Author Archives: Colleen Stone

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 4: Gina Barba with Sharon Daniel

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The Pandemicene Podcast aims 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.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November 8th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

Welcome to the Pandemicene Podcast. Today we share a conversation with Professor Sharon Daniel, whose work has dramatically shifted in response to the pandemic.  Sharon Daniel is a professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC. In addition to teaching at the university, Daniel also does research on various social justice issues in order to create interactive websites and other media projects for the general public. Her current work focuses on the criminal justice system and Indigenous communities in Alaska. She strives to give a platform to those historically marginalized. Daniel talks to us about what incarceration during the pandemic looks like and shares details on her newest project – Exposed – documenting COVID-19 in prisons and jails around the country. Visit the newly launched project site at unjustlyexposed.com!

Guest Bio:

Sharon Daniel is a Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, and a media artist who produces interactive and participatory documentaries focused on issues of social, economic, environmental and criminal justice. She builds online archives and interfaces that make the stories of marginalized and disenfranchised communities available across social, cultural and economic boundaries. Daniel’s most recent project – Exposed – documents the ravaging spread of COVID-19 through jails and prisons in the U.S. Detailed descriptions of Daniel’s works can be found at http://sharondaniel.net.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

CITRIS logo

SJTP concludes comparative cross-campus review of graduate curriculum that make questions of gender and social justice fundamental to STEM training

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With colleagues at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute (FRI) and the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center concluded a seed fund grant awarded in 2019 from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at the University of California under “2019-0112: Comparative Analysis of Interdisciplinary Training for STEM Scholars”.

More at: UC Santa Cruz researchers win four CITRIS seed funding awards

Summary

This project set out to compare two graduate training programs that center issues of gender, race, and social justice as fundamental to science training in STEM curriculums. Our comparison centered around the introductory seminars to the training programs taught during Winter 2020 by Dr. Kalindi Vora (UCD) and Dr. Jenny Reardon (UCSC).

FRI gathered data using field notes and a retrospective survey to analyze Seminar participants’ experiences. Notes, taken by the Graduate Student Researcher Maya Cruz, consisted of observations and analysis of seminar modules, discussions, and group activities. SJRC also gathered data through a retrospective participant survey, and Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe conducted an interview with SJRC’s Founding Director Jenny Reardon about the evolution of the Training Program and her experience teaching the introductory seminar. Due to IRB delays and campus disruptions, SJRC did not gather Seminar field notes. Both surveys asked participants to reflect on their learned capacity to recognize power and injustice in research environments; to intervene in research cultures and enact change-oriented research and practice; how their understandings of science and justice shifted throughout the course; and their experiences of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in their fields. GSRs Browe and Cruz met over Summer 2020 to compare findings and share the results with the team for discussion.

While each Seminar was taught through the unique lens of FRI and SJRC, overall they offered the same types of tools, models, and skillsets for guiding STEM graduate students through thinking about issues of gender, race, and justice in their work and fields. They covered topics such as the politics of doing science; critically interrogating how knowledge gets produced and claims to objectivity and neutrality; and thinking about intersectionality, race, and the promises and pitfalls of anti-racist technoscience. Additionally, we found that enrolling graduate students from a wide range of disciplines is key to fostering generative conversation. FRI enrolled students from eight disciplines and SJRC enrolled students from six. Building trust within the Seminar communities was necessary to being able to think through the hard questions that often lay implicit within the students’ scientific fields. Both Seminars also found it pedagogically effective to invite relevant postdocs, visiting scholars, and faculty as module participants and discussion leaders. Both Seminars focused on experiential learning through hands-on projects. The culmination of both classes was a final project that effectively guided students to apply a feminist and justice-oriented lens to their fields. At SJRC, this took the form of a collaborative project, while at FRI, this took the form of instructional design. 

