Author Archives: Colleen Stone

November 2-7, 2022 | Sawyer Seminar: Alberto Ortiz-Diaz

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Wednesday, November 02, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM 

Zoom only (Registrations: 11/02 Presentation, 11/07 Reading Group)

On Wednesday, November 02 at 4:00pm, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Alberto Ortiz-Diaz, will present online over Zoom (register). Then, on Monday, November 07, we will host a reading group at 4:00pm over Zoom (register).

More on the seminar can be found in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the project website.

“Carceral Care: Health Professionals and the Living Dead in Colonial Puerto Rico’s Sanitary City, 1920s-1940s”

Using an array of primary sources, this talk explores the early history of the Río Piedras sanitary city or medical corridor, a transnationally and imperially inspired built environment and complex of welfare institutions (a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum, and a penitentiary) constructed and consolidated on the margins of San Juan by Puerto Rico’s colonial-populist state between the 1920s and 40s. Within and across these institutional spaces, health professionals contributed to the production of medicalized scientific knowledge and cared for and socially regulated racialized, pathologized Puerto Ricans. Penitentiary “living dead” (incarcerated people), in particular, were subjected to research and received treatment, but also provided health labor that put them at risk while powering the sanitary city and nurturing its inhabitants. Crucially, however, some prisoners managed to exploit the unthinkable openness of the complex, revealing in the process that the living dead could only be buried alive for so long.

Alberto Ortiz Díaz is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, Arlington, and currently a Larson Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress. His first book, Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in March 2023.

November 02, 2022 | Giving Day

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Wednesday, November 2, 2022

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022 for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help support the next cohort of Science & Justice student researchers by giving through one of the two below Science & Justice campaigns.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 2nd.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

Help support the next cohort of Science & Justice student researchers by giving through our Science & Justice campaigns. Your donation goes directly to supporting students and providing opportunities for them to gain valuable professional development experiences working with scholars, researchers, mentors and community members on meaningful projects.

ABOUT the SJRC

Scientific and technological discoveries increasingly shape societies, which today are simultaneously being roiled by rising inequality and injustice. The Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz opens doors for dialogue across disciplines to address the resulting challenge of creating science and technology that serves a more diverse range of lives in the midst of these inequities. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists, and artists all come together in SJRC projects to actively and urgently seek a way forward. We learn to work effectively with one another in order to create positive social change within the context of scientific and technological discovery.

Our mission is distinctive. The center’s broad systemic emphasis goes well beyond conventional bioethics and consent. We’re reimagining how justice perspectives can reshape all aspects of the scientific enterprise—from funding and agenda setting, to relationships with the corporate sector, to reward structures and scientific hierarchies to the ways in which we respond to crisis and critique.

Visit and share SJRC’s campaign page

ABOUT SJRC’s LEED Initiative

Through our Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research initiative, it is our hope to facilitate the creation of a cross-sector, cross-national effort to reformulate the meaning of good science in a manner that creates sustained organizational culture and policy changes that advance equity and justice.

The project proceeds in three phases: background research; drafting of LEED Principles and Practices; and International Discussion and Write-Up of LEED Principles and Practices. Help us realize support a graduate student work with us and to realize LEED Principles and Practices!

Visit and share the LEED campaign page

Why Support S&J

As a Hispanic-Serving Research Institution, we’re engaging with an increasing number of young underrepresented scientists and engineers eager to integrate social justice challenges into their work.

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on Science & Justice projects during the academic and summer terms. With your help, we can offer fellowships that support this critical dimension of the training of future leaders in the emerging field of Science and Justice.

With your support we can also:

  • Support students in integrating social justice perspectives into scientific inquiry as they gain experience in critical cross-disciplinary collaborative projects and take these experiences into their professional lives.
  • Bring scientists, activists, and other thought leaders to UC Santa Cruz to expand the range of research projects, teach and work with students, and enrich campus discussion.
  • Support projects that connect community groups and agencies with the sophisticated science and data analytics capabilities of UCSC faculty and students, integrating a wider range of social perspectives into research models to address urgent local and national issues.

