Author Archives: Colleen Stone

May 22, 2023 | Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

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Monday, May 22, 2023

1:00 – 3:00pm

Humanities 1, 210 +  Zoom (Registration)

Book Cover for Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Celebrate the launch of Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne’s new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Contesting Race and Citizenship explores the politics of Blackness and citizenship in Italy. It examines the ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency. The book represents one of the first ever in-depth studies of Black Italian political mobilizations in Italy. Associate Professor Marisol LeBrón (feminist studies) will provide a welcome, Graduate Student Theresa Hice-Fromille (sociology) will provide introductions, and Associate Professors Debbie Gould (sociology) and Savannah Shange (anthropology) will serve as discussants.

More information can be found at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501762291/contesting-race-and-citizenship/.

The open-access ebook version can be downloaded at: https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9781501762307.pdf

Camilla Hawthorne (she/they) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Legal Studies Program, and the new Visualizing Abolition Certificate Program, and co-founded the UCSC Black Geographies Lab. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the volumes The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Co-Sponsored by the departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, the History of Art of Visual Cultures’ Visual Media Cultures Colloquium series, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 15, 2023 | BME80G Series: Hank Greely on “Weird Sh!t: Organoids, Chimeras, and Embryo Models”

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Wednesday, May 15, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Monday, May 15 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Hank Greely on “Weird Sh!t: Organoids, Chimeras, and Embryo Models” – a panel discussion will follow.

Henry T. (Hank) Greely is Professor by courtesy of Genetics, Stanford School of Medicine; Director, Center for Law and the Biosciences; Director, Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society; and Chair, Steering Committee of the Center for Biomedical Ethics. Greely specializes in the ethical, legal, and social implications of new biomedical technologies, particularly those related to genetics, assisted reproduction, neuroscience, or stem cell research.

May 10-11, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Anna Barry-Jester on “From Symptom to Story: Understanding an Epidemic of Kidney Disease in Central America”

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Wednesday, May 10, 2023

6:00 – 8:00 pm 

Humanities 1, Room 210

Thursday, May 11, 2023

12:15 – 1:45 pm

Humanities 1, Room 210

On Wednesday, May 10 at 6:00 pm, we will host a talk entitled, “From Symptom to Story: Understanding an Epidemic of Kidney Disease in Central America” with Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Anna Barry-Jester. Then, on Thursday, May 11th at 12:15 a reading group.

What does it mean to construct a “cause” of disease? What is the primary source material we consult as we write the narrative of a new disease? When it comes to public health, how do we fairly and accurately reflect scientific evidence, personal experience, and community knowledge? In this talk, journalist Anna Maria Barry-Jester will use these questions to chart the history of a particular epidemic of chronic kidney disease that, since the early aughts, has been recognized as a leading cause of death in parts of Central America. In the two decades that followed, the global understanding of this condition has expanded to a growing list of communities, including war-torn parts of Sri Lanka, agrarian sectors of India and migrant guest workers from Nepal. Drawing from nearly 20 years of reporting — including interviews, photography, video, and scientific literature — Barry-Jester will explore the shifting narratives of the emergence of a disease and interrogate what becomes evidence and how it informs public understanding of disease and its causes.

Anna Barry-Jester is a public health reporter with ProPublica. Previously, she was a senior correspondent covering public health at Kaiser Health News. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials who she profiled. Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. She was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News. More information can be found on her website.

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

May 03, 2023 | BME80G Series: Victoria M. Massie on “Of Albert Perry: A Biomythography of Genetic African Origins”

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Wednesday, May 03, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Wednesday, May 03 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Victoria M. Massie on “Of Albert Perry: A Biomythography of Genetic African Origins” – a panel discussion will follow.

More information to follow.

