My Monthly Archives: January 2022

JOB Announcement | UC Santa Cruz is hiring for a Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Scholar

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POSITION OVERVIEW

Position title: Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Scholar

Salary range: Commensurate with qualifications and experience, initial annual salary is $70,000. Minimum annual salary rates are made based on the individual’s Experience Level, which is determined by the number of months of postdoctoral service at any institution. See current salary scale for Postdoctoral Titles at https://apo.ucsc.edu/compensation/salary-scales/index.html
Percent time: Postdoctoral Scholar appointments are full-time
Anticipated start: Position available to start between 7/1/22 – 9/1/22.
Position duration: One year. The total duration of an individual’s postdoctoral service may not exceed five years, including postdoctoral service at any institution. Under limited circumstances, an exception to this limit may be considered, not to exceed a sixth year.

APPLICATION WINDOW

Open December 22nd, 2021 through Wednesday, Aug 31, 2022 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)

POSITION DESCRIPTION

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) invites applications for a one-year postdoctoral scholar appointment to support an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” scheduled for the 2022-23 academic year, under the direction of Associate Professor Jennifer Derr. The seminar working group will be led by Professors Jennifer Derr (History) and Jenny Reardon (Sociology). Through public lectures, scholarly talks, and a regular interdisciplinary reading and discussion group, the seminar will interrogate the intersections among race, empire, and the environment, and their significance in the theory, practice, and structure of American biomedicine. The seminar’s geographic frame is that of the American biomedical empire, a formation that includes the United States as well as those places formed by and encircled in the networks of American (biomedical) imperial influence. Within these geographies, race has functioned as a determinant of environmental exposures with deleterious impacts on human health. It also has been a central component of the environmental imaginaries that undergird the theory and practice of medicine and the provision of care. This seminar will approach the history and study of biomedicine from the vantage point of its racialized environments with an eye towards how these critical engagements might be marshaled to produce a more equitable practice of medicine. It is rooted in the proposition that to fully grasp the significance of race in medicine, we must probe how race is made material through environmental imaginaries, practices, and material entanglements, and how these in turn undergird and shape American biomedicine.The Mellon Sawyer postdoctoral scholar position is a twelve-month appointment and includes salary, health benefits, moving expenses, and a research budget. The start date of the appointment is flexible but must begin between July 1 and September 1, 2022. The employee will be hosted by the Department of History. They will be expected to be in residence at UC Santa Cruz, to participate in all aspects of the Sawyer Seminar, and to develop their own scholarship through the format of the seminar.We welcome applications from scholars in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences in any region of the world that falls conceptually within the territories of American biomedical empire, which include but are not limited to the geographies of American Empire. The chronological focus of the postdoctoral scholar employee’s research should be the twentieth and/or twenty-first centuries.Applications are accepted via email to Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu. All documents and materials must be submitted as PDFs.Required Documents/Materials

  • Letter of application that briefly summarizes your qualifications and interest in the position.
  • Curriculum vitae, which must include the names and contact information for two professional references. The hiring unit will contact the references of those applicants who are under serious consideration.
  • Statement of contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion (not to exceed two pages): address your understanding of the barriers facing traditionally underrepresented groups and your past and/or future contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion through research and professional or public service. Candidates are urged to review guidelines on statements (see https://apo.ucsc.edu/diversity.html) before preparing their statement.
  • Statement of research (not to exceed two pages) describing how your research relates to the themes raised by the seminar
  • Writing sample (20-25 pages)

Full consideration will be given to applications completed by March 1, 2022. Applications received after this date will be considered only if the position has not been filled.

History Department: https://history.ucsc.edu/

QUALIFICATIONS

Basic qualifications (required at time of application)

See additional qualifications.