Share our Campaigns for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 2.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

October 26, 2022 | Works-in-Progress: Locating the Cloud

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + 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 Science & Justice Training Program Fellows Carrie Hamilton (Environmental Studies) and Kellie Petersen (Sociology) who are undertaking research on the system of servers and associated technologies that underpin the global shared network of computers, computing power, and data storage, commonly referred to as “the Cloud” or cloud computing. They are interested in exploring how the material dimensions of the Cloud–and the sense of amorphousness that it conjures–exacerbate social and environmental injustices by investigating the physical infrastructures, natural resources, and human labor that underpin large data centers.

Carrie Hamilton is a PhD student in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her work draws on political ecology and critical resource geographies to examine the social and environmental dilemmas posed by the expanding U.S. energy transition mineral frontier. Prior to coming to UCSC, she worked as a program associate at the Social Science Research Council, the administrative coordinator of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, and a research technician at the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience at Duke University. She earned her bachelor’s in environmental science and geography from UNC Chapel Hill.

Kellie Petersen (she/her) is a PhD student in the Sociology department. Her research interests broadly concern future-focused themes such as climate change and the Anthropocene, technology, and urbanization. She has a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Northern Iowa and an MA in Sociology from the University of South Florida.

October 19, 2022 | Sawyer Seminar Inauguration: Tahir Amin on Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health

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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

12:15-1:30 PM 

Humanities 1, Room 210 (in person only)

On Tuesday, October 18, the Inaugural Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Tahir Amin, will present at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center (320 Cedar St) in downtown Santa Cruz (tickets, map) on Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines. Then, on Wednesday, October 19, the Center for Cultural Studies will host Amin from 12:15-1:30pm in Humanities 1, room 210 on Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health.

More on the seminar can be found in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the project website.

Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health

With billions of people in low-income countries still without Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, this pandemic has exposed the neo-colonial structures of the political economy of intellectual property system and the World Trade Organization (WTO). This talk will delve into an often overlooked history of  how the WTO TRIPS Agreement came into existence and the impact it has had on the global South over the 27 years it has been in force – and how it will impact future pandemic preparedness and climate change.

Tahir Amin, LL.B., Dip. LP., is a founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organisation working to address structural inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. He has over 25 years of experience in intellectual property (IP) law, during which he has practised with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work focuses on re-shaping IP laws and the related global political economy to better serve the public interest, by changing the structural power dynamics that allow health and economic inequities to persist.

Amin and I-MAK have also put out a 10 point plan for the Biden-Harris administration to bring equity into the patent system, and their work is highlighted in the New York Times Editorial Board’s recent endorsement of patent reform. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and TED Fellow. Amin has served as legal advisor/consultant to many international groups, including the European Patent Office and World Health Organization, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on intellectual property and unsustainable drug price.

November 09, 2022 | Monica Barra on Alternative Restorations

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Wednesday, November 09, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Earth & Marine Sciences A340 or Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion with Monica Barra on alternative restorations. Special thanks to S&J affiliate faculty Tamara Pico (Earth & Planetary Sciences) for hosting.

Environmental restoration is typically understood as a means of returning a damaged ecosystem to a previously healthy, sustainable state. Yet the extent to which we consider restoration as an ecological and socio-cultural process connected to human politics and desires is largely underexplored across disciplines. Drawing from ethnographic research among scientists and frontline communities of color confronting large scale wetlands restoration in coastal Louisiana, this work-in-progress seminar explores ways of thinking about restoration as an ongoing process of reparation and repair that centers the needs and desires of Black and Indigenous coastal communities. Grounded in Black feminist science studies, Indigenous ecologies, and critical geographies of restoration, it asks: What does it mean to approach ecological restoration as a practice tied to cultivating self-determination for frontline communities? How can science and the restoration of natural geologic processes become an ally—as opposed to an obstacle—in securing the empowerment for these groups? What can we learn about the meaning of restoration from Black and Indigneous ecological practices?

