My Monthly Archives: April 2024

Call for Participation

Summer 2024 Graduate Student Researcher Opportunity (PAID)

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Together with The University of Alberta, Canada, the Science & Justice Research Center is now accepting applications for a Graduate Student Researcher.

This position supports The Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. More information about The CIHSN project can be found on the project webpage.

In consultation with PIs Jenny Reardon and James Doucet-Battle (Sociology), and Colleen Stone (Program Manager) at the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) and PIs Jessica Kolopenuk (Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, UofA) and Kim TallBear (Native Studies, UofA), one UC graduate student researcher will be offered a GSRship (a total of $5000) in Summer 2024 with the possibility of extension to a 50% GSRship in Fall 2024 (or split 25% in Fall 2024 and 25% in Winter 2025).

The graduate student researcher will: 1) assist in developing and organizing a weeklong visit to the University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada including a Symposium; 2) help implement activities during the visit; 3) assist in developing a literature review on critical Indigenous health research, sovereignty, and governance; 4) and work with the team to produce a final end-of visit report on activities including plans of future in-person gatherings.

The Graduate Student Researcher Must:

  • Be currently enrolled as a graduate student in the UC System (any campus, any discipline); available to accept an appointment at UC Santa Cruz.
  • Knowledge of and experience in working with tribal communities.
  • Be interested in strengthening partnerships with the University of Alberta, Edmonton and UC Santa Cruz, and developing a network for critical Indigenous health studies.
  • Be available to be in Edmonton for the in-person visit (August 19-23, 2024).

The Graduate Student Researcher Will Receive:

  • A fellowship with the SJRC and listed on the Project’s webpage.
  • An initial GSRship for Summer 2024. Date range, percent, and step to be confirmed upon acceptance of offer.
  • Appropriate funding to cover travel and lodging expenses associated with Symposium#1 in Edmonton.

To Apply:

By Monday, May 28 at 12 Noon, email (scijust@ucsc.edu) expressing interest, letting us know and sending the following:

  1. Your name, home campus and department, academic faculty advisor(s).
  2. Your resume/CV.
  3. Why you are interested in the project and how your learning/research/career goals would benefit from the fellowship.
  4. Your experiences with the project topic, if any.

SNU In the World Program 2024 Rapporteur Report

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SNU In the World Program 2024 Rapporteur Report

Innovation, Science & Justice

University of California, Santa Cruz

January 23, 2024 – February 03, 2024

The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) hosted its second year of the SNU in the World Program, with 29 visiting scholars (including Professor Doogab Yi, 2 graduate students, and 26 undergraduates) from Seoul National University (SNU). During their two-week stay, scholars engaged with various projects conducted at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) by SJRC affiliates. The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at SNU, is a university-led and government-funded initiative to train South Korean undergraduate students to be globally engaged scholars and leaders. The SNU in the World Program at UCSC is one of five other programs selected for funding and focuses on Innovation, Science and Justice. Other SNU Programs included visits to Washington DC (public policy), Japan (sustainable development), and Australia (climate crisis).

The program was once again facilitated by Doogab Yi, Associate Professor of Science Studies at Seoul National University, who brought together a diverse group of students from fields including the biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, industrial design, pharmacy, dentistry, sociology, anthropology, business administration, and fine arts. Over the two-week program students participated in an in-depth series of lectures, workshops, a film screening and live performance, and field trips to the surrounding Bay Area museums, cultural centers, and sites of innovation such as Google and an AI enabled lab at Stanford University Hospital. Activities focused on exploring cutting-edge issues including stem cell innovation in organoid intelligence, data and information justice, engineering and AI ethics, health equity, land and site-based practices, and ecological reparations.

