Author Archives: Colleen Stone

Call for Participation

Summer 2022 | Undergraduate Student Researcher Opportunity (PAID)

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The Science & Justice Research Center and the Sociology Department are now accepting applications for a:

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow

This position and the research conducted is supported by a Faculty Research Grant provided by the Committee on Research from the University of California, Santa Cruz awarded to Principal Investigator James Doucet-Battle (Assistant Professor of Sociology) under the project titled, “Building Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies”. The opportunity was established to support summer research conducted by a UCSC Sociology Undergraduate Student.

In consultation with Colleen Stone at the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) and the PI (Doucet-Battle), one undergraduate student researcher enrolled in the UCSC Department of Sociology will be awarded $2000 to develop and implement the proposed research project.

The researcher will: 1) assist developing and conducting a local study that compiles campus literature, conduct interviews and collect updates from relevant parties and those leading campus efforts, and helps identify novel mechanisms for strengthening diversity in Sociology and STS in our department, 2) assist with organizing a one day workshop to brainstorm/develop a 1-year action plan to implement at UCSC. Responsibilities may also include: assisting with organizing, planning, and co-facilitating groups and assist with documentation, reviewing research relevant to proposed themes and areas of inquiry, preparing for and conducting interviews, transcription and data analysis, creating outreach materials and reports based on findings or events including infographics, charts, and diagrams, developing and contributing to available communication channels (ie: blog posts, news articles) for sharing research findings. 

More information about the “Building Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies” project can be found in the plan narrative for the UC-HBCU small grant initiative submitted in 2022 (pending award). 

The Student Must:

  • Be currently enrolled as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz and declared as a Sociology major (all Sociology majors may apply; enrollment during summer is not required).
  • Be interested in strengthening diversity and participation in sociology, science and justice, and science and technology studies.

The Ideal Candidate:

  • Will be interested in continuing the project beyond Summer 2022 and through the 2022-2023 academic year.
  • Will be interested in using this research as part of a senior thesis which could be overseen by Doucet-Battle. 
  • Will meet the eligibility requirements for the UC Santa Cruz Building Belonging Program.

The Student Will:

  • Be awarded $2000 [$1000 distributed at the beginning of summer and $1000 upon submitting an end-of-summer report. Equals a 25% effort (10 hrs/week) from July 1 – Sept 30 at $15 per hour].
  • Be offered a summer fellowship with the SJRC and listed on the Project’s webpage.
  • Adhere to IRB standards for working with human research subjects, if applicable.
  • Work closely with a team to develop clear goals, research methods, and intended outcomes with an outline of items to be completed over Summer 2022.
  • Submit an end-of-summer report of project status and/or research findings with suggestions for next steps.

To Apply:

By Monday, May 23 at 12 Noon, email (scijust@ucsc.edu) expressing interest, letting us know and sending the following:

  1. Your name, major, 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.
  5. Any ideas briefly describing potential research to be developed or completed over Summer 2022.

April 13, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Rachel O’Neill: the cultural politics of wellness

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Wednesday, April 13, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Humanities 2, room 450, OR Zoom Registration

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 – in our first post-covid hybrid event!

At this session, we will hear from Visiting Scholar and Wellcome Trust Fellow Rachel O’Neill, an Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics who is undertaking research on ‘wellness’ culture in the UK, with a particular focus on food and nutrition. Professor O’Neill is very much concerned with the cultural politics of wellness, including its gendered, classed, and racialised dimensions.

Professor O’Neill’s project examines the development of ‘wellness’ as a novel cultural formation and new commercial development in the UK, related to but distinct from various ‘healthy living’ trends that have come before it, and closely connected with the aspirational economies of social media. Ethnographic in character, fieldwork to date has involved attending a variety of wellness events, including food festivals, product launches, and industry conferences, alongside interviews with those who actively participate or are otherwise imbricated in this sphere, from ordinary consumers through to Instagram influencers, dietitians, health coaches, medics and clinicians. One of the project’s key concerns is to chart how the rise of wellness coincides – temporally but also ideologically – with the decline of welfare in the UK, not least as growing emphasis is placed on lifestyle change as a public health measure amid the ongoing wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr. Rachel O’Neill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, specialising in feminist media and cultural studies. Her research centers questions of subjectivity and inequality, primarily in the contemporary UK context but with attention to transnational circulations of culture and capital. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, published by Polity in 2018. Her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Theory, Men & Masculinities, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Theorizing Race After Race

