Science & Justice Affiliated Faculty Jaimie Morse (Sociology) has been awarded the 2022 David Edge Prize from the Society for Social Studies Science for her 2021 Osiris article on “The Geopolitics of ‘Rape Kit’ Protocols: Historical Problems in Translation as Humanitarian Medicine Meets International Law.”

More on the award and Morse’s article can be found at: https://www.4sonline.org/what-is-4s/4s-prizes/david-edge-prize/

Volume 15

Director’s Letter: Welcome to Science & Justice

As we look forward to the year to come, we appreciate the chance to share with you our accomplishments of the last year.

Science & Justice continues to be in the headlines, making a critical difference in California, the nation and globally. Our faculty and students were out front both in the press, and in their many new publications and interviews, addressing pressing issues, including public trust in science and medicine, and how COVID has revivified or changed existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. Members of our Theorizing Race After Race working group published critical dialogues about COVID, Race and Racism in The Foundry. Members of the Unjustly Exposed documentary reported on their collaborative class with Georgetown. As part of SJRC’s long standing goal to transform institutional structures so that they support a much more diverse range of scholars, we launched projects to Build Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies, as well as received a grant from the National Science Foundation for our Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research initiative. Our faculty also participated in workshops hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, for example, the Educational Pathways for Black Students in Science, Engineering, and Medicine; Exploring Barriers and Possible Interventions: Proceedings of a Workshop and the Launch Workshop for the Consensus Study on Creating A Framework for Emerging Science, Technology and Medicine.

Our events continued to highlight the unusual and inspiring collaborations and conversation Science & Justice creates. Participants engaged with us from all over the nation and world, including over the last year remotely from Denmark and Mexico, and universities throughout the United States.

Despite the ongoing pandemic, the 2021-22 academic year also produced much to celebrate. Congratulations to many affiliated faculty who were promoted and received tenure – and those who published books – a special feat of the industries, especially during a pandemic! We look forward to finally celebrating this coming year. Congratulations to collaborator Alondra Nelson for being appointed the Deputy Assistant to the President and performing the duties of the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); and Karen Miga for being named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People! Congratulations also to founding Training Program Fellow, Colin Hoag, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Smith College, who published a book on water and ecology in Lesotho, titled “The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy” from University of California Press. We will celebrate the book launch next year. As well as to Sociology and Statistics undergraduate student Aisha Lakeshman who was awarded honors for her senior thesis on, “Normalizing “Slow Science” in the Case of RNA-Therapeutics: Research Pace and Public Trust in Science,“ researched that emerged from her work on our partnership with C.O.A.S.T. team (Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics).

As we plan the year ahead, we are especially excited to begin gathering in-person again! We will do our best to keep hybrid activities available. Top activities we look forward to are our Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine with Jennifer Derr and The Humanities Institute, working with Associate Director of Teaching James Doucet-Battle to advance Build Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies, launching a faculty recruitment in Critical Race STS and a Hub to build a Science and Justice minor with the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, and the launching of our LEED initiative.

We are ever thankful for the guidance and support our steering committee and board of advisors continue to provide us, and for the support of many units and divisions on campus.

Jenny Reardon

Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Science & Justice Leadership Team

Founding DIRECTOR | Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology

DIRECTOR of Teaching the SJTP | James Doucet-Battle, Associate Professor of Sociology

CENTER MANAGER | Colleen Stone

GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCHER | Chessa Adsit-Morris, History of Art and Visual Culture

Science & Justice Steering Committee

Jennifer Derr, Associate Professor of History

James Doucet-Battle, Associate Professor of Sociology

Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Professor of Anthropology

Lise Getoor, Professor of Computer Science

Dee Hibbert-Jones, Associate Professor of Digital Art and New Media

Jaimie Morse, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology

Matt Sparke, Professor of Politics

The Science & Justice Mission

The Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a globally unique endeavor that innovates experimental spaces, engages in collaborative research practices, and fosters emerging alliances between seemingly disparate sectors, disciplines and communities. Biomedical innovation, species extinction, toxic ecologies, access to healthcare, and many other contemporary matters of concern provoke questions that traverse multiple intellectual, institutional and ethico-political worlds. Science & Justice generates modes of inquiry and empirically rigorous research that address these enormous challenges and support livable worlds. The Center is home to the Science and Justice Working Group, the Science and Justice Graduate Training Program (SJTP) and sponsored research projects. The initiative builds on the UCSC campus’ historic commitments to socio-ecological justice and strengths in science studies and interdisciplinary research.

Sustaining a Vibrant SJRC Community

The Science & Justice Research Center supports a vibrant, collaborative community. Located in Oakes College, SJRC hosts visitors from across the UC system and around the world. The SJRC community is committed to sustaining an experimental ecosystem for novel ideas, dialogues, methods and collaborations. The Science & Justice Working Group remains the heart of our collective work. We also host regular reading groups and experimental mixers with affiliated graduate students and faculty who seek to further investigate the meanings and practices of science and justice.

Visiting Scholar Program

Since 2009, the SJRC Visiting Scholars Program has been a vibrant hub for interdisciplinary scholars across the UC-system, the nation and the globe. The Science & Justice Research Center offers opportunities for visiting scholars at all levels of their career (regardless of institutional affiliation) to participate in the community through research collaborations, reading groups and experimental mixers. In the 2021-2022 academic year, the Center continued to host one long-term visiting scholar, two remote exchanges, and hosted one on campus visitor: refer to Appendix 1 to learn more about our visitors.

Highlights from the Science & Justice Working Group, Experimental Mixers, Writing and Reading Groups

The Science & Justice Working Group (SJWG) provides a convivial and novel space to cultivate emerging connections, spark new questions for research, and nurture our communities’ collaborative ties. In addition to formally convening the SJWG, our informal experimental mixers are a lively and open space for all SJRC community members.

Below are some highlights of the year’s events (all events are listed in Appendix 2).

On October 06, the Center began the academic year by hosting our annual Meet & Greet. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company, the annual gathering is always a great chance to welcome new members, welcome back others, and share current work to foster emerging collaborations.

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Melina Packer kicked off the Works-in-Progress Series on October 13 by presenting their research on Toxicant Masculinity. Packer offered a critical feminist historiography of toxicology, also known as “the basic science of poisons.” Applying queer feminist theory and methods, Packer’s project urges contemporary toxicologists to re-situate the science of poisons in its sociopolitical context, confronting the discipline’s military-industrial history while centering the lived experiences of over-exposed communities, for both better science and environmental justice.

Our Works-in-Progress series continued on October 27 with one of our remote visiting scholars, Rebecca Herzig, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College on Science, Justice, and University Abolition. This talk, part of a larger work-in-progress on US higher education, drew together left abolitionist approaches to the university and decolonial, anti-capitalist, and queer feminist critiques of science. Specifically, the talk took up Boggs et al’s (2019) call to reckon with US universities’ complicity with settler colonial and racial capitalist regimes of accumulation by considering the distinctive positioning of contemporary “STEM,” ideologically and materially, within those regimes. Thinking of Science & Justice within and beyond the carceral university, the talk suggested, requires struggle with academic science’s ongoing conditioning of twenty-first century racial-capitalist orders.

On November 10, we celebrated the launch of SJRC affiliate faculty Beth Shapiro’s new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021). Science & Justice Training Program Fellows, Jonas Oppenheimer (Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics) and Jenny Pensky (Earth & Planetary Sciences) presented findings from their collaborative research project exploring the relationships between “invasive” plants, botanical gardens, and colonialism – as well as – put their work into conversation with Shapiro’s Life as We Made It. Learn more about Life as We Made It in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

On January 19, we continued the Works-in-Progress series with Daphne Martschenko, a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and collaborator Sam Trejo, an Assistant Professor in the Department Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, on how ethical, anticipatory genomics research on human behavior means celebrating disagreement.

