Author Archives: Colleen Stone

The Software Arts (2019) by Warren Sack

Are the arts at the center of software’s evolution?

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The Software Arts (2019) by Warren Sack

The Software Arts (2019) by Warren Sack

In his new book, The Software Arts (MIT Press 2019), Science & Justice Affiliate, UC Santa Cruz Professor of Film & Digital Media, Warren Sack presents an alternative history of computing that puts the arts at the center of software’s evolution.

Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work has been exhibited at SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media. Warren is an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, Chair and Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Find out more in the campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/08/sack-software-arts.html

You can listen to an introduction to The Software Arts in a podcast episode of GeekSpeak hosted by Lyle Troxell.

Read also:

Book Release! Warren Sack on The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019)

 

Book Release! Jennifer Derr on The Lived Nile Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2019)

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About the Book

Book Cover for Derr’s “The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt”.

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt’s relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt’s colonial economy and forms of subjectivity.

Science & Justice Affiliate, UC Santa Cruz Professor of History, Jennifer L. Derr, follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.

Jennifer L. Derr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center. Derr’s research interests include: Colonial and Post-colonial Middle Eastern history; environmental history; history of science; history of medicine; critical geography.

The book is available at: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29529

book

2019 SJRC Graduate Student Research Fellowships

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The Science & Justice Research Center is pleased to announce we are now accepting applications for:

Summer Fellowships

The award was established to support summer research conducted by graduate students currently working on Center projects or are in the Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). Graduate students in any UC Santa Cruz department may apply. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed or are going through the Training Program. The award is intended as a stipend to support general living expenses, fieldwork, travel, presentation of work, and/or research. Award amounts will vary based on proposed outcomes; a maximum of $2,200; depending on proposals, up to two awards will be distributed.

Fellowship projects may include: independent and collaborative research.

CURRENT CENTER PROJECTS

The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative

Jail Care: Amplifying Santa Cruz Community Voices on Health & Incarceration

Just Biomedicine

Queer Ecologies Research Cluster

The student should:

  • be an enrolled graduate student at UC Santa Cruz (enrollment during summer not required).

  • be currently working on an established Center or SJTP hosted project.

The student will:

  • be compensated up to $2200; distributed half at the beginning of summer, half at the end of summer.

  • adhere to IRB standards for working with human research subjects.

To Apply:

By Monday, June 17, students should email (scijust@ucsc.edu) expressing interest. Please let us know the following:

  1. your name, major, academic faculty advisors.

  2. name of the current project and any project faculty advisor(s); your role and experiences with the current project as related to items listed in the above outlined workplan (including human subjects research).

  3. why you are interested in the project and how your work/research/career goals would benefit from the fellowship.

  4. propose clear goals and intended outcomes with an outline of work to be completed over summer 2019; the methods of your research project; and briefly outline or describe the expenses to be supported by the award.

Information on SJRC Projects can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/research/projects/.

Information on the Science & Justice Training Program can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/pedagogy/sjtp/.

June 6, 2019 | Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence  

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Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, June 6, 2019

7:00 PM (registration)

UC Santa Cruz, Kresge College Seminar Room

The Right Livelihood Laureate Lecture presents

an evening with Nicanor Perlas, Right Livelihood Award Laureate, followed by panel discussion with UC Santa Cruz Faculty Anthony Aguirre (Associate Professor of Physics), Lise Getoor (Professor of Computer Science and S&J Affiliate), and Sikina Jinnah (Associate Professor of Politics).

The 21st century is the Age of Science and Technology. It is also the Age in which humanity faces a unique and unprecedented challenge. This is the challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If properly developed and aligned with the values of humanity, AI will bring tremendous benefits to society. However, if AI is used inappropriately, it could undermine human civilization and, ultimately, with the emergence of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), lead to the extinction of humanity, in as little as 10 to 20 years. Scientists, philosophers and engineers call this latter possibility the “alignment challenge” or “existential risk” of AI. The fate of our future lies literally in our hands. In navigating the turbulent waters of extreme technology in the 21st century, two sources of hope are visible in the horizon: new more ethical developments from within science and technology itself, and the rapid and widespread emergence of societal change agents, whether they are activists in the realm of culture and civil society, visionary legislators in the realm of polity and government, or enlightened entrepreneurs in the realm of the economy and business.

For a full “deep dive” experience exploring these unprecedented challenges and possibilities, UC Santa Cruz will also host a week-long summer institute, July 8-12, with Right Livelihood Award laureate Nicanor Perlas, who received the “alternative Nobel” in 2003 for his work opposing corporate globalization.