Victoria M. Massie (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Rice University, and a faculty affiliate in the Medical Humanities Program, the Center for African and African-American Studies, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is broadly interested in the political economy of racialization through emerging biotechnologies that reconfigure the nature of belonging, citizenship, and life itself. Dr. Massie’s expertise sits at the intersection of feminist kinship studies, anthropology of racialization, black feminist bioethics, postcolonial and feminist science studies, vitalism, and biocapitalism, with an area focus on the United States and West/Central Africa. Her latest book project, Sovereignty in Return: The Gift of Genetic Reconnection in Cameroon, examines how the genetic Cameroonian diaspora emerges as speculative capital to facilitate new modes of postcolonial futurity following Cameroon’s 50th anniversary of independence. Dr. Massie received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. A Hurston/Wright Foundation Fellow, Dr. Massie draws on her experience as a nonfiction writer, poet, and former journalist to experiment with ethnographic form.

May 03, 2023 | Book Launch! Unsettled Borders: Militarized Border Technologies and Indigenous Sacred Science

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Wednesday, May 03, 2023

4:00-5:30pm

Humanities 1, 210

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2022)

You are invited to celebrate the launch of Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2022) by SJRC faculty affiliate Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

We will gather on Wednesday, May 3rd at 4:00pm in Humanities 1, room 210. Kathleen Gutierrez (Assistant Professor of History) and Jennifer Gonzalez (Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture) will serve as discussants.

Learn more in this campus news article: New book traces the scientific and technological development of militarized borders.

The book is available at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/unsettled-borders.

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of the Feminist Studies Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department as well as an Affiliate Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies. Her first book, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas (New York University Press, 2013), follows Internet-mediated marriages across the United States, Colombia, and Mexico alongside neo-colonial fantasies of racial and gendered difference across borders. Her second book, Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2021) re-maps the virtual border war alongside the ongoing settler colonial war with Indigenous peoples. She was also one of the editors of the Anthology, Precarity & Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers 2021) and has published articles in a variety of international journals in Mexico, France, and Brazil, and U.S. journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; American Quarterly; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Sexualities Journal.

May 01, 2023 | Baking Strange with Lindsay Kelley

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Monday, May 01, 2023

Time and Location TBD

On Monday, May 01 (time TBD), you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Art Professor Beth Stephens’ course for a talk with S&J Visiting Scholar Lindsay Kelley on Baking Strange.

What exactly do we eat when we eat a biscuit? Everyday objects like biscuits contain unexpected, dense connections that illuminate material and cultural networks. Thousands of years before biscuits could be purchased in packets from the grocery store, twice-baked breads circulated as military rations. When we eat biscuits, we digest their military ration predecessors with each mouthful. Their ingredients have commemorative significance and may function as reenactments of specific military contexts. Using taste and recipe formats as key methods, the multiyear research initiative Tasting History involves diverse publics in experiences of tasting and eating together.

Lindsay Kelley is a visiting scholar with the Science and Justice Research Center. She works with food and eating as sculptural and social art forms. Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design, College of the Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University, and she holds a MFA in Digital Art & New Media and a PhD in the History of Consciousness, both from the University of California Santa Cruz. She has written two books, Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience and forthcoming from MIT Press, After Eating: Metabolizing the Arts.

publication: An autoethnographic assessment of a manifesto for more trustworthy, relevant, and just models

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Melissa Eitzel Solera, now with the Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis has published a new journal article and was awarded a grant by UC Davis’ Global Affairs program to build on past work with The Muonde Trust. Melissa, along with Center Director Ryan Meyer, Pamela Reynolds from UC Davis DataLab and Sarah Mccullough from UC Davis’ Feminist Research Institute were honored at a reception hosted Global Affairs celebrating their award. Their project will support Muonde in examining how well they track the outcomes of their own projects, and will advance the pursuit of diversity/equity/inclusion in community-engaged projects in the Global South by investigating how UN Sustainable Development Goals serve (or don’t serve) the community in Mazvihwa Communal Area.

Melissa Eitzel Solera is a graduate of the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program at UC Berkeley (with dissertation work in Statistical Ecology) whose research goal is to improve the sustainability of Californian and global ecosystems using sophisticated data synthesis techniques that facilitate broad public engagement.