On February 07, with the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies along with Performance, Play and Design, we celebrated the launch of SJRC affiliate faculty micha cárdenas’ new book, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, from Duke University Press at the Cowell Provost house. The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats are available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations.

On February 09, we heard from our long-time visiting scholar, Melissa Eitzel Solera, now with the Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis. Eitzel Solera gave us a brief report on the achievements from the work at SJRC as an NSF Science, Education, and Engineering for Sustainability postdoctoral scholar, some highlights of new collaborative projects at Davis, and workshopped papers associated with the recently-published Modeler’s Manifesto.

On February 23, we heard from visiting scholar, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda in a talk titled, “Global divisions of health; bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America.” Saldaña-Tejeda, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, asked how scientific and non-scientific communities of knowledge production in Latin America have historically perceived ethical concerns regarding human genome editing and other reproductive technologies (MSRTs). Saldaña-Tejeda’s project explored how current frameworks, concerns and discourses in the United States and Europe engage with (or contradict) those in Latin America. Over the summer, Saldaña-Tejeda co-authored an article, “Policy landscapes on human genome editing: a perspective from Latin America”, published in Science & Society’s Trends in Biotechnology.

Later in the day on February 23, S&J colleague, Professor of African American studies, and founding director of Princeton University’s Ida B.Wells JUST Data Lab, Ruha Benjamin, spoke at the 38th annual UCSC Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation. The talk was moderated by SJRC affiliated faculty Camilla Hawthorne, Associate Professor of Sociology. SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRaR) Working Group (which Professor Hawthorne co-leads) discussed Professor’s Benjamin’s work in advance of the talk.  More in this campus news article: Distinguished sociologist and founding director of Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab to headline MLK Convocation.

On April 13, we concluded the Works-in-Progress series with Visiting Scholar and Wellcome Trust Fellow Rachel O’Neill, an Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics who is undertaking research on ‘wellness’ culture in the UK, with a particular focus on food and nutrition. Professor O’Neill is very much concerned with the cultural politics of wellness, including its gendered, classed, and racialised dimensions.

Justice Sparks Innovative and Original Research

The Science & Justice Research Center continues to be an exemplar of how to transform commitments to justice into collaborative research projects. We formulate new methods and institutional practices where scientists and engineers work alongside social scientists, humanists, ethicists, artists and diverse public communities. SJRC affiliates pursue local, regional, national, and international research collaborations on issues that inform and affect institutional and public policy.

In 2021-2022 the center focused on several ongoing projects. Members of our Theorizing Race After Race working group published critical dialogues about COVID, Race and Racism in UC Humanities Institute’s on-line platform, The Foundry. Sociology and Statistics undergraduate student Aisha Lakeshman was awarded honors for her senior thesis, “Normalizing “Slow Science” in the Case of RNA-Therapeutics: Research Pace and Public Trust in Science ,“ and outgrowth of research she did as part of our collaboration with C.O.A.S.T. (the Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics). Members of the Unjustly Exposed documentary led by Film and Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel reported on their collaborative class with Georgetown. As part of SJRC’s long standing goal to transform institutional structures so that they support a much more diverse range of scholars, we launched projects to Build Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies as well as received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research.

Funding Undergraduate and Graduate Research

SJRC assisted students in identifying and applying for campus funding to conduct original and collaborative research. Campus funding was awarded to undergraduate Science & Justice researchers through the Undergraduate Research in Science & Technology Endowment (Aisha Lakshman, Sociology, Statistics; Tee Wicks, Sociology), the Genomics Institute’s Research Mentoring Internship Program (Aisha Lakshman, Sociology; Ryleigh Hales, Biochemistry, MCD Biology Spring 2021; Jessica Singh, MCD Biology, Legal Studies Spring 2021), and the Institute for Social Transformation’s Building Belonging Program (Andrea Asher, Sociology, Human Biology Summer 2021-Summer 2022.

In 2021-22, SJRC also awarded 3 undergraduate students (totaling $ 2200) and 3 graduate students (totaling $10,000) funds to conduct original and collaborative research. The awards supported general living expenses, fieldwork or travel (as allowed by COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions), presentation of work, and research. Dennis Browe (Sociology) conceptualized a half day symposium on ImaginACTivism as part of his work on Science & Justice’s Just Biomedicine Project, which he had a chance to co-present at the Precision Medicine and Society Conference at Columbia University in May 2021 in a talk titled, “From City of Love to City of Life: Revitalization and the Reconstruction of San Francisco’s Uneven Healthscapes” with UCSC Sociology Alum Andy Murray and Kate Darling (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Maine, Augusta). PhD candidate Chessa Adsit-Morris (HAVC) helped the group secure grants from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the UC Santa Cruz Office of Research, and the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation for the LEED initiative.

For a complete list of the ongoing research our community conducted, refer to Appendix 3.

Creating a UCSC Ethics in Practice

At an increasing rate, many forms of scientific evidence are met not just with questions of curiosity and interest, but also with skepticism and mistrust. Healthcare systems are challenged by entrenched inequalities and profit motives. Algorithms encode bias into the heart of big data approaches to science and engineering. The next generation of leaders in biomedical and life sciences, environmental science, and engineering need to be adept at addressing these challenges. At SJRC, we believe this requires bold new approaches to ethics and research practice in STEM fields. We strive to exceed narrow standards for the ethical approval of science and prepare and support our students and faculty to be powerful stewards of socially robust and reflexive science. Our vision of good science exceeds simple compliance and strives towards institutional change. We work with affiliates to realize this in practice. Examples of our efforts from this year are described below.

A Model for Building Diversity and Interdisciplinarity

National calls for increased attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all phases of STEM research, from project inception to publication, have led to an increasing demand for scholars trained in STS who can provide guidance to STEM researchers and serve as collaborators on STEM research teams. Yet the lack of diversity in STS threatens to reproduce the same hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality that have long been documented in STEM fields, as well as the broader societal barriers to equity and justice that these calls seek to address. While substantial resources have been allocated to address pipeline issues in STEM and to a lesser extent the social sciences, to our knowledge, few exist that specifically focus on training the next generation of STS scholars of color who can provide critical guidance and nuanced expertise on justice and equity concerns in STEM. Despite this growing demand, there is little guidance on best practices for fostering this integration or for evaluating its effects. As efforts to increase the diversity of both researchers and the researched in STEM have gained in prominence, the number of African and Indigenous descent PhDs working in STS remains low in the United States.

In 2021-2022 Science & Justice continued its history of initiating bold new collaborations and under the direction of Associate Professor of Sociology and SJRC Associate Director of Teaching James Doucet-Battle, we launched a study to Build Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies. We focussed our efforts on applying for a grant from the UC-HBCU initiative to strengthen UCSC’s efforts to attain and support graduate students. We worked closely with the Office of Research and the Division of Graduate Studies to coordinate staff and faculty in multiple divisions, departments, resource and cultural centers, and campus student success units to identify student and faculty needs and structural barriers to writing, receiving and supporting UC-HBCU grants. We created agreements and tools to better holistically address these needs and barriers. Our work is resulting in holistic institutional support from central administration while we build partnerships between UCSC and HBCU faculty.

