Join the newly-created Public Research Action Network!
Building on the momentum from the highly successful Stand up for Science UCSC rallies held in March 2025, faculty are forming a group that will meet regularly with the slogan “Stand Up for Science; Stand Up for Knowledge”. The goal will be to keep up with the changing landscape regarding publicly-based research across all disciplines. The format is collaborative, with a plan for ~30-45 minutes of sharing some current events and updates, and ~45 minutes of action—oriented outreach plans including possibly letter and op-ed writing, working on communications to the UCSC Academic Senate and/or administrators, connecting with state and federal leaders, or other ideas to be crafted together. Meetings will take place once/month on the 2nd Thursday.
Parking at the Coastal Science Campus is available with no permits after 5pm.
Join the Center for Reimagining Leadership and co-sponsors in the Namaste Lounge for a conversation with Andrew Curley (Diné), an Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (2023).
Indians and Energy Transition: Green New Deal to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’
Energy in the United States is a topic of extreme importance. It is foundational to the U.S. economy, infrastructure, development in local communities, and accelerating processes of climate change. In political rhetoric, energy conversations oscillate between broad ideas of clean energy technology to opening more and more protected spaces for oil and gas drilling. Tribal communities are often caught in the middle of these political movements. Native leaders, planners, and workers must anticipate energy headwinds while shoring up their sources of development and revenue while at the same time thinking through the politics of climate change and the negative environmental impacts of energy projects, such as new kinds of contamination, threatening limited water sources or climate change. In this presentation, I will offer new research focused on the perspectives of Diné, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, and Jicarilla Apache community members in places with long histories of fossil fuel production, primarily oil & gas as well as coal and uranium.
Sponsored by: Center for Reimagining Leadership, Environmental Studies Department, Institute for Social Transformation, Kresge College, Rachel Carson College, Science and Justice Research Center
On Friday, May 02 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Kyle Robertson.
A zoom option or recording may be available for members of the campus community who cannot attend in person. Contact Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) to request access.
Artificial Intelligence and the Criminal Justice System
Predictive algorithms are not just helping us write text (like this abstract), they are becoming part of the criminal justice system. Police departments use them to help with decisions, and courts use them to suggest bail options and amounts. In the future, trials and sentencing may also rely on these technologies. These developments raise important ethical questions about human freedom and causation. In this talk, I will focus on two questions: (1) What moral obligation do we have to use predictive algorithms to prevent crime? (2) How can we reconcile ideas of free will and blameworthiness with the apparent predictability of human behavior?
Kyle Robertson, Lecturer of Philosophy, Assistant Director, Center for Public Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kyle Robertson is Lecturer of Philosophy, Assistant Director, Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.
On Friday, April 04 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Jonathan LoTempio on the foundational aspects of bioethics as it developed in the last 80 years.
A zoom option or recording may be available for members of the campus community who cannot attend in person. Contact Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) to request access.
Nuremberg moments: bioethics pasts and futures
Bioethics as we understand it today is a product of the rules-based international order. It is a unique field of study because it has been sanctioned or supported at the highest level of government, rather than devolved to specialist agencies. However, this position is changing, offering time for stock-taking and consideration of new futures. In this seminar, we will discuss some pre-World War II antecedents of 20th-century bioethics, the bioethical wilderness from the War and Nuremberg up until the Belmont Report, and the Commission Era from 1974-2016. With this foundation, we will consider the futures of bioethics, public health ethics, and data ethics in light of our newly fractured rules-based order.
Dr. Jonathan LoTiempo Jr, Fellow in Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Genetics and Genomics at Penn Medical Ethics & Health Policy.
Dr. Jonathan LoTempio Jr. is a globally engaged researcher working at the intersection of genomics, bioethics, and international policy. As a postdoctoral fellow in bioethics and human data at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, he studies the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging genomic technologies within an international framework.
LoTempio’s contributions to the field span bioinformatics, science diplomacy, global health, and bioethics initiatives. During his doctoral work, he expanded an extant medical collaboration between researchers in Washington, DC and Kinshasa, DR Congo to include reference genomics projects to enhance diagnostic rates for rare and inherited conditions in sub–Saharan Africa. As a Fulbright Schuman Fellow, he conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria, and United Nations University-CRIS in Bruges, Belgium, where he examined the role of science and technology in international governance with a focus on data sharing. He spent the summer after his Fulbright doing archival research at the UN Office at Geneva in search of the postwar antecedents of open science. Woven through each of these has been a commitment to enhancing ethical research and fundamental study of bioethics.
He has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the US Department of State and the EU Directorate General for Education and Culture through the Belgium-Luxembourg Fulbright Commission, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, San Francisco, California, the Clark Family Foundation of Bethesda, Maryland, and the Cosmos Club of Washington, DC.
He holds a BS in biochemistry (University of Rochester) and a PhD in genomics and bioinformatics (George Washington University). Before his academic career, he spent three years working in program management and policy evaluation at the US National Institutes of Health and the Obama White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Readings
Required: bioethical primary sources
Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial PDF (get from instructor)
Section: Judgment – Permissible Medical Experiments (pages 11-14 only, charges on pages 6-11 may be disturbing but instructive)
Join The UCSC Humanities Institute for a one-day conference, “Critical Imagination in Crisis Times,” featuring presentations by:
Iain Chambers, Former Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes, Oriental University, Naples
Paul Gilroy, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, University College, London
Vron Ware, Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science
UC Santa Cruz faculty participants include: Jim Clifford (Emeritus Professor, History of Consciousness) Chris Connery (Professor, Literature), Vilashini Cooppan (Professor, Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies), Isaac Julien (Distinguished Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), Mark Nash (Professor, Arts and History of Consciousness), María Puig de la Bellacasa (Professor, History of Consciousness).