Monica Patrice Barra is a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary background in the social sciences and humanities. Broadly, her work examines the relationship between race, inequality, and environmental change in the United States. Her first book, Good Sediment: Race, Science, and the Politics of Coastal Restoration examines the relationship between racial histories, science, and environmental change from the perspectives of Black coastal communities and scientists confronting Louisiana’s unprecedented wetland loss crisis. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of the Earth, Ocean & Environment at the University of South Carolina.

October 18, 2022 | Sawyer Seminar Inauguration: Tahir Amin on Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022

7:00-8:30 PM (tickets)

Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St, Santa Cruz (map)

On Tuesday, October 18, the Inaugural Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Tahir Amin, will present at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center (320 Cedar St) in downtown Santa Cruz on Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines. Then, on Wednesday, October 19, the Center for Cultural Studies will host an in person reading group from 12:15-1:30pm in Humanities 1, room 210 on Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health.

More on the seminar can be found in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the project website.

Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines

The globalization of intellectual property in the 80s has coincided with some of the deadliest pandemics, epidemics and outbreaks, from HIV, hepatitis C, SARS, and recently COVID -19. Tahir Amin will take us through his and his organization’s journey over two decades fighting the ever growing intellectual property systems being pushed by the US, EU and their pharmaceutical companies that are blocking affordable access to medicines for billions of low income populations around the world.

Tahir Amin, LL.B., Dip. LP., is a founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organisation working to address structural inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. He has over 25 years of experience in intellectual property (IP) law, during which he has practised with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work focuses on re-shaping IP laws and the related global political economy to better serve the public interest, by changing the structural power dynamics that allow health and economic inequities to persist.

Amin and I-MAK have also put out a 10 point plan for the Biden-Harris administration to bring equity into the patent system, and their work is highlighted in the New York Times Editorial Board’s recent endorsement of patent reform. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and TED Fellow. Amin has served as legal advisor/consultant to many international groups, including the European Patent Office and World Health Organization, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on intellectual property and unsustainable drug price.

book

Call for Prospective Stem Cell Justice Graduate Students

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The Departments of History and Sociology at UC Santa Cruz are recruiting PhD students to begin in Fall 2023 to pursue research on stem cells.

UC Santa Cruz is known for its reputation as a center for the study of science (e.g. feminist science studies, multispecies studies, the study of race and genomics, science and justice). 

In pursuing a research agenda situated in Stem Cell Justice, PhD students will have the opportunity to become part of our cross-divisional community of scholars. Students will participate in various transdisciplinary forums that may include the Center for Cultural Studies (CCS), the program in Global and Community Health (GCH), the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC), the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC), and events regularly sponsored by the Departments of History of Consciousness, Anthropology, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, History, Sociology, and Politics.

In addition to university support coordinated by the departments, successful PhD applicants are invited to apply for a fellowship in a future year of study. Fellowship funding is provided from a grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine overseen by the UCSC Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC) who coordinates opportunities for training and research related to the biology of stem cells. IBSC Directors Lindsay Hinck (Professor, MCD Biology) and Camilla Forsberg (Professor, Biomolecular Engineering) lead the institute’s stem cell training and career development programs.

History and Sociology mentoring faculty are particularly interested in the following areas of study:

  • Jennifer Derr (History) My research agenda engages the relationship between the histories of science and medicine and those of capitalism. A portion of this agenda relates to questions of bioethics and the social relations that undergird particular research agendas, such as those bound up with stem cell research. My own research is situated in the Middle East and North Africa. I am particularly well-suited to advise trainees on the implications of stem cell research for the Global South.
  • Jenny Reardon (Sociology) My research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices. My training spans molecular biology, ecology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. I am also the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center, and oversee the Science & Justice Training Program, a nationally and internationally recognized training program that teaches graduate students in science and engineering how to respond to the places where questions of ethics and justice meet questions of science and knowledge. I am particularly well-suited to advise students on the governance of stem cell science and the emergence of novel uses of stem cell research in areas such as agriculture.