Finally, we continued our work with Genomics Institute staff and faculty to collaborate on integrating a concern for ethics and justice into genomics research. James Doucet-Battle (Sociology), Jenny Reardon and Colleen Stone worked with Lars Fehren-Schmitz (Anthropology), Angela Brooks (BME), Karen Miga (BME) and Zia Isola to reconceive Genomics and Society work. In this, we applied for, but were not awarded, SEED Funding for an Early-Stage Initiative through the UCSC Office of Research for “Training tomorrow’s leaders at the intersection of Genome Sciences, Policy and Society.” We, however, continue our work together and are seeking alternate sources of support.  Professor Karen Miga also  joined our effort to create a Science and Justice minor. James Doucet-Battle and Angela Brooks worked together on UC-HBCU training program grants. Jenny Reardon and Colleen Stone with Jeremy Sanford (MCD Biology) and Michael Stone (Chemistry) continued working in The UCSC Center for Orphan-disease Alternative Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.).  C.O.A.S.T seeks to accelerate the discovery of precision therapies for rare diseases by exploiting the chemical language of ribonucleic acid (RNA), while addressing the questions of ethics and justice raised by this novel area of research. Finally, drawing on work with C.O.A.S.T., Aisha Lakshman (Sociology, Statistics) wrote a senior thesis, “Normalizing “Slow Science” in the Case of RNA-Therapeutics: Research Pace and Public Trust in Science.“ Lakshman, who was awarded honors, used her two disciplines to interpret datasets to demonstrate social problems and catalyze social change. In May 2022, Lakshman presented her research poster at UC Global Health Day hosted by UC Santa Cruz.

This year we also extended our efforts to create a more robust approach to ethics grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration through our new partnership with the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells. Working with Camilla Forsberg (Biomolecular Engineering) and Lindsay Hinck (Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology), we created a Science and Justice training component for the successful EDUC 4: CIRM Research Training Grant “CIRM Scholar” Award. We look forward to working with them, and to expanding training opportunities in stem cell research to include a critical focus on questions of ethics and justice. See this UCSC news story for more information.

Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design (LEED) of STEM Initiative

To clarify, review, and revitalize the roles and value of engaging bioethicists and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts in STEM research, SJRC launched a national and international collaborative initiative informally called LEED. ​​Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research proceeds in three phases: background research; drafting of LEED Principles and Practices; and International Discussion and Write-Up of LEED Principles and Practices. SJRC Founding Director and Professor of Sociology Jenny Reardon was the PI of a successful grant application to the National Science Foundation ER2-Ethical & Responsible Research ($399.994) that will support the first phase of the project. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee (Columbia University) and Mildred Cho (Stanford) are the co-PIs, and Evelynn Hammonds (Harvard), Aaron Panofsky (UCLA), Malia Fulteron (University of Washington), and Sara Goering (University of Washington) are senior personnel. The LEED group wrote its first article, which Cell magazine favorably reviewed. We anticipate its publication in Cell next year.

For a complete list of the ongoing research our community conducted, refer to Appendix 3.

Science & Justice Training Program

Science & Justice Graduate Training Program

The SJRC is the home to the globally unique Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). The program teaches graduate students from across all five divisions how to collectively address the moments where questions of science meet questions of justice.

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP), draws together masters, early career PhD students and faculty from across all five Divisions of the University. Students who took the training program’s introductory course Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration in the Winter 2020 term with SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon presented on their project Ecological and Social Perspectives on Restoration, in conjunction with SJRC affiliate faculty Beth Shapiro’s new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)! (poster – PDF).

Students who enrolled in the seminar offered in Winter 2022 taught by SJRC Director of Teaching James Doucet-Battle, entered the program in Spring and Fellows began conducting original research and collaborative projects over the summer. In the 2021-22 academic year, Doucet-Battle will mentor graduate students who chose to go on to get a Science and Justice graduate certificate. The seminar will be offered again in Winter 2024.

Over the last 12 years, the introductory course for the Science & Justice Training Program has trained 104 graduate students representing 22 different UC Santa Cruz departments in creative approaches to science and justice. Participating in the program helps students build their careers and catalyzes new collaborative initiatives within the university. Our students have already had considerable early career success, demonstrated by their successful applications for fellowships, grants, postdoctoral positions and entrepreneurial efforts.

Building Science and Justice Undergraduate Curriculum

UC Santa Cruz offers a wide range of courses across its many disciplines that address the relationships between science, society and justice. Science & Justice affiliates have long desired to create a large core course that would teach undergraduates the fundamentals of Science and Justice. Over this last year,  SJRCs Steering Committee continued to discuss the potential with faculty and staff across campus for creating a minor in Science and Justice. A Science and Justice minor could offer students an opportunity to learn the transdisciplinary field of science and justice studies while at the same time receiving training in their major discipline. SJRC will continue to gather faculty  to discuss and conceptualize new courses and a proposal for a minor in Science and Justice to be hosted by the newly established Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department. With Christine Hong (Chair of CRES), we applied for campus seed funding made available through the Office of Research for a Science and Justice Minor Hub and Research Cluster to develop the minor over the 2021-2022 academic year. While it was not awarded, it was underwritten by the Humanities Division. Over the Summer 2022, SJRC and CRES began inviting affiliated faculty to join the Hub who will meet next year.

Funding the Future of Science & Justice

Director Jenny Reardon and Manager Colleen Stone with the advice of the SJRC Steering Committee continue to work closely with University Relations and Development Officers to develop strategies for funding the future of science and justice at UC Santa Cruz.

On November 03, we hosted a Giving Day campaign to support SJTP Fellows (pictured), case statements and concrete fundraising goals for the research center and the graduate training program. Our immediate grant-writing and fundraising goals include fellowship support for the Science & Justice Training Program graduate fellows, and support for Center staff and faculty.

With the support of the SJRC Steering Committee, we have helped faculty across campus raise over $10 million in grants. Currently, the SJRC is directly managing nearly $750,000 in funded research and training initiatives (refer to Appendix 5 for a list of active grants and Appendix 8 for a full breakdown). 

We will continue to pursue grants to support and endow the Center’s collaborative research, training and advocacy activities.

Additional grant funding and donor contributions will secure our efforts to build an internationally recognized program that trains the next generation of scholars to responsibly take up the important social and scientific problems of our time. Higher levels of grant writing support will help us to develop our research infrastructure and our ability to obtain large-scale grants. Our ambitious fundraising goals and sustained efforts to pursue grant and foundation funding will continue the growth and vitality of our work and community.

As we look to the future, we seek to continue to build SJRC as a hub for extramural funding of research projects with links to science and justice.

Reflecting on Our Progress and Looking Ahead

The 2021-22 academic year marked the end of our tenth year as a research center. The SJRC has become a dynamic and collaborative infrastructure for training the next generation of humanities, natural and social science researchers and engineers who are trained to pursue their research and make discoveries in ecosystems where ethics and justice are primary concerns.  The Center and its affiliated faculty remained key partners in creating innovative training, curriculum, and research across campus that recognizes the questions of ethics and justice at stake as we forge knowledge and innovations. In particular, we continued to deepen our collaborations with our colleagues in Science and Engineering, particularly through future HBCU Summer Undergraduate programs; and our colleagues in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies to develop an undergraduate minor in Science and Justice.  We also deepened and extended our national and international networks through the launch of our LEED initiative.

Reflecting on our progress and growth, we continue to refine Center practices, and document them in the SJRC Handbook. Center Manager, Colleen Stone continued to meet with Director Jenny Reardon and Sociology Department Manager Jessica Lawrence to better understand and delineate responsibilities of administrative tasks related to running the Center. Reardon and Stone also continued to envision specific ways in which SJRC can provide effective support to the educational and research efforts of our diverse faculty community.

We are committed to developing future research collaborations, and seek collaborators from all divisions at UCSC and in the UC system, as well as in the community. We will continue to provide a critical and dynamic space that supports the diverse needs of our faculty, researchers, students, and staff.

As we plan the year ahead, we are especially excited to begin gathering in-person again! We will do our best to keep hybrid activities available. Top activities we look forward to are our Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine with Jennifer Derr and The Humanities Institute, launching a faculty recruitment in Critical Race STS and a Hub to build a Science and Justice minor with the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department, working with SJRC Director of Teaching James Doucet-Battle to advance Building Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies, and launching our LEED initiative.