Co-sponsored by Kresge College, Social Sciences Division, Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

More can be found at: https://rightlivelihood.ucsc.edu/events/perlas.html

June 5-7, 2019 | Wrong at the Root: Racial Bias and The Tension Between Numbers and Words in Non-Internet Data

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Wednesday, June 5 – Friday, June 7, 2019

Melvin Calvin Laboratory

University of California Berkeley

 

Sponsored by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Sloan Foundation

Artificially intelligent systems extrapolate from historical training data. While the training process is robust to “noisy” data, systematically biased data will inexorably lead to biased systems. The emerging field of algorithmic fairness seeks interventions to blunt the downstream effects of data bias. Initial work has focused on classification and prediction algorithms.

This cross-cutting workshop will examine the sources and nature of racial bias in a wide range of settings such as genome-wide association studies, social and financial credit systems, bail and probate calculations, black box medicine, and facial recognition and robotic surveillance. We will survey state-of-the-art algorithmic literature, and lay a more concrete intellectual foundation for advancing the field of algorithmic fairness.

Full schedule: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/schedule/10757#

Register at: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/fairness-workshop-1

June 3, 2019 | Book Release! Warren Sack on The Software Arts

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Monday, June 3, 2019

3:00PM – 4:30PM (Poster)

Communications 139, UC Santa Cruz

 

The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) by Warren Sack

The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) by Warren Sack

The Department of Film and Digital Media invite you to a book party to celebrate the release of The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) by Warren Sack, S&J Faculty Affiliate, Professor and Chair of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

With his new book, Warren Sack provides an alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the very center of software’s evolution. Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.

The book is available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-arts

Overview

In The Software Arts, Warren Sack offers an alternative history of computing that places the arts at the very center of software’s evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists’ step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans, Sack shows that programming languages are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts.

Sack offers a reading of the texts of computing—code, algorithms, and technical papers—that emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical arts—including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, and simulation—into terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms of digital life. He considers, among other topics, the “arithmetization” of knowledge that presaged digitization; today’s multitude of logics; the history of demonstration, from deduction to newer forms of persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The Software Arts, Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.

Endorsements

“Warren Sack’s creative thinking across the arts and sciences has kept my cyborg on her toes, provoked again and again to test out how to reinvent practices for thinking, designing, working, and playing together for less deadly worlds. Sack’s historically attuned book investigates the folded zones linking the mechanical and liberal arts as new languages called programs have been built for emerging worlds. Rhetorics, epistemologies, and procedures are at stake in the digital media that shape and are shaped by the arts of computation. This is an important book about how things come to be in the workshops of the software arts that can never pretend to the separation of interpreting, making, and thinking.”

Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of  California, Santa Cruz

May 30-31, 2019 | Indigeneity and Climate Justice

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Indigeneity and Climate Justice

Thursday May 30 – Friday May 31

9:30-3:30pm – (schedule) (poster)

Arboretum Horticulture Hall II

The UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department presents a Feminist Science Studies Conference on Indigeneity and Climate Justice, organized by Professors of Feminist Studies Karen Barad (Science & Justice Director of Teaching) and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer.

Thanks to Zoe Todd for the use of her artwork!

Thanks to Zoe Todd for the use of her artwork!

Anthropogenic climate change is the notion that human actions are the main driver of the current climate crisis. The identification of the anthropos as origin and cause of global climate change elides the fact that climate change is not, and has never been, a universal homogenous process produced by all humans and affecting all humans equally, or as if by chance, some communities more than others (e.g., because they just happen to be living in precarious places). Rather, driven by the forces of capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and imperialism, climate change has been and continues to be perpetuated by the few, while those subjected to precaritization and violence are made to disproportionately absorb the ill effects of “progress” and “development.” In other words, climate change has always been a matter of geopolitics and the ongoing precaritization of oppressed peoples, dominated lands, and other-than-human beings that are part of living landscapes. And lest we think of global climate change as a new phenomenon, a 2015 study of ice core samples reveals that European colonization of the Americas killed so many native peoples so rapidly (approximately 56 million in less than 100 years) that it cooled the Earth’s climate.

The 2019 UCSC Feminist Science Studies conference takes as its focus the theme of “Indigeneity and Climate Justice.” Climate Justice, as opposed to the more narrow framings of “environmental justice,” marks the consideration of the entanglement of ecological, cultural, social, political, geological, biological and other forces, understood as simultaneous and mutually constitutive. A shared concern among our esteemed keynote speakers is the question of how to respond to the challenges and potentials of collaborative engagements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to caring for the Earth.  We invite them to engage in conversation with each other and students, faculty, staff, and other conference participants about these pressing questions of multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and uneven responsibilities.