Additional qualifications (required at time of start)

Ph.D. (or equivalent foreign degree) in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. Ph.D. must be in hand at the time of appointment.
Help contact: jderr@ucsc.edu

CAMPUS INFORMATION

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, or protected veteran status. UC Santa Cruz is committed to excellence through diversity and strives to establish a climate that welcomes, celebrates, and promotes respect for the contributions of all students and employees. Inquiries regarding the University’s equal employment opportunity policies may be directed to the Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 or by phone at (831) 459-2686.Under Federal law, the University of California may employ only individuals who are legally able to work in the United States as established by providing documents as specified in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Certain UCSC positions funded by federal contracts or sub-contracts require the selected candidate to pass an E-Verify check (see https://www.uscis.gov/e-verify). The university sponsors employment-based visas for nonresidents who are offered academic appointments at UC Santa Cruz (see https://apo.ucsc.edu/policy/capm/102.530.html).UCSC is a smoke & tobacco-free campus.If you need accommodation due to a disability, please contact Disability Management Services at roberts@ucsc.edu (831) 459-4602.UCSC is committed to addressing the spousal and partner employment needs of our candidates and employees. As part of this commitment, our institution is a member of the Northern California Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (NorCal HERC). Visit the NorCal HERC website at https://www.hercjobs.org/regions/higher-ed-careers-northern-california/ to search for open positions within a commutable distance of our institution.The University of California offers a competitive benefits package and a number of programs to support employee work/life balance. For information about employee benefits please visit https://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/compensation-and-benefits/index.html

As a condition of employment, you will be required to comply with the University of California SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Vaccination Program Policy. All Covered Individuals under the policy must provide proof of Full Vaccination or, if applicable, submit a request for Exception (based on Medical Exemption, Disability, and/or Religious Objection) or Deferral (based on pregnancy) no later than the applicable deadline. For new University of California employees, the applicable deadline is eight weeks after their first date of employment. (Capitalized terms in this paragraph are defined in the policy.)

VISIT THE UCSC WEB SITE AT https://www.ucsc.edu

JOB LOCATION

Santa Cruz, California

ABOUT

Book launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

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About the Book

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University
Press, 2021)

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano’s holographic art, Esdras Parra’s and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry, Mattie Brice’s digital games, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations

About the Author

micha cárdenas is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as coauthor of Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs and The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities.

January 19, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Daphne Martschenko and Sam Trejo

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Wednesday, January 19, 2022

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work.

At this session, we will hear from Daphne Martschenko, a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and collaborator Sam Trejo, an Assistant Professor in the Department Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, on how ethical, anticipatory genomics research on human behavior means celebrating disagreement.

Despite the many social and ethical considerations in human genetics, researchers and communities remain largely siloed as for-profit direct-to-consumer genetic testing and the application of polygenic scores to in vitro fertilization services become increasingly prevalent. The multifaceted challenges facing genomics, both empirical and ethical, require collaborations that foster critical dialogue and honest debate between communities inside and outside the research enterprise. This works-in-progress argues that in order to respond to the premature or inappropriate use of genomic data in industry, the scientific community needs to embrace, understand, and be in dialogue about its disagreements. We begin by introducing the research framework of adversarial collaboration as a way to celebrate disagreement and then discuss ideas from the Genetics & Social Inequality chapter of our ongoing book project ‘Debating DNA’.

Sam and Daphne are currently writing a book together for Princeton University Press that unpacks various social, ethical, and policy issues related to the DNA revolution. Their goal is to present a genuine middle ground, moving past the dichotomies—interpretivist vs. positivist, qualitative vs. quantitative, optimism vs. pessimism regarding biological explanations—that vex the biosocial sciences.

Daphne O. Martschenko PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and co-organizer of the international Race, Empire, and Education Research Collective. Daphne’s work advocates for and facilitates research efforts that promote socially responsible communication of and community engagement with social and behavioral genomics.

Sam Trejo PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. He is quantitative social scientist interested in how social and biological factors jointly shape human development across the life-course and specialize in quasi-experimental, biosocial, and computational methods. Sam’s research capitalizes on two data sources that, until recently, were unavailable to researchers: (1) large administrative datasets and (2) longitudinal studies containing molecular genetic data.