Crown College Provost Manel Camps provided the students with an introduction to initiatives in innovation at UC Santa Cruz.  These included the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED), which promotes the development, research, and teaching of innovation and entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz, the Innovation and Business Engagement Hub, and with the Student Creativity Empowerment and Entrepreneurship association (SCEE). SJRC co-directors Jenny Reardon and James Doucet-Battle then took the lead framing the key learning outcomes of the visit centering on pressing topics of bioethics, health disparities, and equitable research. Previous and current projects affiliated with SJRC such as the the Leadership in Ethical & Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research Project and the University of California – Historically Black Colleges and Universities (UC-HBCU) Initiative provided insights into the Center’s efforts to center issues of equity and justice in science and engineering. 

This year’s SNU in the World program provided an opportunity to bring together a diverse community of researchers, scholars, artists, and policy makers who work in the domain of Science and Justice at UCSC and in the broader Bay Area. On their first day, they had a chance to be in conversation with Tiffany Wise-West, the Sustainability and Climate Action Manager for The City of Santa Cruz and a founding graduate fellow of the Science & Justice Training Program. In this conversation they learned about innovative relationships, environmental justice and the city.

Over dinner that first evening, they met with undergraduate student fellows in the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change. The Everett Program develops young leaders who use the technical, educational, and research resources of the university to work directly with communities, empowering people to develop practical solutions to persistent problems.

Over the following days, students had a chance to engage with a variety of areas and topics. In a session with the UCSC IBSC Stem Cell Journal Club, the visitors engaged in rich conversation surrounding bioethical questions raised by the innovative biotechnological research in organoid intelligence. UCSC Professor of History Ben Breene and Roya Pakzad, Founder and Director of Taraaz, a non-profit organization working at the intersection of technology and human rights, raised the question of ethical dilemmas in engineering from a global historical perspective, while two faculty members in the History of Consciousness department, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, approached the question of ecological justice from the framework of community technoscience. Leilani Gilpin and Carolina Flores, Assistant Professors in Computer Science and Engineering and Philosophy respectively, presented their collaborative work on the topic of justice in data science. Chessa Adsit-Morris and James Karabin, graduate researchers in SJRC’s Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) Initiative, also focused on addressing issues of equity at intellectual and institutional levels in science and engineering.

This year, a series of performances, exhibitions, and film screenings complemented core themes of the lectures. A live performance of Strata: A Performance of Topography, an improvisational documentary meditating on land-based histories, shared thematic resonances with Connie Zheng and Kevin Corcoran’s lecture on land and site-based artistic research practices. Another highlight of the artistic contributions of the program was a screening of Richland, the 2023 documentary film by filmmaker Irene Lusztig centering on the residents and nuclear site workers of Hanford, a manufacturing company of weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project in the town Richland, Washington. The collective viewing of the film was effective in bringing about cross-cultural exchange of significant social, political, and national differences about world historical events such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The visitors’ responses to the film showed how the technology of nuclear bombs signifying American imperialism could also be framed as an anti-colonial technology in Korea. Both perspectives raise difficult questions about the role of normalized ideologies in justifying immense violence. 

Outside of UCSC, the group participated in several field trips throughout the local Bay Area. They were welcomed to the UC San Francisco Mission Bay Campus by Julie Harris-Wai, an Associate Professor at UCSF’s Institute for Health and Aging in the School of Nursing. Visitors embarked on a walking tour of Third Street led by Reardon and researcher Dennis Browe as part of SJRC’s Just Biomedicine project. Just Biomedicine is a research collective that critically examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The walking tour was designed to allow participants to think critically about who and what research infrastructures (such as buildings) are for when confronted by accessibility, surveillance, and social stratification issues in the urban landscape. Visitors also had ample free time to explore the city by attending de Young Museum, SF MOMA, and biking the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito before visiting Paul Tang’s AI enabled Lab at Stanford Hospital and touring UC Berkeley. 

After traveling back to Santa Cruz, SNU students worked in groups to synthesize their lessons throughout the two-week program into conference-style presentations. During the project development phase, groups discussed and debated a number of issues. At the end of the two-week program, teams presented their final research projects covering topics including: the role of artificial intelligence in mental health sciences; access to medical care and the power of walking ethnographies. All of these projects attempted to apply and analyze practical approaches to addressing issues of equity and justice in the realms of science and technology.