Free and Open to the Public.

Keynote Presentations – full schedule

From Environmental Case Study to Kin-Study: 
Weaponized Fossil Kin, Fish, Water, and Métis Legal Orders and Relationality in the Alberta Petro-Economy

Zoe Todd
Métis Scholar of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada
Visiting Professor of History, Yale University

Current and Future Effects of Climate Change on the Amah Mutsun Tribe: Local Steps to Take Now!

Valentin Lopez
Chairman, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band

Upside Down Country

Timothy Neale
Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Anthropology and Geography
Deakin University, Australia

Who Has the Right to Declare the Urgency of Addressing Climate Change?

Kyle Powys Whyte
Timnick Chair in the Humanities
Associate Proefssor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability
Michigan State University

Co-sponsored by: the UC Santa Cruz Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, The FMST Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair, Humanities Division, The Humanities Institute, the Center for Creative Ecologies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, Research Center for the Americas, the Science & Justice Research Center, and the departments of Environmental Studies and Sociology.

Book cover for Herman Gray Racism postrace (Duke, 2019)

Book Release! Racism Postrace (Duke, 2019)

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Overview

With the election of Barack Obama, the idea that American society had become postracial—that is, race was no longer a main factor in influencing and structuring people’s lives—took hold in public consciousness, increasingly accepted by many. The contributors to Racism Postrace examine the concept of postrace and its powerful history and allure, showing how proclamations of a postracial society further normalize racism and obscure structural antiblackness.

Book cover for Racism Postrace (Duke, 2019)

They trace expressions of postrace over and through a wide variety of cultural texts, events, and people, from sports (LeBron James’s move to Miami), music (Pharrell Williams’s “Happy”), and television (The Voice and HGTV) to public policy debates, academic disputes, and technology industries. Outlining how postrace ideologies confound struggles for racial justice and equality, the contributors open up new critical avenues for understanding the powerful cultural, discursive, and material conditions that render postrace the racial project of our time.

The book and introduction are available at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/racism-postrace

SJRC Director Jenny Reardon and Herman Gray on race in America as interviewed in January 2020 by Chris Benner (Director of the Institute for Social Transformation).

Editor(s):

Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Herman Gray (UCSC Sociology)

Contributors:

Inna Arzumanova, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Aymer Jean Christian, Kevin Fellezs, Roderick A. Ferguson, Herman Gray, Eva C. Hageman, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Victoria E. Johnson, Joseph Lowndes, Roopali Mukherjee, Safiya Umoja Noble, Radhika Parameswaran, Sarah T. Roberts, Catherine R. Squires, Brandi Thompson Summers, Karen Tongson, Cynthia A. Young

Praise

“In this well-written, wide-ranging collection, imaginative and innovative researchers from across the disciplines conduct a post-mortem of the illusion of postracialism. Through case studies of the role race plays in diverse areas of contemporary culture, Racism Postrace takes stock of the continuing allure of the postracial despite its implausibility, but also of the ways in which its demise can point the way toward better and more effective imaginings of social justice.” — George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

“According to this stellar array of scholars, racism is alive, well, and thriving both in the United States and globally, and they offer important theoretical and empirical insights into why and how. This volume effectively dismantles the myth of postraciality, using a range of cultural forms and texts to demonstrate how racism rears its ugly head in the service of capitalism and white supremacy. Indeed, these essays tell us that the popular and common usage of ‘postrace’ neutralizes antiracist movements and props up antiblackness and other modes of racial and ethnic antipathy with devastating effect. This volume is a wake-up call to all who have luxuriated in the liberal fantasy of a democratizing media.” — Jane Rhodes, Professor of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

drawing

‘Indigeneity & Climate Justice’ conference foregrounds how to care for rather than manage the earth

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The Feminist Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz presented Indigeneity & Climate Justice, a two-day conference at the Arboretum on May 30-31, 2019.

In a campus news article, Barad described the difference between environmental justice and climate justice, noting that the latter also ‘considers the mix of ecological, cultural, social, political, geological, legal, and biological forces.’

The campus article can be found at: https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/05/feminist-climate-justice.html

More on the conference at: https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/news-events/department-news/science-conference/index.html

Incarcerated Care: Unjustly Exposed + Amplifying Santa Cruz Community Voices on Health & Incarceration

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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.

Learn more about Unjustly Exposed.
Learn more about Amplifying Santa Cruz Community Voices on Health & Incarceration.