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In the post-WWII, post-fascist, post-nationalist moment, a dominant story developed both within and outside the academy that ‘race’ had no meaning or value for understanding human biology. Despite the so-called end of ‘race’ over the last several decades, scholars continued to track the subtle manner in which racial thinking continued under the cover of culture, religion, population and ethnicity. Today, however we see an overt return to race, a return facilitated and mediated by novel forms of science and technology: genomics; machine learning; algorithmically driven media platforms. From David Reich’s New York Times op-ed arguing that there is a genetic basis to ‘race,’ to renewed interest in Charles Murray and The Bell Curve, several prominent public intellectuals have sought to buck what they perceive as the ‘politically correct dogma’ of race as a social construction. At the same time, members of the alt-right are embracing genomics research to support their claims for a ‘white ethnostate.’ ‘Theorizing Race after Race’ seeks to develop a framework for grappling with these reconfigurations of race after the supposedly ‘post-racial’ moment. Our goal is to understand how knowledge of the genome and ideas of human difference circulate, taking on different meanings across diverse historical-geographical contests.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press)

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press)

On March 12th 2019, Faculty and students of SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race group, and Jenny Reardon’s graduate seminar Sociology 260: Culture, Knowledge, Power discussed the overt return to race facilitated and mediated by novel forms of science and technology: genomics; machine learning; algorithmically driven media platforms with Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble.

On March 12th 2019, at the Kresge Town Hall, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble discussed her new book, Algorithms of Oppression, and the impact of marginalization and misrepresentation in commercial information platforms like Google search, as well as the implications for public information needs.

On January 19th 2020, SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and Herman Gray speak about race in America as interviewed by Chris Benner, Director of the Institute for Social Transformation, on KSQD.

On January 22nd 2020, the community joined us for a vibrant, stimulating, and challenging conversation on Racial Reconciliation and the Future of Race in America with Alondra Nelson (President, Social Sciences Research Council) and Herman Gray (Emeritus Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz) as moderated by Jenny Reardon (Professor of Sociology and Director of the Science & Justice Research Center, UC Santa Cruz).

On November 20th 2020, the first installment of a series of Dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism of the SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race working group launched on the UCHRI Foundry website! Check out Black Geographies of Quarantine: A Dialogue with Brandi Summers, Camilla Hawthorne, and Theresa Hice Fromille.

On September 22nd 2021, the second installment of a series of Dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism of the SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race working group launched on the UCHRI Foundry website! Check out Metrics, Enumeration, and the Politics of Knowledge in Estimating Racial Health Disparities in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, Co-Founder of The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project. In this dialogue, SJRC affiliate faculty and Assistant Professor of Sociology Jaimie Morse, with Film & Digital Media graduate student Dorothy Santos, and UCSC undergraduate student alum Aitanna Parker (as part of the TRAR Collective) are in dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, journalist and co-founder of The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project that operated from April 2020 to March 2021. The Atlantic is a major media outlet that produced alternative statistics on COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths during the first year of the pandemic, acting as a watchdog on the federal government’s data and reporting. The Atlantic was among the first media outlets to report racial health disparities through its COVID Racial Data Tracker before the CDC released data by race. In this dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, we explore the politics of knowledge production and how data can advance racial justice. What follows is an edited, condensed transcript of the dialogue.

On March 9th, 2022, the third installment of the series, Dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism, by UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center’s Theorizing Race after Race (TRAR) working group launched on the UCHRI Foundry website! In this third dialogue, Race, Contagion, and the Nation,1 which took place during August 2021, graduate students Lucia Vitale and Dennis Browe, and undergraduate Sophia Parizadeh, hosted a Zoom video panel with four scholars from around the Americas discussing how COVID has revivified or changed the existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. The panel was structured around six main questions, which Sophia asked and are marked in bold. Find more information about relevant contexts that shaped the topics discussed during the full dialogue.

These are part of an ongoing effort to develop frameworks for grappling with race and racism in this purportedly “post-racial” era. The COVID-19 pandemic provides particularly striking examples of the ways in which a post-racial moment has not yet come to pass, undermining a teleology already disrupted by the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the pandemic is replaying old narratives in new guises, we contend that it also affords a real-time global critique of narratives of race and science. Dynamics of COVID-19, and narratives about it, differ across national, state, city, and zip code lines. Placing these differing narratives in conversation, we suggest, disrupts 20th- and 21st-century epistemes that have clung strongly to narratives of race and pathology, race and biology. To make these differences manifest, and to develop a critique that attunes us to the racial justice questions of this moment, in this forum TRAR is curating a series of dialogues between scholars working in different geographic and political contexts about different themes at the intersection of COVID-19 and racism—from the politics of numbers and race-based data collection, to questions of race, space, surveillance, and quarantine.

Help us realize more dialogues! Consider donating to the SJRC to support our undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

Contact

Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology), Jenny Reardon (Sociology)

Graduate Researchers

Dennis Browe is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Dennis’ work lies at the intersections of medical sociology, science & technology studies (STS), public health, sexuality and gender studies, and feminist theory.