Based on our findings, FRI and SJRC will continue to proactively recruit more science and engineering graduate students into their seminars. Further, both FRI and SJRC recognize the pedagogical importance of linking the course syllabus assignments to the events and projects happening concurrently at the Institute/Center during the academic year. Both will continue to build these connections within each respective Institute/Center, while also developing further collaborations between the campuses. Specifically, FRI and SJRC plan to host a cross-campus graduate student event over Zoom later this year, consisting of a roundtable discussion and manifesto writing workshop.

Website Launch! Unjustly Exposed – interactive documentary on COVID in prisons and jails

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UCSC Film and Digital Media Professor and Science & Justice Affiliate Sharon Daniel launches Unjustly Exposed (https://www.unjustlyexposed.com/), an interactive documentary on COVID in prisons and jails.

About Exposed

black with white text of project description and credits

Unjustly Exposed – an interactive documentary on COVID in prisons and jails

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over 2 million people, in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, their families, and staff.

EXPOSED is comprised of quotes, audio clips, and statistics from online publications and broadcasts that are assembled to create a cumulative public record and evolving social history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. Each quote is linked to its original source.

EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of suffering inside carceral spaces across the US as the virus continues to spread. The content is organized chronologically, along an interactive timeline, that on each day, provides abundant testimony to the trauma and precarity that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. For example, on July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made primarily by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardships. Unfortunately, their words are all we have access to. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted and the use of solitary confinement has expanded by orders of magnitude. The design of the interface, a monochrome image-less screen space that allows viewers to step through or select from thousands of ‘headline-style’ text sequences and audio clips, reflects the sense of confinement — the fragmentary and ephemeral forms of contact prisoners have with the outside — and signals that the injustice they collectively endure is structural.

Exposed Credits

By: Sharon Daniel
Design and Programming by: Erik Loyer
Research Assistant: Brian Myers
Research Interns: Alyssa Brouwer, Nailea Castillo, Brandon Castro, Anysia Deak, Srijeeta Islam, Jacinto Salz, Charlotte Schultz

The quotes, audio clips and statistics included in EXPOSED are excerpts from a wide array of online publications and broadcasts. All excerpts are linked in the interface to the original source.

Special thanks to Timothy James Young, Wayne La Mar Palmer and Ty Zimmerschied for their contributions.

Data Sources

UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project
The COVID Prison Project
The Marshall Project State-by-State Look at Coronavirus in Prisons
Vera Institute of Justice

Developed with Stepworks

This project has been supported in part by the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 3: Maryam Nazir with Misha Angrist

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The Pandemicene Podcast aims 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.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November 1st, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast, where we attempt to create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture. Today we are sharing a conversation with Misha Angrist, an associate professor of the Practice in the Social Science Research Institute and Senior fellow in the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, to talk about responses to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lenses of genomics and bioethics, including their strengths and shortcomings.

Guest Bio:

Misha Angrist is Associate Professor of the Practice at SSRI, a Senior Fellow in Science & Society, and Visiting Associate Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy as part of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He directs the undergraduate Science & Society Certificate Program and the First-year FOCUS cluster on Science and the Public. He teaches and mentors students in the MA in Bioethics & Science Policy. He teaches science writing and scholarly writing to both undergraduate and graduate students. In his work, he explores the intersection of biology and society, especially as it relates to the governance of human participation in research and medicine. As the fourth participant in the Personal Genome Project, he was among the first to have his entire genome sequenced and made public. He chronicled this experience in his book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics. Angrist has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, an MS in genetic counseling from the University of Cincinnati, and a PhD in genetics from Case Western Reserve University.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

October 28, 2020 | Works-in-Progress with Guthman, Fairbairn, Reisman

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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM

Zoom link

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 Professor of Social Sciences Julie Guthman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Madeleine Fairbairn and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Emily Reisman who will be discussing their research on the emerging Silicon Valley-based agri-food tech sector and its aspirations to address the major challenges of food systems.

More information can be found at: https://afterproject.sites.ucsc.edu/.