SJRC’s promise is simple and bold. The benefits are manifold: improved outcomes not just for humans, but for the many non-human lives as well; approaches to science and technology that balance prosperity and justice, health, ecological survival and ethics. Our affiliated researchers and interdisciplinary teams have built decades of scholastic expertise examining the life sciences and biomedicine, health, environment, food, and racial and economic justice. The Center provides the critical milieu in which the creative sharing of this expertise leads to novel justice praxis and knowledge sharing that fosters and supports diverse lives and futures.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

Appendix 1: Visiting Scholars

Melissa Eitzel Solera | National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellow, Sociology (through December 2021).

Kim Hendrickx | Research Associate, Spiral, University of Liège (Belgium). Kim was also a 2017-2018 visiting scholar. Refer to Kim’s September 2021 article in Frontiers in Pharmacology on Orphan Drugs, Compounded Medication and Pharmaceutical Commons.

Rebecca Herzig | Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Bates College.

Appendix 2: Science & Justice Working Group (SJWG) Events, Experimental Mixers, and Reading Groups

Our 2021-2022 events are linked below for more information, rapporteur reports and recordings.

October 05, 2021 | Assuming the Ecosexual Position Book Celebration with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens

October 06, 2021 | Meet & Greet

October 13, 2021 | Works-in-Progress with Melina Packer

October 21, 2021 | Theorizing Race After Race

October 27, 2021 | Works-in-Progress with Rebecca Herzig

November 03, 2021 | Giving Day

November 10, 2021 | Graduate Training Program Informational Meeting

November 10, 2021 | Book Launch! Life As We Made It + SJTP Fellow Presentation

January 19, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Daphne Martschenko and Sam Trejo

February 07, 2022 | Book Launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

February 09, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Melissa Eitzel

February 23, 2022 | Global divisions of health: bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America

February 23, 2022 | Ruha Benjamin: 38th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation

April 13, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Rachel O’Neill: the cultural politics of wellness

Appendix 3: Research Clusters & Projects

Building Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies Initiative

As efforts to increase the diversity of both researchers and the researched in STEM have gained in prominence, the number of underrepresented graduate students working in Science and Technology Studies (STS) remains unacceptably low in the United States. While substantial resources have been allocated to address pipeline issues in STEM and to a lesser extent the social sciences, to our knowledge, few exist that specifically focus on training the next generation of STS scholars of color who can provide critical guidance and nuanced expertise on justice and equity concerns in STEM. The Sociology Department at UC Santa Cruz, with the Science & Justice Research Center, endeavors to better fulfill department and university missions by increasing the number of underrepresented graduate students and fostering intellectual excellence in our fields and academic associations that better reflects the diversity of our state. For more information, contact James Doucet-Battle.

Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.)

Science & Justice (Jenny Reardon, Andy Murray, and Colleen Stone) continued to work with Jeremy Sanford (MCD Biology) and Michael Stone (Chemistry) on a project as part of an effort to create The UCSC Center for Orphan-disease Alternative Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.). The group was awarded $75,000 of seed funding from the Office of Research and PBSci Dean Koch. The goals of C.O.A.S.T. is to accelerate the discovery of precision therapies for rare diseases by exploiting the chemical language of ribonucleic acid (RNA), while addressing the questions of ethics and justice raised by this novel area of research. Drawing on work with C.O.A.S.T. and lessons learned from COVID-19 Aisha Lakshman (Sociology, Statistics) expanded her blog post on “Normalizing Slow Science,” to a senior thesis on, “Normalizing “Slow Science” in the Case of RNA-Therapeutics: Research Pace and Public Trust in Science.“ Lakshman, who was awarded honors, used her two disciplines to interpret datasets to demonstrate social problems and catalyze social change. She presented her research poster in person at UC Global Health Day hosted by UC Santa Cruz.

Incarcerated Care

The Incarcerated Care project brought together UCSC social scientists, film and digital media makers with local community groups to study and document health care needs and challenges of California state jails and prisons. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the research expanded with the creation of EXPOSED (https://unjustlyexposed.com) overseen by Film & Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel. Exposed documents the spread of COVID-19 over time inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the United States, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. In Summer 2021, the SJRC issued fellowships to 3 undergraduates and 1 graduate researcher to continue contributing to the interactive documentary. Previous undergraduate researchers came from – psychology, legal studies, feminist studies, cognitive science, politics and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies–to work on the project.

Additionally, SJRC affiliated faculty Sharon Daniel taught a collaborative course, “Reasonable Doubts: Making an Exoneree” with Professor of Government and Law at Georgetown Marc Howard and his childhood friend, Adjunct Professor Marty Tankleff, who was himself wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for almost 18 years before being exonerated. Howard and Tankleff developed Georgetown’s Making an Exoneree course in 2018, and its students have already won the release of three men and made significant progress in the legal prospects of several others. For the current 2022 class, the original crimes and convictions of five people were re-investigated, and students painstakingly documented the main issues, challenges, injustices, and stories involved in each case, producing short documentary films, interactive documentaries, and social media campaigns designed to provide humanizing portraits of the incarcerated people’s lives and complicated legal cases. For more on “Making an Exoneree,” read a recent news article here or, contact Sharon Daniel.

Just Biomedicine

Just Biomedicine is a UC Santa Cruz-based research collective that examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. Many hope that this convergence will democratize access to health information and produce revolutionary new medical treatments that new companies will make available to the public through market mechanisms. Yet, as in other domains, living with technoscientific transformations over time reveals how they produce new inequalities and injustices: new challenges to democratic governance; new surveillance regimes; and new forms of social stratification.

The team continued presenting their findings at other academic institutions and professional academic associations. In August 2021, graduate student researcher Dennis Browe (sociology) presented at the American Sociological Association.

SJRC Director Jenny Reardon continued her service on the advisory board for the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA). CERA is a new national center establishing a reliable online platform for scientists, scholars, policymakers, journalists and the general public to learn about the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics and genomics (ELSI) and fostering a community of multi-disciplinary researchers focused on ELSI research. CERA is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-led by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Division of Ethics at Columbia University in partnership with The Hastings Center and the Personal Genetics Education Project at Harvard University by Co-Principal Investigators Mildred Cho (Associate Director Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics) and Sandra Soo-Jin Lee (Chief, Division of Ethics Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University). To get involved, contact Jenny Reardon.

Following the April 2019 meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at The Vatican on the future of genomic medicine, Reardon published an essay entitled, Thoughtful Genomics in the edited book published by Oxford University that arose from the meeting, Can Precision Medicine Be Personal? Can Precision Medicine Be Precise? More on the book can be found in Appendix 4.

Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design of STEM research (LEED)

Increasingly public and private funders recognize the critical importance of incorporating ethical and societal analysis into the design of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) research. Despite this growing demand, there is little guidance on best practices for fostering this integration or for evaluating its effects. This initiative—a national and international collaboration—aims to clarify, review, and revitalize the roles and value of engaging bioethicists and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts in STEM research. It proceeds in three phases: background research; drafting of LEED Principles and Practices; and International Discussion and Write-Up of LEED Principles and Practices. If you would like to take part in or contribute to this project, email Jenny Reardon. Learn more.

The Pandemicene: Re-Worlding Towards Justice

The Science & Justice project The Pandemicene still catches the attention of the public. Amid the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis, our particular commitment at Science & Justice remained to help build spaces where our partners and friends from around the planet could think and re-world together. During 2020-2021, Pandemicene students produced 13 podcast episodes, aired on KZSC 88.1FM and Spotify, that addressed overlapping topics of institutions of care, genomics, health and society, and how– practically–to re-world towards justice at this critical historical juncture. To get involved, contact Jenny Reardon.