Working with Jenny Reardon (UC Santa Cruz Professor of Sociology and SJRC Director) and Ken Wilson (The Muonde Trust), Dr. Eitzel Solera led the NSF-funded project, “Understanding Resilience in a Complex Coupled Human-Natural System: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Information and Community-Based Action Research,” involving a 35-year collaborative research project in rural Zimbabwe run by The Muonde Trust. Together with the community research team, they developed methods of modeling the resilience of their system and synthesizing their long-term data to answer pressing concerns about sustainable environmental management.  They also made theoretical and practical contributions to more just modeling practices in an age of “big data.” Refer to A modeler’s manifesto: Synthesizing modeling best practices with social science frameworks to support critical approaches to data science as published in Rio Journal in 2021 and Autoethnographic assessment of a manifesto for more trustworthy, relevant, and just models published in Environmental Modelling & Software on Science Direct in 2023.

April 26, 2023 | BME80G Series: Benjamin Hale on “Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture”

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Wednesday, April 26, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Classroom Unit 2 (map)

On Wednesday, April 26 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Benjamin Hale on “Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture” – a panel discussion will follow.

The hope and promise of synthetic ‘cultured’ meat products is that they will serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that replace meats made by conventional animal agriculture. Where the ethical discussion concerning meat often centers on what is wrong with meat, we instead ask how consumer indifference and producer strategy might influence the uptake of clean meat in the economic market. Rather than approaching the problem in terms of substitution value, we approach the problem of substitution from the standpoint of reasons-for and reasons-against. Doing so, we suggest, exposes complications with “causal indeterminacy” that in turn implicate our thinking both about moral responsibility and the broader nature of technocratic solutions to environmental problems.

Benjamin Hale teaches environmental studies and philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  He works primarily in the area of environmental ethics and environmental policy, though his theoretical interests span much larger concerns in applied ethics, normative ethics, and even metaethics. As for applied questions, much of his recent work centers on ethical and environmental concerns presented by emerging technologies.

April 19, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Karina L. Walters on Transcending Historical Trauma: How to Address American Indian Health Inequities and Promote Thriving

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

6:00 – 7:30 pm

Cowell Ranch Hay Barn (free and open to the public, register)

Thursday, April 20, 2023

12:00 – 1:30 pm

Humanities 1, room 210

SAVE-the-DATEs! On Wednesday, April 19 at 6:00 pm, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Karina L. Walters, will present a campus-wide talk at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. It is free and open to the public, though we do ask people to pre-register. Then, on Thursday, April 20, we will host a reading group at 12:00pm in Humanities 1, room 210.

Throughout history, settler colonialism has endeavored to erase the lived experiences and histories of American Indian and Alaska Native Peoples. Yet, Indigenous populations, particularly Indigenous women, remain strong and resilient pillars of communities. Oftentimes these [her]stories are missed in public health initiatives as a result of settler colonialism’s perpetual drive to erase and silence. In this talk, Dr. Walters will explore the latest advances in designing culturally derived, Indigenist health promotion interventions among American Indian and Alaska Native women. The talk will describe the indigenist methodological innovations utilized in the NIH funded Yappalli Choctaw Road to Health, a culturally focused, land-based obesity and substance abuse prevention program as well as the national multi-site Honor Project Two-Spirit Health Study. Consistent with tribal systems of knowledge, both studies illustrate the importance of developing culturally derived health promotion interventions rooted in Indigenist thoughtways and land-based practices to promote Indigenous thrivance and community well-being.

Dr. Karina L. Walters (MSW, PhD) is the recently appointed Director of the Tribal Health Research Office at the National Institute of Health. She is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a Katherine Hall Chambers University Professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, and Co-Director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI) at the University of Washington. Dr. Walters is world renowned for her expertise in developing behavioral and multi-level health interventions steeped in culture to activate health-promoting behaviors. She has written landmark papers on traumatic stress and health, historical and intergenerational trauma, and originated the Indigenist Stress-Coping model. She has led 22 NIH-funded studies, is one of the leading American Indian scientists in the country, and is only one of two American Indians (and the only Native woman) ever invited to deliver the prestigious Director’s lecture to the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) at the NIH. She is the first American Indian Fellow inductee into the American Academy of Social Welfare and Social Work (AASWSW).

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.