 

Rapporteur’s Report

By Dennis Browe

During this Works in Progress talk, Science & Justice colleagues Julie Guthman, Madeleine Fairbairn, and Emily Reisman showcased their work: The UC AFTeR Project: A California Agri-Food Technology Research Collaboration. The project inquires into Silicon Valley’s imaginaries and projects that make grand promises for a technologically advanced future of food production, distribution, and consumption, asking what problems they aim to solve and what kind of food system futures they envision. Importantly, this project also focuses on highlighting the material processes that otherwise become black-boxed and hidden from public view during Food Tech and Ag Tech endeavors.

For example, Guthman offered examples of website advertising by some of these companies, which feature cartoonishly simple depictions of what are actually hyper-complex biotechnology processes which bring alternative proteins into being (hundreds of these alternative proteins are currently being developed and brought to market). She noted that while many of these agri-food technologies might make a positive impact in food systems, there remain real, unanswered questions about what bringing these alternative proteins to scale might look like ecologically.

Reisman focused on how burgeoning agri-food tech gets linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, paying particular attention to the Silicon Valley narrative about needing to invest in innovation, through two technologies of automation and supply chains. She noted how issues of politics and labor similarly become obfuscated through the innovation narrative, such that innovation through digitization as a crisis response tool becomes an unquestioned public good. Yet, Reisman noted, the unproven assumption in this narrative is that new technologies, despite being designed for vastly different purposes than public health or crisis response, will naturally flow toward these purposes – and that can be misleading if not dangerous. Instead, the AFTeR Project aims to spark open dialogue on the specific ways in which innovative agri-food technologies might – and might not – be able to contribute to COVID-19-focused public health responses.

Fairbairn then critically analyzed what she referred to as “the major communicative genre of this Silicon Valley culture: the pitch,” to see what it can tell us about Silicon Valley’s foray into agri-food technologies. The pitch has at least four required components: the problem, the solution, the market, and the business plan. One of their findings upon analyzing dozens of agri-food tech pitches is that while many pitches promise to help solve a grand problem – such as global hunger or climate change – through disruptive technological innovation, these agri-food tech startups almost always end up losing their ‘world-changing’ potential as they grapple with the real-world economic, cultural, and material configuration of food and agriculture. These startups tend to reintegrate into standard business plans, as they are required to work with large corporations to bring their ideas to fruition.

Guthman, Fairbairn, and Reisman continue to present their work and findings in numerous venues, sparking needed conversation about the content and effects of these Silicon Valley agri-food tech imaginaries and how these projects will help shape industrial food systems for years to come. This project keeps vital questions front-and-center so that issues of politics, labor, ecology, and justice do not become invisibilized within the magical silver-bullet style of outcomes advertised – the grand promises made – by agri-food tech.

designed intersecting points with title

Tech Futures: 52 Conversation Starter Card Deck

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The Science & Justice Research Center is co-sponsoring a project with the Center for Public Philosophy to create a deck of playing cards that will catalyze conversations about ethics and technology, and we want your ideas. Cards will not tell players what to think. They are a playful way to stimulate dialogue on some of the critical issues we need to face. If there’s a question about tech and ethics (or social justice or individual rights) you think is urgent or particularly troubling, submit your ideas to https://techfutures52.ucsc.edu/ by December 1, 2020 to receive a pack of cards.

Inquiries may be directed to pubphil@ucsc.edu.

Fall Science & Justice Writing Together

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Thursday’s 9:00AM-11:00AM PST

(Zoom link) Meeting ID: 949 2647 3182; Passcode: 075587

Wanting to establish a regular writing routine exploring science and justice? Beginning October 22, join SJRC scholars every Thursday of fall term from 9:00AM-11:00AM for open writing sessions! Engage in six 25-minute writing sessions (with a 5 minute break in between). Open to all students, faculty, researchers, staff, and visiting scholars.