Queer Ecologies Research Cluster

Queer Ecologies is a group led by Training Program Fellows Paloma Medina (now alum) and Dennis Browe. The cluster investigates how sexuality and concepts of nature have been historically linked. In particular, they are interested in how evolutionary and ecological science has informed what is “natural” and how we use this information to delineate certain sexual behaviors as normal or aberrant. Queer Ecologies seeks to examine the historical making of the natural as it relates to sexuality while communicating the overwhelming diversity of sex and gender in biology. The cluster looks forward to resuming gatherings in the coming year. To get involved, please contact Dennis Browe.

Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine

Thanks to a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, over the next two years, through a seminar working group led by Professors Jennifer Derr (History) and Jenny Reardon (Sociology), faculty and students at UC Santa Cruz will have a chance to critically investigate the relationships among medicine, race, and the environment both in the United States and in other regions of the globe shaped by the influence of American medicine. The project will hire graduate students and a one-year postdoctoral scholar.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” will host public lectures, scholarly talks, and a regular interdisciplinary reading and discussion group, the seminar will interrogate the intersections among race, empire, and the environment, and their significance in the theory, practice, and structure of American biomedicine. The seminar’s geographic frame is that of the American biomedical empire, a formation that includes the United States as well as those places formed by and encircled in the networks of American (biomedical) imperial influence. Within these geographies, race has functioned as a determinant of environmental exposures with deleterious impacts on human health. It also has been a central component of the environmental imaginaries that undergird the theory and practice of medicine and the provision of care. The seminar will approach the history and study of biomedicine from the vantage point of its racialized environments with an eye towards how these critical engagements might be marshaled to produce a more equitable practice of medicine. It is rooted in the proposition that to fully grasp the significance of race in medicine, we must probe how race is made material through environmental imaginaries, practices, and material entanglements, and how these in turn undergird and shape American biomedicine. Learn more at this campus news article or contact Jennifer Derr.

Theorizing Race After Race

Launched in 2018-2019 by SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and SJRC affiliate and Assistant Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne, the working group, Theorizing Race after Race (TRaR) continued seeking to develop a framework for grappling with reconfigurations of race after the supposedly ‘post-racial’ moment. Their goal is to understand how knowledge of the genome and ideas of human difference circulate, taking on different meanings across diverse historical-geographical contexts. The group convened several meetings throughout the academic year with campus scholars and developed a publication plan including a series of dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism.

During August 2021, TRAR student researchers hosted a third dialogue with four scholars from around the Americas discussing how COVID-19 has revivified or changed existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. This dialogue has been posted to The Foundry as Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon. The first two dialogues, posted last year on UCHRI’s Foundry site, cover Black geographies of quarantine and Metrics, enumeration, and the politics of knowledge. To get involved, contact Jenny Reardon and Camilla Hawthorne.

Sociology and Science, Technology, and Society Studies Pathways Project

Focusing on sociology and science, technology, and society studies, the Pathways Project, engages transdisciplinary thought and collaboration, and the critical skills needed for building our capacities to address problems of our time that span disciplines and areas of practice. The broader mission of the Pathways Project seeks to engage undergraduate students in robust intellectual linkages between the social sciences, African Diaspora Studies, history, politics, and genomic science to better understand the question of diversity. For more information, contact James Doucet-Battle.

Appendix 4: SJRC Publications Launched in 2021-2022

Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

In 2008, S&J affiliated faculty Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, setting them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, their seven-year art and exhibition project with performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young.

Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, celebrating their vows to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth. The collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, and art and environmentalism to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

As written in CNN, Stephens and Sprinkle’s “collaborative projects bring joy amid injustice and hardship… make saving the planet a bit sexier.” The book launch is planned as another joyful project in the struggle against climate change.

Can precision medicine be personal; Can personalized medicine be precise? (Oxford University Press, 2022)

People have always sought medical care that is tailored to every individual patient. Alongside with the historical development of institutions of care, the vision of personal and ‘holistic’ care persisted. Patient-centred medicine, interpersonal communication and shared decision making have become central to medical practice and services.

This evolving vision of ‘personalized medicine’ is in the forefront of medicine, creating debates among ethicists, philosophers and sociologists of medicine about the nature of disease and the definition of wellness, the impact on the daily life of patients, as well as its implications on low-income countries. Is increased ‘precision’ also an improvement on the personal aspects of care or erosion of privacy? Do ‘precise’ and ‘personalized’ approach marginalize public health, and can this care be personalized without attention to culture, economy and society?

Can precision medicine be personal; Can personalized medicine be precise? provides a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary discussion of the ethos and ethics of precision/personal medicine, involving scientists who have shaped the field, in dialogue with ethicists, social scientists and philosophers of science. The contributing scholars come from all over the world and from different cultural backgrounds providing reflective perspectives of history of ideas, critical theory and technology assessment, together with the actual work done by pioneers in the field. It explores issues such as global justice, gender, public health, pharmaceutical industry, international law and religion, and explores themes discussed in relation to personalized medicine such as new-born screening and disorders of consciousness.

Edited by Y. Michael Barilan, Margherita Brusa, and Aaron Ciechanover with contribution by Professor of Sociology and SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon from their participation in the workshop, “The Revolution of Personalized Medicine: Are We Going to Cure All Diseases and at What Price?,” that took place April 8-9, 2019 in Vatican City.

Read more in this campus news article: Jenny Reardon participates in Vatican workshop on personalized medicine.

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

Contesting Race and Citizenship is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. SJRC affiliated faculty Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, Europe itself.

Contesting Race and Citizenship traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.

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

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)

When the 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, it underlined our amazing and apparently novel powers to alter nature. But as biologist S&J affiliated faculty Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, she claims, reshaping nature—resetting the course of evolution, ours and others’—is the essence of what our species does.

In exploring our evolutionary and cultural history, Shapiro finds a course for the future. If we have always been changing nature to help us survive and thrive, then we need to avoid naive arguments about how we might destroy it with our meddling, and instead ask how we can meddle better.

Learn more about Life as We Made It in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

Listen to the book trailer at: https://twitter.com/bonesandbugs/status/1449073227569897479?s=12

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2022)

In Poetic Operations S&J affiliated faculty, artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats are available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations

 

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley culture expert and SJRC affiliated faculty Fred Turner (Stanford, Communication) join forces to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world in their new book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.

The book is available from the University of Chicago Press.

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

In Unsettled Borders SJRC affiliate faculty Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (Feminist Studies) examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Schaeffer traces the scientific and technological development of militarized border surveillance across time and space from Spanish colonial lookout points in Arizona and Mexico to the Indian wars, when the US cavalry hired Native scouts to track Apache fleeing into Mexico, to the occupation of the Tohono O’odham reservation and the recent launch of robotic bee swarms. Labeled “Optics Valley,” Arizona builds on a global history of violent dispossession and containment of Native peoples and migrants by branding itself as a profitable hub for surveillance. Schaeffer reverses the logic of borders by turning to Indigenous sacred sciences: ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.

Learn more about Unsettled Borders in this campus news article: 

https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/07/felicity-schaeffer-unsettled-borders.html 

Appendix 5: SJRC Funders

Since 2004, the SJRC has helped faculty across campus raise over $10 million in grants for collaborative research including training grants by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health and California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Below is a summary of active awards. A full breakdown of external and internal grants and gifts can be found in Appendix 8: Key Accomplishments.