Theresa Hice Fromille is pursuing her PhD in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, with designated emphases in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies. Her dissertation project draws insights from Black Geographies and youth studies to investigate how Black youth from the United States construct their racial identities during international travel.

Dorothy R. Santos is a PhD student in the Department of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Dorothy is a Filipina American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics.

Lucia Vitale is a PhD student in the UC Santa Cruz Politics department and interdisciplinary global health scholar whose work explores the right to healthcare and fragmented primary health systems in Latin America. She uses citizenship to frame inclusion and exclusion practices occurring at both the transnational scale in global health policy, and at the national scale in social policy. You can read her most recent publication here: “COVID’s Co-Pathogenisis,” and find her on Twitter here: @luciavitale

Undergraduate Researchers

Joshua Harjes (Biology, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies)

Sophia Parizadeh is a College Ten affiliate, first-year undergraduate student majoring in Politics. She is interested in understanding systemic racial inequality and how it has been magnified within the pandemic. She hopes to shed light on other social justice issues and work towards forming solutions to today’s problems.

Alum Researchers

Aitanna Rene Parker, a Kresge affiliate, is a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz, with a BA in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and a BS in Technology and Information Management. She plans to use her technical abilities for social good. Aitanna is currently working with the Science & Justice Research Center, looking at datasets to understand how Covid is negatively impacting racialized populations in the United States. She wants to continue this work in graduate school.

Past Meetings

Theorizing Race After Race: Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon

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Over the past year SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR) research cluster has produced a series of dialogues grappling with COVID-19 and Racism. The first two dialogues, hosted on UCHRI’s Foundry site, cover Black geographies of quarantine and Metrics, enumeration, and the politics of knowledge.

During August 2021, TRAR student researchers hosted a third dialogue with four scholars from around the Americas discussing how COVID-19 has revivified or changed existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. This dialogue has been posted to The Foundry as Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon. 

Below you will find information about relevant contexts that shape the topics discussed during the full dialogue.

As a UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) report from 2020 summarizes, xenophobia and racism toward migrant workers around the world has grown since the start of the pandemic, attributed to fears of contagion and charging migrants with spreading the virus. For example, just as the U.S. ‘weaponized COVID against migrants’, the Dominican Republic’s long history of structural racism against Haitians as well  its and the U.S. governments’ deportations of Haitians during the past year threatened not only the general health of these migrants, but also caused a surge in COVID-19 cases in Haiti, already suffering from an unstable public health infrastructure.

Further intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic has been mass protests (both in the U.S. and internationally) against racism, white supremacy, and police brutality sparked, in part, by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in Spring 2020. Much discussion ensued about the need to understand white supremacy and racism as factors creating structural threats to health. As one open letter signed by over 1,200 U.S.-based public health professionals and community advocates put it, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”

In an effort to think through these developments, the dialogue ranged widely with panelists offering their uniquely situated takes. First, panelists were asked about the possibilities and impediments to the collection of COVID data based on ‘race’ in their countries (the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the United States). Next, they discussed strategies to move away from the biologizing and racializing discourse on pre-existing conditions and COVID-19 vulnerability that become tied to certain racial/ethnic groups. As one strategy, Dr. Saldaña made the case for treating social-structural forces, such as racism and poverty, as pre-existing conditions themselves. The discussion covered the utility of seeing whiteness as a race and the ways the power and privilege of whiteness becomes invisibilized even as it leads to harmful effects on others – for example, white U.S. citizens vacationing in Mexico without getting tested for COVID-19.

The dialogue further covered the function and role of borders, and understandings of the border as a racialized and carceral space of containment and expulsion. Panelists discussed how legacies of colonialism have gutted many national and transnational public health responses to the pandemic, thus failing to ensure adequate health and safety for those most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. Panelists concluded the dialogue by discussing ways the meaning of racial justice has shifted trans/nationally since early 2020, and how they are grappling with these developments as they move forward with their work and projects.

Contributors

Dennis Browe is a Sociology PhD student who works across medical sociology, science and technology studies, and feminist theory. He studies the rise of precision medicine in the U.S., as well as the field of biogerontology, which links questions of population aging to the biomolecular study of aging in cells and organisms.

Sophia Parizadeh is a second-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Politics. She is interested in understanding systemic racial inequality and how it has been magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic. She hopes to shed light on other social justice issues and work towards forming solutions to today’s problems.

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

Dr. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is an anthropologist at the Universidad de Guanajuato in central Mexico whose work includes scholarship on mestizaje and health patterns of non-communicable diseases and healthcare access. 

