This year the California STS Network Retreat is returning to NatureBridge, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The retreat will be hosted by the UC Davis STS department and will be held from 5:00 PM on May 23rd – 3:00 PM on May 25th.
The STS Retreat is an opportunity to meet up with a mixture of faculty, postdocs and graduate students interested and working in STS from across California. Sessions will be a mixture of mind-stretching STS related workshops, professionalisation workshops, and ‘theory walks’ in the beautiful headland landscape. Sessions are designed to provide attendees with the opportunity to get to know fellow scholars in a relaxed environment.
The cost is $200 including food and accommodation in bunk rooms. Transport to and from is not included.
If you have any questions or plan to attend the retreat, please email Bex Jones, UC Davis graduate student, at rljones@ucdavis.edu. Spaces will only be reserved and confirmed upon payment.
Join The UCSC Humanities Institute for a one-day conference, “Critical Imagination in Crisis Times,” featuring presentations by:
Iain Chambers, Former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Oriental University, Naples
Paul Gilroy, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, University College, London
Vron Ware, Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science
UC Santa Cruz faculty participants include: Jim Clifford (Emeritus Professor, History of Consciousness) Chris Connery (Professor, Literature), Vilashini Cooppan (Professor, Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies), Isaac Julien (Distinguished Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), Mark Nash (Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), María Puig de la Bellacasa (Professor, History of Consciousness).
Conference Program:
2:00-2:15 pm Conference Introduction: Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
2:15-3:15 pm Iain Chambers, “From Kassel to Gaza: Art and Critical Testimony” (Moderator, Chris Connery)
3:30-4:30 pm Vron Ware, “Letting the Land Speak” (Moderator, María Puig de la Bellacasa)
4:45-5:45 pm Paul Gilroy, “Political Eschatologies of Mismanaged Decline” (Moderator, Jim Clifford)
5:45-6:30 pm Plenary Discussion: Moderators, Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
Light refreshments will be served throughout the afternoon. The conference will also be live-streamed. Follow this link to join online. Conference presented by Moving Image Lab, The Humanities Institute, and the Center for Cultural Studies. Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department.
Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, Orientale, and is now an independent researcher. Amongst his recent publications are Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road at documenta 15. He writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto.
Paul Gilroy was born in the East End of London in 1956. He is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at University College London where he was founding director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation. Gilroy was previously Professor of American and English at King’s College London, Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College London (1995-1999). He holds honorary doctorates from Goldsmiths College, Sussex University, the University of Liege, the University of Copenhagen, Oxford University and the University of St. Andrews. He is an honorary Fellow of Sussex University and of King’s College, London. In 2014, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2018 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded Norway’s Holberg Prize in 2019. He writes widely on Art, Music, Literature and Politics. His publications include: Darker than Blue: On The Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Cultures (2010), Black Britain: A Pictorial History (2007), After Empire:Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2005).
Vron Ware is a London-based writer and photographer, having previously taught geography, sociology and gender studies at universities in the UK and the US. She has written several books on the politics of gender and race, colonial history, national identity, ecological thought and the cultural heritage of war. She gave her first book talk for Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History at UC Santa Cruz in 1992. More recently she has published Return of a Native: Learning from the Land (2022) and co-authored England’s Military Heartland: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain (2025).
THI Image Credit: Isaac Julien, Western Union Series no. 1 (Cast No Shadow), 2007, Duratrans image in lightbox, Courtesy the artist.
Motivated by the attacks on sciences and scientists that we are seeing daily across fields of research and care for health, environment, climate, and more, we will gather in a pop-up event outside the Science and Engineering Library at noon, Friday, March 7, for a half hour of sharing information and experiences of damage to sciences and scientists across the country and here at UCSC. Spread the word among students and colleagues! Invite our administrators!
Donna Haraway and another speaker currently being arranged will briefly summarize some of the attacks and responses, and there will be time for others to share information and experiences. Bring home-made signs and lots of energy.
We will meet on Red Square just outside the Science and Engineering Library, a big, centrally located plaza. Organizing is taking off, and folks in PBSci are enthusiastic.
Another UCSC Stand Up for Science event is also being planned on the Coastal Science Campus, to raise awareness about the dismantling of federal science and especially to support the people of NOAA and the USGS, who are also on the CSC campus and who are losing jobs and labs right now. Ingrid Parker (imparker@ucsc.edu) can provide more information for anyone who wants to go to that event on the coast.
Having actions on both campuses makes it possible for everyone to come easily!
Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025)
In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