We will continue to schedule quarterly writing sessions based on interest and availability. For more information or to express interest for Winter 2021 (including days/times of the week that work for you), please contact SJRC Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe (sociology).

Vivian Underhill standing outside in front of a snowy mountain and water

SJTP fellow awarded AAUW fellowship

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Congratulations to Science and Justice Training Program Fellow, Vivian Underhill, who has been awarded a 2020-21 fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The fellowships recognize recipients whose academic work and community projects empower women and girls.

Vivian Underhill is a PhD student in the Feminist Studies program with an emphasizing in critical race science studies at UC Santa Cruz. Previously, Vivian worked for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, a small, grassroots environmental nonprofit in Fairbanks, Alaska, that focuses on economic and climate justice in central and northern Alaska. Vivian’s work currently focuses on intergenerational environmental-justice activism around fracking and groundwater in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

More in this UCSC news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/10/underhill-women-fellowship.html

SJTP Fellow and GSR Lizzy Hare (Anthropology) was awarded a AAUW award in 2016-2017.

Pandemicene Podcast, Episode 2: Kathia Damian with Joan Donovan

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The Pandemicene Podcast aims 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.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, October 25th,

6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below (after the episode airs).

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast, where we attempt to create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture. Today we will be talking with Joan Donovan about state sponsored misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. What role does technology play in spreading or curbing disinformation? How can private media companies be held accountable and what can we as individuals do to respond to misinformation? Stay tuned to the Pandemicene podcast as we search for answers to these questions.

Guest Bio:

Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC). TaSC explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.

Works Cited in Interview:

Donovan, Joan. “Don’t Panic: Care, Trust, and Mutual Aid During an Infodemic” Webinar. March 27, 2020.

Glaser, April. “Communities rally around one another — and Google Docs — to bring coronavirus aid.” March 20, 2010.

Gray, Mary L. and Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

October 14, 2020 | Meet & Greet

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On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, Zoom Registration, SJRC hosted a beginning of term social hour. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company, we welcomed new members of our community, and welcomed back others.
The SJRC annual Meet & Greet is a great chance for everyone to meet and foster emerging collaborations! Attendees were highly encouraged to bring and share their objects of study as it is a fun and helpful way to find intersecting areas of interest. Some previous objects shared have been: soil samples, a piece of the Berlin wall, bamboo, newly launched books, a stick, human blood, a human liver, and food.

Joining us for this was our 10th anniversary cohort of Science & Justice Training Program graduate fellows: Jonas Oppenheimer (Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics), and Jenny Pensky (Earth & Planetary Sciences) who will be available to discuss their project exploring the relationships between “invasive” plants, botanical gardens, and colonialism.

Also joining us were graduate and undergraduate student interns in the Pandemicene Project and Theorizing Race After Race groups who have co-created a zine, and podcast series, based on interviews with SJRC’s robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners. Each new episode airs Sunday evenings, 6:30 – 7 pm, on KZSC Santa Cruz.

We also welcomed new affiliates Kathleen Gutierrez (History) who broadly centers plant species and the plant sciences in modern Philippine and Southeast Asian history; and Tamara Pico (Earth and Planetary Sciences) who explores how social conventions and cultural practices affect women and underrepresented minorities in the geosciences, Tamara will teach on topics related to the geosciences, feminist science studies and the social studies of science.

We took time to celebrate the recent release of Madeleine Fairbairn’s book Fields of Gold, Financing the Global Land Rush, Lesley Green’s book Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa and micha cardenas’ augmented reality game, Sin Sol (No Sun). As well as the forthcoming launches of Feminist Studies graduate Erin McElroy’s Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance that includes a chapter from our Just Biomedicine research cluster titled ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in SF’s Biotech Hub’; Sociology Assistant Professor Hillary Angelo’s new book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens; and James Doucet-Battle’s launch of Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes.

Faculty interested in science and justice who want to learn more about SJRC, or would like to affiliate with Science & Justice are highly encouraged to be in contact with Colleen Stone or a project leader.