To take part in or contribute to this partnership for the next visit in late January 2025, please contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) and Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).

April 24, 2024 | Precision Public Health After Covid-19

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Wednesday, April 24, 2024

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + Zoom (registration)

Join SJRC scholars in Oakes 231 (or on Zoom) for an open discussion! 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 Martha Kenney (Department Chair, Women & Gender Studies, San Francisco State University) and Laura Mamo (Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health, San Francisco State University) on precision public health after Covid-19.

In the mi-2010s, a new paradigm called precision public health has emerged—part genomics, part informatics, part public health, and part biomedicine, touted as a data-driven public health revolution. This presentation reflects on the promises of precision public health in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, looking at how the “precision imaginary” has shifted when confronted with a global health crisis that exacerbated health inequities worldwide.

Martha Kenney (Ph.D. History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) is a feminist science studies scholar whose research explores the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. Her current project examines and intervenes in the narratives emerging from the new field of environmental epigenetics, which studies how signals from the environment affect gene expression. Specifically, she looks at how assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality influence the design of epigenetic experiments on model organisms and how we understand the relationship between bodies and environments. She has recent and forthcoming articles in Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, Biosocieties and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Dr. Kenney teaches courses on the politics of science, technology, medicine and the environment.

Laura Mamo is the Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health. Her work lies at the intersection of medical sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. Her research and teaching focus on sexuality and its politics in medicine, science, and health discourse, practice, and resistance. Mamo is the author of the forthcoming book, Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Gendered Politics of Cancer Prevention (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007); co-author of Living Green: Communities that Sustain (New Society Press, 2010); and co-editor of Biomedicalization Studies: Technoscience and Transformations of Health, Illness and U.S. Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2010). Mamo is the co-founder of The Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia school-based queer sexuality and gender project with Jessica Fields, Jen Gilbert and Nancy Lesko. Mamo’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others. Mamo earned her PhD in 2002 from UCSF and BA from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She joined the faculty at SFSU as Health Equity Professor of Public Health in 2010 following appointments as Assistant Professor and Associated Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

April 17, 2024 (POSTPONED) | Refiguring Worlds Through Local Voices? Epistemic Vulnerability in a Time of Climate Change in Kerala, India

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Wednesday, April 17, 2024 – POSTPONED

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress, next January 2025! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work! At this session, next year, we will hear from visiting postdoctoral fellow Anna Bridel.

As climate change impacts intensify there are growing calls for alternative life-worlds to be imagined and brought in to being through the inclusion of local voices in environmental policymaking. At the same time, research has shown that platforming local environmental knowledge can often lead to an unexpected continuation of pre-existing relations of knowledge, politics and climate vulnerability. In this work in progress, Bridel will discuss ethnographic fieldwork from Kerala, India, where Cyclone Ockhi led to the death of over 200 fishers in 2017 but local fishing communities have been unable to influence dominant approaches to governing storm risk. In doing so Bridel will seek to develop the concept of ‘epistemic vulnerability’ as interactions between processes of making authoritative knowledge about the environment and vulnerabilization, to understand how fisher needs become silenced. Bridel gratefully welcomes any comments or feedback, especially on this analysis and the utility of epistemic vulnerability as a conceptual device.

Anna Bridel is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

April 10, 2024 | Sensing Landscapes, Hidden violence, and Atmospheres of Control

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024

4:00-5:30 PM

Humanities 1, Room 210

Join Science & Justice Affiliate Lindsey Dillon (Sociology), for a roundtable discussion with Visiting Scholar Katherine Chandler and UC Davis faculty guests Caren Kaplan (American Studies) and Javier Arbona (American Studies, Design). We will gather in Humanities 1 Room, 210. Due to the sensitive nature of the discussion, Zoom will not be available.