Current Funded Initiatives

LEED: Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design of Science and Engineering

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation ER2-Ethical & Responsible Research

Principal Investigator: Jenny Reardon

Amount: $399.994

 

LEED: Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design of Science and Engineering

Funding Agency: The UCSC Institute for Social Transformation; Sprout Grant 

Principal Investigator: Jenny Reardon

Amount: $9,600 

 

LEED: Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design of Science and Engineering

Funding Agency: The UCSC Office of Research, SEED Grant

Principal Investigator: Jenny Reardon

Amount: $14,444

 

Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine

Funding Agency: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Principal Investigator: Jennifer Derr, with Co-PI Jenny Reardon

Amount: $225,000

 

Science and Justice Minor Research and Planning Cluster

Funding Agency: The UCSC Office of Research, SEED Grant

Principal Investigator: Christine Hong, with  Co-PI Jenny Reardon

Amount: $40,000 (applied) (awarded by Division of Humanities)

 

Building Sociology and Science and Technology Studies

Funding Agency: The UCSC Committee on Research, Faculty Research Grant 

Principal Investigator: James Doucet-Battle

Amount: $2,000 

 

Building Sociology and Science and Technology Studies

Funding Agency: The UCSC Institute for Social Transformation; Sprout Grant

Principal Investigator: James Doucet-Battle

Amount: $12,000

 

The UCSC Center for Orphan-disease Alternative Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.)

Funding Agency: UC Santa Cruz center-scale seed funding initiative

Principal Investigator: Michael Stone

Amount: $75,000 (Office of Research $60,000) and (Physical and Biological Sciences $15,000)

 

EDUC 4: CIRM Research Training Grant “CIRM Scholar” Awards

Funding Agency: California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)

Principal Investigator: Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells: Camilla Forsberg, Co-PI: Lindsay Hinck

Amount: $4,913,271 ($2,500 SJRC portion)

Major Sponsors

Department of Sociology

Division of Graduate Studies

Division of Humanities

Division of Physical & Biological Sciences

Division of Social Sciences

The UC Santa Cruz Office of Research

The UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation; Sprout Grant 

Appendix 6: SJRC 2021-2022 Org Chart

SJRC Org Chart 2021-2022 (PDF)

Appendix 7: SJRC Faculty Affiliates at UC Santa Cruz

The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) partners with multiple regional and international units to provide a discipline-neutral space to freely express and address areas of common concern through facilitated discussions, student exchanges, research, and training. Find out more about how affiliates support the Center.

UCSC Affiliated Faculty

SJRC Affiliated Faculty add to the liveliness of the S&J Community.

Elliot Anderson, Art

Hillary Angelo, Sociology

Neda Atanasoski, Feminist Studies

Karen Barad, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Philosophy

Chris Benner, Environmental Studies, Sociology

Micha Cárdenas, Art and Design: Games and Playable Media

Nancy Chen, Anthropology

Sharon Daniel, Film & Digital Media

Jennifer Derr, History

Lindsey Dillon, Sociology

James Doucet-Battle, Sociology

Madeleine Fairbairn, Environmental Studies

Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Anthropology

Lise Getoor, Computer Science

Julie Guthman, Community Studies

Kathleen (Kat) Gutierrez, History

Camilla Hawthorne, Sociology

Dee Hibbert-Jones, Digital Art and New Media

Zia Isola, Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering

Andrew Mathews, Anthropology

Jaimie Morse, Sociology

Tamara Pico, Earth and Planetary Sciences

Jenny Reardon, Sociology

Warren Sack, Digital Arts and New Media

Beth Shapiro, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Matt Sparke, Politics

Beth Stephens, Art, E.A.R.T.H. Lab

Susan Strome, Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology

Anna Tsing, Anthropology

Anjuli Verma, Politics

UCSC Steering Committee

Members of the SJRC Steering Committee serve for 1 academic year (renewable). The committee advises the Center on its research, community involvement, programing, and building the Science and Justice platform. It also reviews committee members and assignments, the Center’s research themes, events, visiting scholars, and steers the Center’s overall programing. The committee meets twice per term.

Jennifer Derr, History

James Doucet-Battle, Sociology

Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Anthropology

Lise Getoor, Computer Science

Dee Hibbert-Jones, Digital Art and New Media

Jaimie Morse, Sociology

Jenny Reardon, Sociology

Matt Sparke, Politics

Internal Advisory Board

Members of the SJRC Advisory Board serve for 3 academic years (renewable).Board members advise the Center on institutional support and fundraising, cultivate connections and synergy amongst partners, and help forge the overall Center vision and plans. The Board meets annually in Spring.

Elliot Anderson, Art

Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies

Ed Green, Biomolecular Engineering

Zia Isola, Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering

Warren Sack, Digital Arts & New Media

Anna Tsing, Anthropology

External Advisory Board

Geoffrey Bowker, Bioinformatics, University of California – Irvine

Joe Dumit, Anthropology, University of California – Davis

Sally Lehrman, SJRC Visitor

Laura Mamo, Health Equity Institute, San Francisco State University

Janet Shim, School of Nursing, University of California – San Francisco

Kim TallBear, Native Studies, University of Alberta, Canada

Fred Turner, Communications, Stanford

Appendix 8: SJRC Key Accomplishments

Key Accomplishments (eg: external and internal funding, grants, press coverage, research collaborations) can be found here.

Volume 14

Director’s Letter: Welcome to Science & Justice

As we look forward to the year to come, we appreciate the chance to share with you our accomplishments of the last year.

Science & Justice continues to be in the headlines, making a critical difference in California, the nation and globally. Our faculty and students were out front both in the press, and in their many new publications and interviews, addressing pressing issues, including public trust in science and medicine, bias and algorithms, and access to COVID-19 vaccines. Inspired by the original research conducted by our Pandemicene students, our researchers contributed to The Empty Year: An Oral History of the Pandemic(s) of 2020 at UC Santa Cruz, a 540-page book produced under the guidance of the University Library’s Regional History Project that preserves stories of resilience and loss. Members of our Theorizing Race After Race working group published critical dialogues about COVID, Race and Racism in The Foundry. And work by our faculty on justice issues raised by the pandemic appeared in Vice and Social Science Research Council’s journal, Items.

In the midst of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, our undergraduates expressed an increased demand for more curricular offerings at the intersections of science and justice. Science & Justice affiliated faculty across the divisions also expressed interest in working together on questions of intersectional justice. These interests converged this year in the proposal for a Science and Justice Minor to be housed in the newly established Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department. Our faculty also continued to advise undergraduate researchers who produced podcasts on COVID-19 and social justice that aired on KZSC, and who transformed their research with Science & Justice into senior theses.

Our events continued to highlight the unusual and inspiring collaborations and conversation Science & Justice creates. Participants engaged with us from all over the nation and world, including over the last year remotely from Canada, Denmark and universities throughout the United States.

This year Science & Justice continued its history of initiating bold new collaborations. In particular, we worked with Alondra Nelson and the Institute of Advanced Study to propose a new domain of research, the Sociology of Bioethics. The Wellcome Trust chose the  proposal–which sought to place questions of justice at the core of bioethics–as a finalist for its Research Development Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We were encouraged by this recognition, and will continue to seek funding. However, plans are on hold as we are pleased to report that Nelson the Biden/Harris  administration appointed Nelson Deputy Director for Science and Society in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dr. Nelson will be the first person to fill this role, bringing social science expertise to national science and technology policy.

Despite the ongoing pandemic, the 2020-21 academic year also produced much to celebrate. Congratulations to Sociology graduate student and Science & Justice Graduate Researcher Andy Murray, who was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to work on the project, “The Global Observatory for Gene Editing: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics for Biotechnology and the Human Future.” Congratulations also go to Film & Digital Media graduate student and graduate of the SJRC training program Dorothy R. Santos, who was named an honoree by San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of their YBCA 100 for 2020!

We are ever thankful for the guidance and support our steering committee and board of advisors continue to provide us, and for the support of many units and divisions on campus.