Conference Program:
2:00-2:15 pm Conference Introduction: Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
2:15-3:15 pm Iain Chambers, “From Kassel to Gaza: Art and Critical Testimony” (Moderator, Chris Connery)
3:30-4:30 pm Vron Ware, “Letting the Land Speak” (Moderator, María Puig de la Bellacasa)
4:45-5:45 pm Paul Gilroy, “Political Eschatologies of Mismanaged Decline” (Moderator, Jim Clifford)
5:45-6:30 pm Plenary Discussion: Moderators, Isaac Julien and Mark Nash
Light refreshments will be served throughout the afternoon. The conference will also be live-streamed. Follow this link to join online. Conference presented by Moving Image Lab, The Humanities Institute, and the Center for Cultural Studies. Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department.
Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, Orientale, and is now an independent researcher. Amongst his recent publications are Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road at documenta 15. He writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto.
Paul Gilroy was born in the East End of London in 1956. He is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at University College London where he was founding director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation. Gilroy was previously Professor of American and English at King’s College London, Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College London (1995-1999). He holds honorary doctorates from Goldsmiths College, Sussex University, the University of Liege, the University of Copenhagen, Oxford University and the University of St. Andrews. He is an honorary Fellow of Sussex University and of King’s College, London. In 2014, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2018 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded Norway’s Holberg Prize in 2019. He writes widely on Art, Music, Literature and Politics. His publications include: Darker than Blue: On The Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Cultures (2010), Black Britain: A Pictorial History (2007), After Empire:Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2005).
Vron Ware is a London-based writer and photographer, having previously taught geography, sociology and gender studies at universities in the UK and the US. She has written several books on the politics of gender and race, colonial history, national identity, ecological thought and the cultural heritage of war. She gave her first book talk for Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History at UC Santa Cruz in 1992. More recently she has published Return of a Native: Learning from the Land (2022) and co-authored England’s Military Heartland: Preparing for War on Salisbury Plain (2025).
THI Image Credit: Isaac Julien, Western Union Series no. 1 (Cast No Shadow), 2007, Duratrans image in lightbox, Courtesy the artist.
Motivated by the attacks on sciences and scientists that we are seeing daily across fields of research and care for health, environment, climate, and more, we will gather in a pop-up event outside the Science and Engineering Library at noon, Friday, March 7, for a half hour of sharing information and experiences of damage to sciences and scientists across the country and here at UCSC. Spread the word among students and colleagues! Invite our administrators!
Donna Haraway and another speaker currently being arranged will briefly summarize some of the attacks and responses, and there will be time for others to share information and experiences. Bring home-made signs and lots of energy.
We will meet on Red Square just outside the Science and Engineering Library, a big, centrally located plaza. Organizing is taking off, and folks in PBSci are enthusiastic.
Another UCSC Stand Up for Science event is also being planned on the Coastal Science Campus, to raise awareness about the dismantling of federal science and especially to support the people of NOAA and the USGS, who are also on the CSC campus and who are losing jobs and labs right now. Ingrid Parker (imparker@ucsc.edu) can provide more information for anyone who wants to go to that event on the coast.
Having actions on both campuses makes it possible for everyone to come easily!
Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of Science and Justice Research Center, on the personalised genotyping company 23andMe’s recent bankruptcy and what’s going to happen to all that genetic data.
Donna Haraway, distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz, has been awarded the 2025 Erasmus Prize, one of Europe’s most prestigious recognitions for contributions to culture, society, and social thought.
An event is planned for June 3rd to honor, Donna Haraway, who received two international honors for her impact not just within academia, but across disciplines, borders, and possible futures.
On Tuesday, June 3rd at 3:30pm, the McHenry Library Special Collections & Archives will host “THICK, SLIMY, SQUISHY, SQUIGGLY & GENERATIVE: A Conversation with Donna Haraway,” featuring Haraway in conversation with three of her former graduate students——Chela Sandoval (Chicana Studies, UCSB), Katie King (Women’s Studies, UMD), and Caren Kaplan (American Studies, UC Davis).
Together with Haraway, these History of Consciousness alums will revisit the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transformative modes of thinking that shaped their time at UCSC in the 1980s and ’90s—and that continue to animate their work today. Reflecting on this shared historical moment, the conversation will trace the intersections, evolutions, and generative entanglements of their ideas over time—and consider why collectivity, friendship, integrity, and humor remain vital tools for navigating what Haraway has called the “thick and slimy” urgencies of our present.
This event also marks the opening of an exhibition that showcases select materials from the Donna Haraway Papers, newly processed and available for research at UCSC’s McHenry Library.
Donna Haraway, distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz, has been awarded the ‘Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement’ in Memoriam to the Italian architect and designer Italo Rota (1953-2024), of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia – Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025)
In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
