Center Research
The Pandemicene Project: Re-worlding Towards Justice
How do we create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture, in the middle of a viral pandemic, and a pandemic of social inequality and racial discrimination that has sparked global unrest? The Pandemicene Project begins from the premise that creating trust-worthy knowledge that can foster a more just world requires attending to both COVID-19 pandemic and the deep inequalities and fissures in the polity that this pandemic has laid bare. It also requires attending both to what is going on locally (e.g., from the shelter-in-place locations of our students), while drawing on the power and insights of global networks. In this project, UCSC faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduates students have worked together to interview members of their communities and the Science & Justice network about scholarly and activist responses to this critical historical moment. The project has produced a podcast series for our campus radio station (KZSC 88.1 FM) and Spotify, and expanded the SJRC blog series. Ultimately, through engaging our communities—both locally and globally—we aim 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. If you would like to take part in or contribute to this project, email Jenny Reardon and/or Colleen Stone. Learn more.
Incarcerated Care: Unjustly Exposed + Amplifying Santa Cruz Community Voices on Health & Incarceration
Incarcerated Care is amplifying voices on health and incarceration by producing an interactive documentary website on COVID-19 in prisons and jails overseen by Film & Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel who, with SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and Psychology graduate student Roxy Davis, also piloted a community initiated investigation into the conditions of health care in the Santa Cruz County jails after a series of preventable deaths. The 2019 preliminary study (funded by the UCSC Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise and Participatory Governance) involved 14 semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people and service providers in community health agencies. Undergraduate Priyanka Kulkarni (Sociology, Oakes) wrote a thesis on the project in Spring 2020 overseen by SJRC affiliate and Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle. Learn more.
Queer Ecologies Research Cluster
The Queer Ecologies research cluster investigates how sexuality and concepts of nature have been historically linked. In particular, they are interested in how evolutionary and ecological science has informed what is “natural” and how we use this information to delineate certain sexual behaviors as normal or aberrant. Queer Ecologies seeks to examine the historical making of the natural as it relates to sexuality while communicating the overwhelming diversity of sex and gender in biology. For more information on this cluster, visit the Queer Ecology webpage and contact Dennis Browe.
Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine
The engagements that comprise the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” interrogate the intersections among race, empire, and the environment, and their significance in the theory, practice, and structure of American biomedicine. These engagements consist of a series of public lectures, scholarly talks, and a regular interdisciplinary reading and discussion group. 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. For more information on this cluster, visit the project website and contact Jennifer Derr or Jenny Reardon.
Science Feminist Anti-Racist Equity (FARE) Collective
Science FARE (Feminist, Anti-racist, Equity) is a collective to stand up for truth and justice. We advocate robust science, evidence based politics, and the integration up stream of justice goals in science and technology infrastructure. Our social and natural contracts are broken, and so is the link between them. For more information on this cluster, contact Jenny Reardon.
Telling the Truth: Objectivity & Justice Research Cluster
The Objectivity & Justice cluster critically examines what the terms fact, truth, and reality signal to each of us in relations to our own research and disciplines since the inauguration of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. At the same time that it is of utmost importance that facts, truth, and reality be asserted to counter the normalization of lies and fake news used to obscure the truth and manipulate the public, large bodies of scholarship showing the non-innocent and often times harmful use of these terms in ways that collude with the forces of power, including colonialism, racism, militarism, etc. We anticipate that these terms will spark a variety of different associations depending on our fields of study and warmly welcome undergraduates, graduates, and faculty. For more information on this cluster, contact Karen Barad or email ObjectivityAndJustice@ucsc.edu.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Experiments in Participatory Data Science and Just Modelling
Melissa Viola Eitzel Solera is a graduate of the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program at UC Berkeley (with dissertation work in Statistical Ecology) whose research goal is to improve the sustainability of Californian and global ecosystems using sophisticated data synthesis techniques that facilitate broad public engagement.
Working with Jenny Reardon (UC Santa Cruz Professor of Sociology and SJRC Director) and Ken Wilson (The Muonde Trust), Dr. Eitzel Solera led the NSF-funded project, “Understanding Resilience in a Complex Coupled Human-Natural System: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Information and Community-Based Action Research,” involving a 35-year collaborative research project in rural Zimbabwe run by The Muonde Trust. Together with the community research team, they are developing methods of modeling the resilience of their system and synthesizing their long-term data to answer pressing concerns about sustainable environmental management. They are also making theoretical and practical contributions to more just modeling practices in an age of “big data.”
Refer to A modeler’s manifesto: Synthesizing modeling best practices with social science frameworks to support critical approaches to data science as published in Rio Journal and Autoethnographic assessment of a manifesto for more trustworthy, relevant, and just models published in Environmental Modelling & Software on Science Direct.
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine | UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
Under the mentorship of Karen Barad (Professor of Feminist Studies), Cleo A Woelfle-Erskine, a graduate of the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley whose work transforms cultures of water use grounded in waste, ignorance, and apathy into new water cultures rooted in renewed connections to local water sources and cycles, was awarded a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. His project is entitled Fish Cultures: indigenous, queer, and trans potentials in aquatic ecology.
Cleo is an ecologist, hydrologist, writer, and scholar of water working to explore queer, transgender, and decolonial possibilities for ecological science. In July 2017, he joined the faculty of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle as the assistant professor of equity and environmental justice.