More information about the funding can be found in this campus news article: Stem cell agency funds research training program at UC Santa Cruz

CONTACT

Further information about each research center or department’s PhD program can be found on their websites. Please contact the faculty mentor, center manager or department graduate program coordinator with questions regarding participating in their research group or applying to their program.

Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC) | Directors Lindsay Hinck (lhinck@ucsc.edu) and Camilla Forsberg (cforsber@ucsc.edu); IBSC Program Manager (ibsc@ucsc.edu)

https://ibsc.ucsc.edu/ibsc-home

Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) | Founding Director Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu); Manager Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu)

https://scijust.ucsc.edu/

History | Professor Jennifer L. Derr (jderr@ucsc.edu); Coordinator Cindy Morris (morrisc@ucsc.edu)

https://history.ucsc.edu/graduate/index.html

Sociology | Professor Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu); Coordinator (socyga@ucsc.edu) 

https://sociology.ucsc.edu/graduate/prospective-students/index.html

APPLICATIONS

The UC Santa Cruz online PhD application for Fall 2023 will be available beginning October 1st (unless otherwise noted), and closes at 11:59 pm PST on the day of the program’s deadline (available here). Admission is for fall quarter only, there is no year-round admission.

Application process: Students should discuss their proposed area of research in stem cells in their Personal Statement. Upon being accepted to a PhD program, students will apply to the IBSC CIRM training program fellowship as a current UCSC PhD student. To participate in the next IBSC program cohort beginning in January, application forms will be made available in late summer and can be found at the bottom of the following webpage: https://ibsc.ucsc.edu/graduate-student-training/cirm-training-graduate-students. 

Black and red abstract lines painted on a gray brick wall

National Science Foundation grant will help establish ethics and equity best practices for emerging forms of science and technology

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Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon, founding director of the Science & Justice Research Center, won a nearly $400,000 National Science Foundation grant to study ethics and equity in the design of science and engineering projects. The project team will spend the next two years reviewing prior scholarship and examining case studies in the fields of genomics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to analyze how ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) and diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) are incorporated into science.

Learn more in this campus news article: National Science Foundation grant will help establish ethics and equity best practices for emerging forms of science and technology

If you would like to take part in or contribute to the LEED project, email Jenny Reardon.

October 12, 2022 | Meet & Greet

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Wednesday, October 12, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + Zoom Registration

Please join us for a beginning of quarter social hour. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company, we will welcome new members to our community, and welcome back others.

This will be a great chance for everyone to meet and foster emerging collaborations! Attendees are 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, sugar, human blood, a human liver, and food.

Faculty or students interested in science and justice who want to learn more about SJRC collaborative projects, the Training Program, or would like to affiliate with Science & Justice are highly encouraged to join us in person or over Zoom.

October 7-9, 2022 | Playing with Fire: a Hot Symposium

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Friday, October 7th – Sunday, October 9th

Digital Arts Research Center, DARC 108 (map)

Playing with Fire: a Hot Symposium Exploring the pleasures, perils & politics of fire through art, theory, practice, science and activism. 

Stay tuned to the E.A.R.T.H. Lab for more information.

Confirmed speakers and participants include:
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: Keynote and Hosts
Roxi Power: Fire Poems
Becca Fenwick: Director, CITRIS Initiative for Drone Education and Research: Presenting UCNRS Fire Data
Karin Bolender: Artist and Director of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (RAW)
Justin Hoover, Artist and Director of the Chinese Historical Society of America
Brandon Smith, Director of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRC)
Benny Fillmore, Washoe Elder and Hotshot Firefighter
Laura Smith-Fillmore, Washoe Language Translator and Artist
Helen Fillmore, Environmentalist, Hotshot Firefighter
Julie Weitz, Artist: Golem: A Call to Action + Prayer for Burnt Forests