The Center for Emerging Worlds, The Center for Cultural Studies and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences present a book talk with TJ Demos.
HAVC professor and influential art and visual culture historian critic TJ Demos will present from his new book, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.
September 28 | 5:30 pm | Humanities 1, RM 210
Katherine (Kate) Weatherford Darling is a sociologist working across the boundaries of the sociology of health, illness and disability, and feminist science studies. Kate is currently a Doctoral Candidate at UC San Francisco. She first joined the Science and Justice Research Center as a Visiting Scholar and a Graduate Student Researcher in 2015 and worked with the SJRC team to plan the Just Data? conference held May 2016 at UCSC.
Kate cares about bringing social justice and health inequalities to the center of discussions about the ethics and politics of biomedicine. Her research examines how chronic illness and complex disease are transformed by biomedical science and health policy in the U.S. In her forthcoming dissertation (2016), she asks what it means for HIV to be defined, managed and experienced as a chronic illness in U.S. healthcare and policy. She ethnographically traces how people living with HIV and their healthcare providers are navigating biomedical bureaucracies, grappling with new insurance markets and attempting to control healthcare costs. Adele Clarke, Janet Shim, Howard Pinderhughes and Jenny Reardon serve on her dissertation committee. She will be in residence at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland in Winter 2017 to extend her research into a book project.
Kate began her training in at UC Berkeley in the College of Natural Resources, where she studied Molecular Environmental Biology and volunteered at a feminist health clinic. She studied abroad in Santiago, Chile and then investigated the health effects of air pollution in New York City at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health.
While a graduate student, she collaborated on research projects at UCSF and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Through these collaborations, she has examined concepts of race/ethnicity in gene-environment interaction research, the history of race in genetics after World War II, and new frameworks for examining implicated values in biomedical research. Information on her current papers and upcoming presentations are available on academia.edu and Twitter @kwdetal.
Kate grew up in Santa Cruz County and lives in San Francisco with her family. She enjoys swimming, hiking, camping, gardening and making beer. Her parents are very proud UCSC alumni.
Oct 22 – 23 | Multiple times and locations
2016 marks 30 years of disability and cinema. Superfest, the world’s longest running disability film festival, celebrates disability as a creative force in cinema and culture. It features films with fresh ideas and images that inspire thought and meaningful conversation. Times and locations for the 2016 film selections can be found here.
Twenty anthropologists and ethnographers from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America will discuss new forms of public and private governance over seeds and soils, how these influence farmers engagement, and how do citizens mobilize to regain control over the seeds and soils on which their daily sustenance, their health and well-being depend.
By considering the relationship of farmers with the living things of soil and seeds together with their relationship to different forms of national and international policy-making, anthropologists engage this comprehensive approach to examine how environmental change is co-created through policies and practices. They will share the outcome of their recent discussions in this roundtable.
Contemporary ways of cultivating and agricultural development strategies are framed by the marketplace: typically today such measures are privatized, corporate, and profit driven, and thus they frequently neglect or even devalue local survival strategies among the world’s poorest. Please join in this public panel that will address the ways in which states and corporations govern living objects that shape peoples’ sustenance, determine the survival of mankind, and the quality of life which have fueled the mobilization of citizens worldwide. Anthropologists have started to analyze the discourses and strategies of farmers, foodies and environmentalists who try to shed the status of consumer, stakeholder or expert and reclaim the status of citizens and of food sovereignty instead of food security. How is the issue of citizenship, the right to food, the claim to be protected from fake food and seeds reformulated? How do these notions impact on decision-making, and the notion/perception of economic democracy?
Co-sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, UCSC Blum Center, Science and Justice Research Center, and UCSC Dept. of Anthropology.
September 13 | 2:00-4:30pm | Louden Nelson Community Center, room 1
12PM-1:30PM | Humanities 1, rm 210
Paul N. Edwards (Professor, School of Information and Department of History, University of Michigan) will present ‘Afterworld: Technosphere, Anthropocene, Geostory’. Edwards’ current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, the history of climate science, and other large-scale information infrastructures. Edwards is the author most recently of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010). See more.
12:35PM-1:50PM SFSU, Humanities 119
On October 19th S&J Assistant Director, Katherine Weatherford Darling, will present on “Chronic Crisis: Managing HIV as a Chronic Condition in Biomedicalized Bureaucracies”. And on November 2nd S&J Faculty Affiliate and Feminist Science Studies Assistant Professor, Kristina Lyons will present on “Evidentiary Ecologies and Variations of Justice: Science & Nature in Times of War and Peace”.
Managing big biodata and health equity were some of the hot issues debated at Just Data? Justice, Knowledge and Care in an Age of Precision Medicine, a collaborative meeting to shape the science and justice agenda in the age precision medicine.
Read the full story here.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016 | 4:00-6:00PM | Oakes College Mural Room
In an e
ra of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, contemporary writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.
Selected Readings: Emergent Ecologies: Chapters 5 6 7
Eben Kirksey is a permanent faculty member in Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and a Visiting Research Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon and the author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power, both also published by Duke University Press.
The “Just Data?” meeting at UCSC aims to broaden the public discussion about big data and health from ethical and legal questions about privacy and informed consent to more fundamental questions about the right and just constitution of care, trust, and knowledge in an age of biomedical data. This agenda-setting workshop will gather international leaders in genomics, health and informatics, civil rights, bioethics, indigenous rights, science policy and the social study of health and medicine. The meeting will be broken into two phases: 1) Discussion of critical challenges, problems and promises; 2) Collaborative work to set the science and justice agenda of big biodata and precision medicine.
For full event and registration information, please visit: https://justdataucsc.wordpress.com/
Co-Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the NHGRI program of the NIH, the UC North Bioethics Collaboratory, and the UCSC Genomics Institute.
May 18-19 | Alumni Room, University Center, UC Santa Cruz