 

Jenny Reardon, Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

James Doucet-Battle, Fall 2020 Interim Director of the Science & Justice Research Center, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

 

Science & Justice Leadership Team

Founding DIRECTOR and DIRECTOR of Teaching the SJTP | Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology

Fall 2020 Interim Director of the SJRC | James Doucet-Battle, Assistant Professor of Sociology

CENTER MANAGER | Colleen Stone

GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCHER | Dennis Browe, Sociology

 

Science & Justice Steering Committee

Jennifer Derr, Associate Professor of History

James Doucet-Battle, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Lise Getoor, Professor of Computer Science

Jaimie Morse, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology

Matt Sparke, Professor of Politics

 

The Science & Justice Mission

The Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a globally unique endeavor that innovates experimental spaces, engages in collaborative research practices, and fosters emerging alliances between seemingly disparate sectors, disciplines and communities. Biomedical innovation, species extinction, toxic ecologies, healthcare reform, and many other contemporary matters of concern provoke questions that traverse multiple intellectual, institutional and ethico-political worlds. Science & Justice generates modes of inquiry and empirically rigorous research that address these enormous challenges and support livable worlds. The Center is home to the Science and Justice Working Group, graduate training programs and sponsored research projects. The initiative builds on the UCSC campus’ historic commitments to socio-ecological justice and strengths in science studies and interdisciplinary research.

Sustaining a Vibrant SJRC Community

The Science & Justice Research Center is the home of a vibrant, collaborative community. Located in Oakes College, SJRC hosts visitors from across the UC system and around the world. The space in which we gather is the unceded land and territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe – as well as – the online platform Zoom. The SJRC community is committed to sustaining an experimental ecosystem for novel ideas, dialogues, methods and collaborations. The Science & Justice Working Group remains the heart of our collective work. We also host regular reading groups and experimental mixers with affiliated graduate students and faculty who seek to further investigate the meanings and practices of science and justice.

Visiting Scholar Program

Since 2009, the SJRC Visiting Scholars Program has been a vibrant hub for interdisciplinary scholars across the UC-system, the nation and the globe. The Science & Justice Research Center offers opportunities for visiting scholars at all levels of their career (regardless of institutional affiliation) to participate in the community through research collaborations, reading groups and experimental mixers. In the 2020-2021 academic year, the Center continued to host one long-term visiting scholar and conceptualized remote exchanges for the coming academic year: refer to Appendix 1 to learn more about our visitors.

Highlights from the Science & Justice Working Group, Experimental Mixers, Writing and Reading Groups

The Science & Justice Working Group (SJWG) provides a convivial and novel space to cultivate emerging connections, spark new questions for research, and nurture our communities’ collaborative ties. In addition to formally convening the SJWG, our informal experimental mixers are a lively and open space for all SJRC community members.

Below are some highlights of the year’s events (all events are listed in Appendix 2).

On October 14, the Center began the 2020-2021 academic year by hosting our annual Meet & Greet. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company, the annual gathering is always a great chance to welcome new members, welcome back others, and share current work to foster emerging collaborations.

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 kicked off the Works-in-Progress Series on October 28 by presenting 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/. A rapporteur report by SJRC Graduate Student Researcher, Dennis Browe can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2020/10/28/oct-28-works-guthman-fairbairn-reisman/.

Our Works-in-Progress series continued on February 24 with Science & Justice affiliate, postdoctoral scholar, and incoming Assistant Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences Tamara Pico who discussed her interests in understanding how practices in 19th century early U.S. geology continue to shape the culture and values in geoscience today. A rapporteur report by SJRC Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2021/02/24/feb24-works-pico/.

In Winter and Spring, SJRC organized and co-hosted a University Forum and two book launch events with the University Relations Special Events Office.

On March 9, ​​the University Forum “V is For Veracity” featured SJRC Founding Director and Professor of Sociology Jenny Reardon with introductions and Q&A moderated by Assistant Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle. Learn more in the April 2020 UCSC campus news article, “Discrimination, governance, and trust in the age of COVID-19“ and the May 2020 Social Science Research Council Items article, “V is for Veracity“. A recording of the forum is available on YouTube.

“Jenny Reardon, in her contribution to the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, argues that the metaphors of war and battle in fighting Covid-19, now commonplace, can have their own problematic effects on how we imagine and act in the face of the pandemic. The “us vs. them” imagery that war metaphors promote pulls us away from veracity — “trustworthy truths” that foreground human (and nonhuman) relations and interdependencies. The pandemic provides an opportunity, Reardon argues, to mobilize veracity for a more just post–Covid-19 future.”  -Items, June 4, 2020

On April 7, we celebrated the launch of Assistant Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle’s new book Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (U. Minn Press, 2021) that challenges assumptions about race within diabetes research and delves into the issue through the lens of African American experiences. With opening remarks and general welcome by SJRC Founding Director and Professor of Sociology Jenny Reardon and introductions and moderation by Nancy Chen (Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society), we gathered in the spirit of celebrating Sweetness in the Blood’s launch and broadening the discussion of race and risk. The conversation with Edward T. Hawthorne, founder and managing partner of CE3 Solutions, LLC, was recorded and is available on YouTube.  

 

On May 4, we celebrated the launch of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021) that brought together cartography, essays, illustrations, and poetry to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. The event, moderated by Chris Benner (Director of the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation), featured original research from multiple campus contributors including an overview by Erin McElroy (UCSC Feminist Studies alum, New York University’s AI Now Institute postdoctoral researcher) with co-editor Adrienne Hall (PhD student in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the UCSC No Place Like Home initiative and SJRC’s Just Biomedicine research cluster. SJRC affiliate Katherine Weatherford Darling (University of Maine), who co-led the SJRC contribution titled: ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in San Francisco’s Biotech Hub,’ examined the different visions for health and healthcare that have been imagined and practiced along the Third Street corridor. A recording can be found on YouTube.

Our Works-in-Progress series concluded on May 12 with new Science & Justice affiliate, Assistant Professor of History Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez who discussed the cultural and intellectual history of the sampaguita, a species of jasmine presently known as the national flower of the Philippines, and its gendered (and gendering) ties to the nationalist imagination. A rapporteur report by SJRC Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2021/05/12/works-kat/. 

On May 26, SJRC scholars joined in the final celebration of the year with UCSC alum and assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at Kansas State University, Harlan Weaver’s book launch of Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021). Bad Dog examines pit bulls and animal shelter politics through the lens of what Weaver terms “interspecies intersectionality” in order to identify how relationships between humans and non-human animals shape and are shaped by experiences of gender, race, colonialism, nation, and sexuality. Traversing themes ranging from contemporary claims to “rescue,” the history of the human, the ontological emergences/becomings of human/pit bull relationships, and the queer possibilities for challenging normative kinship inherent in pit bull politics, Bad Dog provides a compelling interdisciplinary argument for a justice that engages the needs, desires, and imaginings of marginalized humans and non-human animals together. A recording of the presentation is available here.

 

Justice Sparks Innovative and Original Research

The Science & Justice Research Center continues to be an exemplar of how to transform commitments to justice into collaborative research projects. We formulate new methods and institutional practices where scientists and engineers work alongside social scientists, humanists, ethicists, artists and diverse public communities. SJRC affiliates pursue local, regional, national, and international research collaborations on issues that inform and affect institutional and public policy.

The Pandemicene: Re-Worlding Towards Justice

As we all continued responding to and reorienting activities to nurture our community during the global COVID-19 pandemic, SJRC continued The Pandemicene: Re-worlding Towards Justice project. The project launched in Spring 2020 as a part of Director Jenny Reardon’s group tutorial and undergraduate independent study seminar SOCY 194: Living and Learning in a Pandemic: The Sociology of COVID-19 (for a description of the class and the project refer to the April 2020 campus news article, “Discrimination, governance, and trust in the age of COVID-19”; for thinking that informed the effort, see the May 2020 Social Science Research Council Items article, “V is for Veracity“, written by SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon).

Amid the crisis, our particular commitment at Science & Justice remained to help build spaces where our partners and friends from around the planet could think and re-world together. Over Summer 2020, undergraduate students who took The Pandemicene class– Kathia Damian (Literature), Gina Barba (Community Studies), Isa Ansari (Sociology), Maryam Nazir (Philosophy)–along with graduate students Dennis Browe (Sociology), Paloma Medina (Biomolecular Engineering), and Dorothy Santos (Film & Digital Media) under the guidance of SJRC Director Jenny Reardon, designed and recorded a podcast series with critical conversations among our collaborators here and around the world about how their foci had and had not changed during the pandemic, and how– practically–to re-world towards justice at this critical historical juncture.