Katherine Chandler, Caren Kaplan, and Javier Arbona discuss current research, examining how wartime, colonial and police violence seeps into everyday life by studying data, drone aircraft, explosions, airpower and traffic regulations. Their work grounds and situates discussions of the global public sphere and geopolitical control in specific landscapes and relationships, including connections to the Bay Area.

Lindsey Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

Kate Chandler is associate professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research studies how technology and media create infrastructures that reinforce, challenge and transform the nation state and a global public. She is the author of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers, 2023). Her second book, Drone Publics, examines the international networks that promote drone innovation in Africa, asking how the militaristic origins of drone aircraft are refashioned through commercial projects, humanitarianism and development.

Javier Arbona is an Assistant Professor with a dual appointment in American Studies and Design at UC Davis, and affiliations with Graduate Groups in Cultural Studies, Geography, and Community Development. At Davis he coordinates the Critical Military, Security, and Policing Studies research cluster. Explosivity: Following the Remains Across Landscapes is forthcoming (Minnesota, 2025). The book is an experimental archive of racialized exposures to explosive risks as found throughout landscapes of the San Francisco Bay Area since the arrival of nitroglycerin in 1866. Arbona co-founded Demilit, an experimental landscape collective that produces sound, fiction, and critical essays for arts and culture venues.

Caren Kaplan is Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Her recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).

Tuesday, May 21 | Informational Meeting: Developing a Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network

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Tuesday, May 21, 2024

9:00-10:00 AM PT

Zoom Only (registration)

Are you interested in centering support for Indigenous peoples’ right to govern health research? The UCSC American Indian Resource Center and the Science & Justice Research Center invite you to attend an Informational Meeting!

ABOUT CIHSN

Supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the leadership teams of the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research and Training Program (Indigenous STS) at the University of Alberta (UofA) and the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) are working to address increasing calls to support Indigenous peoples’ right to govern health research by developing the Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network (CIHSN). CIHSN supports the RWJF’s aligned goal to decolonize health systems. In line with leading Indigenous Studies scholars (and in the University of Alberta Indigenous Strategic Plan), CIHSN defines decolonization as the restoration of Indigenous land, life, and relations appropriated or disrupted by colonialism. While no single project can undo the massive upheavals of colonialism, our project uses decolonial thinking and practice to build and restore Indigenous expertise and leadership in, and governance of, health research.

How to Get Involved in CIHSN

The leadership teams at UofA Indigenous STS and UCSC SJRC are recruiting a graduate student who is interested in strengthening partnerships with the University of Alberta, Edmonton and UCSC, and developing a network for critical Indigenous health studies. Around the theme of problems of the extraction of power, not theorizing colonial violence, topics include but are not limited to: medical genomics, ecological health perspectives (fire, water, food), and Indigenous health systems (botanical knowledge, sport/culture).

The graduate student researcher will: 1) assist in developing and organizing a weeklong visit to the University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada including a Symposium; 2) help implement activities during the visit; 3) assist in developing a literature review on critical Indigenous health research, sovereignty, and governance; 4) and work with the team to produce a final end-of visit report on activities including plans of future in-person gatherings.

Team meetings are conducted remotely. Over the course of the three year grant, research teams will come together in-person at both UofA and UCSC. Students participating in Summer 2024 should be available to be in-person in Edmonton, Canada from August 19-23, 2024. Students participating in Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 should be available to be in-person in Santa Clara, California from February 24-28, 2025. Travel and lodging expenses will be covered.

To apply: review the Call for Graduate Student Researcher.

For more information: visit the project website at https://indigenoussts.com/cihsn/. 

For questions, contact scijust@ucsc.edu.

CIHSN LEADERSHIP

Jessica Kolopenuk (Cree, Peguis First Nation) is an Assistant Professor and Alberta Health Services Research Chair in Indigenous Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society in the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta.

James Doucet-Battle is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.