from a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation on the theme of “The History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns,” whose Principal Investigator is Jennifer L. Derr (History).

Further information about the history department’s graduate program can be found on their web page (https://history.ucsc.edu/graduate/phd-program/index.html). Please contact Jennifer L. Derr (jderr@ucsc.edu) or the Graduate Program Coordinator for the Department of History, Cindy Morris (morrisc@ucsc.edu), with questions regarding applying or the graduate program.