January 23, 2025 | Book Celebration The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

Wednesday, January 23, 2025

4:00-6:00 PM

Rachel Carson College, Red Room

Join Science & Justice scholars together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the Black Geographies Lab, and Sociology Department to celebrate the The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).

About The Black Geographic

The Black Geographic
Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023)

Co-edited by S&J affiliate Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.

The Black Geographic  is available at Duke University Press.

Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne

January 15, 2025 | Potluck

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

4:00-6:00pm

304 Dickens Way, Santa Cruz (sign-up to bring a dish to share)

SJRC invites you to gather over food and drink and to catch up more with everyone, and to hear from folks where their cares lie at the moment—this moment, with so many challenges—old and new.  How do we support each other, inspire each other, create anew out of the rubble of what has been and now is unfolding?

December 4, 2024 | The Lichen Walk with A. Laurie Palmer

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

3:00pm

Meet in front of Humanities 1

A not to miss opportunity to explore the UC Santa Cruz Campus, on and off the footpaths with A. Laurie Palmer!

As a conceptual frame to slow and redirect attention, The Lichen Museum invites you to zero in on inhabitants of slowed, horizontal, colorful and complex worlds while imagining radical possibilities for human being and relating. This walk invites participants to bend down and look closely at inhabitants of the planet who are already doing things differently as part of the process of imagining alternate futures for the rest of us.

A. Laurie Palmer writes, makes art, and teaches art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research-based work focuses on undoing and re-crafting human practices of relating with the material world towards building just, livable, and joyful social and environmental relations. Her most recent book, The Lichen Museum, explores lichens’ role as an anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor. Palmer also works in collaboration with activist groups in solidarity across socioeconomic and racial difference in campaigns that employ imagination and art to resist and interrupt social and environmental injustice. Palmer collaborated with the art collective Haha for twenty years on site-based installation projects, and was a founding member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project (CTJM) from 2010 to 2015 . The work of CTJM contributed to a broad-based campaign that won the first municipal Reparations for police violence in the US. After being based in Chicago for 30 years, Palmer moved to Santa Cruz in 2015 where she helped start the new Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program at UCSC, an innovative, student-centered, graduate program focusing on environmental and social
justice.

This walk is part of the earth ecologies x technoscience series in co-sponsorship with the History of Consciousness Department.

November 22, 2024 | UCSC-HBCU Pathways Research Symposium

Friday, November 22, 2024

2:00 – 4:00 pm PST

Zoom (Registration)

Join us for a virtual symposium featuring undergraduate research presentations from UC Santa Cruz, North Carolina A&T State University, and Howard University. This symposium will be hosted on Friday, November 22 from 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM PST. Come celebrate the cross-institutional connections and scholastic achievements of our talented cohort of students. Please register in advance for this event: bit.ly/UCSCHBCU

Thank you to our partners, North Carolina A&T State University and the UCSC Division of Graduate Studies, for your collaboration.

Co-sponsored with the Division of Graduate Studies and the Office of African, Black, and Caribbean (ABC) Student Success

November 20, 2024 | Giving Day: Building Just Genomics with HBCUs

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

12:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Campaign Page (live day-of)

Join the Science & Justice Research Center with the Division of Graduate Studies and the Office of African, Black, Caribbean Student Success at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, November 20th, 2024 for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help support the next cohort of student researchers by giving through the Experience Sciences at HBCUs: Building Just Genomics with HBCUs campaign. Incentives to give include matching funds: let us know if you are interested in matching funds.

Together, we are building intentional collaborations with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in order to improve the training and development of future scientific leaders. Currently, we are working with North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCATSU) to provide UCSC and NCATSU undergraduate and graduate students and faculty with important opportunities to gain valuable professional development experiences in the pursuit of research, community, and knowledge exchange.

SJRC Co-Director James Doucet-Battle with studentsLast year, through a grant secured by the Graduate Division from the University of California, SJRC Co-Director James Doucet-Battle seeded a research-focused collaboration with Dr. Joseph Graves, Jr. and Dr. Checo Rorie of Biological Sciences at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCATSU). In June 2024, the grant enabled Doucet-Battle to bring 8 undergraduate STEM students, 2 graduate STEM students, and three ABC staff to NCATSU for one-week. Participants learned about the history of Black science at HBCUs, experienced the environment at NCATSU, participated in research collaborations, and connected with UCSC and NCATSU students and faculty. Students not only found the experience productive and challenging, they urged us to find ways of making this a two-week trip in the future, even offering to help raise funds and recruit future applicants. To support these efforts, we have launched this Giving Day 2024 campaign and are plotting Summers 2025 and 2026.

With your support, we can: 

  • Expand this project to more HBCUs and more academic disciplines.
  • Invite more students and faculty to participate.
  • Extend the program schedule.
  • Provide continuity, mentorship, and graded levels of expertise supportive of UCSC / NCATSU student acculturation and retention.
  • Develop more mechanisms for co-teaching and learning exchanges.

We’d love to maximize the impact of this campaign by getting as many individual donors as possible during the following time slots. This will help us compete for additional funds by winning challenges. Even just a few dollars helps!

  • Early Riser: 7 – 8 AM
  • Mid-day Motivator: 12 – 2 PM
  • Mad Dash: 6 – 8 PM
  • Final Frenzy: All Day

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

January 27, 2025 | SNU in the World Program Visit

The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at Seoul National University is a university-led and government-funded initiative to train undergraduate students to be globally engaged scholars and leaders. The SNU in the World Program with the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at UC Santa Cruz is coordinated through the Science & Justice Research Center’s Visiting Scholar Program with Doogab Yi, Associate Professor of Science Studies at Seoul National University (https://bit.ly/2P9b7Wi). The SNU in the World Program at UC Santa Cruz is one of five other programs selected for funding and focuses on Innovation, Science and Justice. Other SNU Programs include visits to Washington DC (public policy), Japan (sustainable development), and Australia (climate crisis).

From January 27 through February 07, 2025, the SJRC will host Professor Doogab Yi, graduate students and undergraduate students for two weeks.

Select in-person lectures and activities will allow for a few additional guests to join. Please express interest in these events in this Google Form. As you fill this out, you can refer to the Winter 2025 Schedule and Participant Biographies.

For additional information or to get involved, contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) and Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).

Doogab Yi currently works on several projects related to the development of science and technology within the context of capitalism, such as the history of biotechnology, the relationship between science and the law, and the emergence of the technologies of the 24/7 self. He teaches courses in the history of modern science, science and the law, and environmental history.

February 19, 2025 | GIVE IT A SHOT: DOCUMENTARY

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

4:00-6:00pm

Online

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 watch a portion of a new documentary, Give it a Shot, by filmmaker Vaishali Sinha. Madhavi Murty (Associate Professor of Sociology) will provide comments.

Vaishali Sinha produced and directed the award-winning feature documentaries, MADE IN INDIA (PBS, Kanopy) and ASK THE SEXPERT (PBS World, Netflix India, Amazon Prime).

TBD Winter 2025 | Refiguring Worlds Through Local Voices? Epistemic Vulnerability in a Time of Climate Change in Kerala, India

TO BE SCHEDULED

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 23, 2025 | TechnoScience Improv

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

12:15-2:00pm

Humanities 1, Room 210

This roundtable improv brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations. Rather than structured around formal talks, each conversation will start with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology.

Convener:

Dimitris Papadopoulos

Participants:

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.

James Doucet-Battle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor in the History Department.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Warren Sack is Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.

Kriti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Matt Sparke is Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

This talk is part of the earth ecologies x technoscience series in co-sponsorship with the History of Consciousness Department.