Dr. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is a Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC who works on science and technology studies, border identities, indigeneity, and citizenship regimes, especially related to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Pedro Valdez is affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, who currently holds a position at a national migration research institute.

Lucia Vitale is a PhD student in the UC Santa Cruz Politics department and interdisciplinary global health scholar whose work explores the right to healthcare (see “COVID’s Co-Pathogenisis”). She uses citizenship to frame inclusion/exclusion practices occurring at both the transnational scale in global health policy, and at the national scale in social policy. You can find her on twitter.

February 23, 2022 | Ruha Benjamin: 38th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Professor of African American studies and founding director of Princeton University’s Ida B.Wells JUST Data Lab, Ruha Benjamin, will speak at the 38th annual UCSC Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation, which will take place on Wednesday, February 23, at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public; those who wish to attend the convocation may register in advance.

Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab and author of two books, People’s Science and Race After Technology, and editor of Captivating Technology. Benjamin is currently working on a fourth book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want and writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.

More in this campus news article: Distinguished sociologist and founding director of Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab to headline MLK Convocation.

Book cover for Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (2022)

Book Release! Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (Oxford University Press, 2022)

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About the Book

Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (2022)

People have always sought medical care that is tailored to every individual patient. Alongside with the historical development of institutions of care, the vision of personal and ‘holistic’ care persisted. Patient-centred medicine, interpersonal communication and shared decision making have become central to medical practice and services.

This evolving vision of ‘personalized medicine’ is in the forefront of medicine, creating debates among ethicists, philosophers and sociologists of medicine about the nature of disease and the definition of wellness, the impact on the daily life of patients, as well as its implications on low-income countries. Is increased ‘precision’ also an improvement on the personal aspects of care or erosion of privacy? Do ‘precise’ and ‘personalized’ approach marginalize public health, and can this care be personalized without attention to culture, economy and society?

The book provides a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary discussion of the ethos and ethics of precision/personal medicine, involving scientists who have shaped the field, in dialogue with ethicists, social scientists and philosophers of science. The contributing scholars come from all over the world and from different cultural backgrounds providing reflective perspectives of history of ideas, critical theory and technology assessment, together with the actual work done by pioneers in the field. It explores issues such as global justice, gender, public health, pharmaceutical industry, international law and religion, and explores themes discussed in relation to personalized medicine such as new-born screening and disorders of consciousness.

This book will be of interest to academicians in bioethics, history of medicine, social sciences of medicine as well as general educated readers.

About the Authors

Edited by Y. Michael Barilan, Margherita Brusa, and Aaron Ciechanover with contribution by Professor of Sociology and SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon from their participation in the workshop, “The Revolution of Personalized Medicine: Are We Going to Cure All Diseases and at What Price?,” that took place April 8-9, 2019 in Vatican City.

Read more in this campus news article: Jenny Reardon participates in Vatican workshop on personalized medicine.

Book launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

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About the Book

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University
Press, 2021)

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano’s holographic art, Esdras Parra’s and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry, Mattie Brice’s digital games, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations

About the Author

micha cárdenas is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as coauthor of Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs and The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities.

February 23, 2022 | Global divisions of health: bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

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 hear from one of our visiting scholars, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda in a talk titled, “Global divisions of health; bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America.”

This project asks how scientific and non-scientific communities of knowledge production in Latin America have historically perceived ethical concerns regarding human genome editing and other reproductive technologies (MSRTs). The project explores how current frameworks, concerns and discourses in the United States and Europe engage with (or contradict) those in Latin America. Through a series of seminars, workshops and regional meetings /in-depth interviews with some key stakeholders (geneticists, legislators, academics), the project explores the implications of a geographical and discursive distance between those places where bioethical frameworks are produced (global north) and those where the actual practice of human genome editing (research and trials) could be potentially happening.

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, and focuses on the social determinants of health, genomics and postgenomics. She is currently exploring bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing and stem cell research in Latin America.

February 09, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Melissa Eitzel

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Wednesday, February 09, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

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 hear from one of our remote visiting scholars, Melissa Eitzel Solera, now with the Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis.  Melissa will give us a brief report on the achievements from the work at SJRC as an NSF Science, Education, and Engineering for Sustainability postdoctoral scholar, some highlights of new collaborative projects at Davis, and then will workshop papers associated with the recently-published Modeler’s Manifesto.

February 07, 2022 | Book Launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

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Monday, February 07, 2022

5:00 PM

To celebrate the launch of micha cárdenas’ new book, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, forthcoming from Duke University Press, the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies along with Performance, Play and Design will host a book launch event on Monday, February 7th at the Cowell Provost house at 5:00PM with Gerald Casel and Nick Mitchell as respondents!

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations.

More about the book can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2022/01/03/book-poetic-operations-cardenas/