In Fall, as the Talk and News Director of KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, undergraduate Kathia Damian guided the sound editing process, Isa Ansari provided the voice for the podcast episodes and series, and Maryam Nazir created publicity and social media content. With the crucial work of students, 9 episodes were produced and aired on KZSC 88.1FM and Spotify over Fall term and 4 episodes were released on the project site in Winter. A full list of episodes can be found in Appendix 3.

Approached by the UC Santa Cruz University Library, Science & Justice graduate researchers Dennis Browe (Sociology) and undergraduate researchers Kathia Damian (Literature, pictured left in white and black stripes), Maryam Nazir (Philosophy) and Aitanna Parker (Technology and Information Management and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, pictured left in green) contributed to The Empty Year: An Oral History of the Pandemic(s) of 2020 at UC Santa Cruz, an immersive project showing how community members coped in the time of COVID-19. The Empty Year collects the oral histories of UC Santa Cruz undergraduate and graduate students last year under the guidance of the University Library’s Regional History Project. These stories of resilience and loss are preserved in a 540-page published book with full-color images as well as an online electronic version with SJRC students and the Science and Justice project mentioned on page 8. Learn more in this campus news article: Bearing witness to COVID at UC Santa Cruz.

“Documenting this moment in time is important, as COVID-19 may be the defining struggle of this generation. Storytelling is especially crucial during this pandemic since the number of deaths and cases ticked on screen don’t feel real. Oral history provides a means to understand the information we have been bombarded with.” 

– Kathia Damian (UCSC Literature ‘21)

Towards A Sociology of Bioethics

In January 2021, SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon in collaboration with Alondra Nelson at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study submitted a proposal for a Wellcome Trust Research Development Award in Humanities, Social Science and Bioethics with a proposal entitled, “Toward a Sociology of Bioethics.” The proposal was selected as one of 16 finalists from a pool of 112 applicants asked to submit a final application for the million pound grant scheme aiming to create a new field of bioethics that places social sciences at its heart and justice as its core principle. While the award was not granted, the team was encouraged by the positive feedback from Wellcome, and will continue to look for applicable funding to push the research agenda forward.

In that same month, Nelson was appointed Deputy Director for Science and Society of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) by the Biden/Harris administration. Alondra Nelson is the first person to fill this Science and Society role, which brings social science expertise to national science and technology policy. Nodding Towards a Sociology of Bioethics, Nelson made clear in her acceptance speech that she will make inclusion, equity and justice core guiding principles at the OSTP.  As she eloquently explained:

“I believe we have a responsibility to work together to make sure that our science and technology reflects us, and when it does that it reflects all of us, that it reflects who we truly are together.  This too is a breakthrough.  This too is an innovation that advances our lives. We have an incredible opportunity ahead of us to approach our science and technology policy in ways that are honest and inclusive, to bring the full strength of our communities—our experiences, our concerns and our aspirations—to every table as we think through emergent forms of science and technology. There has never been a more important moment for scientific development—to get scientific development right or to situate that development in our values of equality, accountability, justice, and trustworthiness.” 

 – Alondra Nelson, January 16, 2021

We are thrilled by Dr. Nelson’s appointment and appreciate the values of social justice and the insights of social science guiding science and technology policy on the national stage.

Reference Links:

• https://www.ias.edu/news/2021/nelson-ostp-appointment
• Watch her announcement speech on CSPAN. Dr. Nelson takes the podium at 21:30.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00159-z
• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/climate/biden-trump-science.html
• https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/25/fact-sheet-president-biden-signs-executive-order-advancing-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-accessibility-in-the-federal-government

Syndemics and Structural Racism

In March 2021, the Science & Justice Research Center in collaboration with the Health Improvement Partnership of Santa Cruz County (HIP) applied for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant with a proposal entitled, “Syndemics and Structural Racism: COVID-19, Type 2 Diabetes, and Climate Change.” The effort was led by co-PIs Assistant Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle and Nancy Chen (Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society) with HIP’s Population Health Director Maritza Lara. While the award was not granted, we continue looking for applicable funding and ways to strengthen campus partnerships to build systems of care with HIP.  The HIP supports many councils and organizations (eg: Safety Net Clinic Coalition, United Way) that work to improve health outcomes for Santa Cruz County residents who receive care through publicly-funded programs – as well as the City of Santa Cruz’s Sustainability + Climate Action Manager and Science & Justice Training Program alumni Tiffany Wise-West who leads the community-driven Climate Action Plan 2030 process and the city’s Health in All Policies (HiAP) policy.

Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.)

In Winter and Spring 2021 Science & Justice (Jenny Reardon, Andy Murray, and Colleen Stone) worked with Jeremy Sanford (MCD Biology) and Michael Stone (Chemistry) on a new research project as part of an effort to create The UCSC Center for Orphan-disease Alternative Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.). The group was awarded $75,000 of seed funding from the Office of Research and PBSci Dean Koch. The goals of C.O.A.S.T. is to accelerate the discovery of precision therapies for rare diseases by exploiting the chemical language of ribonucleic acid (RNA), while addressing the questions of ethics and justice raised by this novel area of research. SJRC recruited 3 undergraduate students (from the fields of biochemistry/ molecular biology, sociology/statistics, and biomolecular engineering) to independently research items related to pharmaceutical licensing agreements, bringing drugs to the market, ethical and equity issues related to orphan-disease drug discovery and dissemination. 

Drawing on work with C.O.A.S.T. and lessons learned from COVID-19 Aisha Lakshman (Sociology, Statistics) released a blog post on “Normalizing Slow Science,” discussing the pace of scientific research. Lakshman will continue on the project next year while writing a senior thesis and plans on using her two disciplines to interpret datasets to demonstrate social problems and catalyze social change.

Incarcerated Care

The Incarcerated Care project brought together UCSC social scientists, film and digital media makers with local community groups to study and document health care needs and challenges of California state jails and prisons. Overseen by Film & Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel who, with SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and Psychology graduate student Roxy Davis, piloted a community initiated investigation into the conditions of health care in the Santa Cruz County jails. The 2019 preliminary study (funded by the UCSC Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise and Participatory Governance) involved 14 semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people and service providers in community health agencies. Aiming to amplify the voices of those incarcerated who face challenges receiving health care, the team looks forward to continuing the project as local pandemic guidelines allow.

Jail / Care Undergraduate researcher, now alum, Priyanka Kulkarni (Oakes, Sociology, ’20), who wrote a thesis on the project in Spring 2020 overseen by SJRC Interim Director and Assistant Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle, was hired by UCSF working on a research project involving system-impacted youth.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the research expanded with the creation of EXPOSED (https://unjustlyexposed.com). Exposed documents the spread of COVID-19 over time inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the United States, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. In Winter and Spring, SJRC gathered 4 undergraduate researchers to contribute to the interactive documentary.  Students came from many different fields– psychology, legal studies, feminist studies, cognitive science, politics and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies–to work on the project.

In May, lead undergraduate researcher Matt Sioson won funding from the Donald A. Strauss Public Service Scholarship Foundation to support his work as director of the Walls to Bridges Book Project.  Sioson led a team of 15 student volunteers who sent books to  system-impacted children on their birthdays on behalf of an incarcerated family member. In Summer, the SJRC issued fellowships to 3 undergraduates and 1 graduate researcher to continue contributing to the interactive documentary.

Theorizing Race After Race

Launched in 2018-2019 by SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and SJRC affiliate and Assistant Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne, the working group, Theorizing Race after Race (TRaR) continued seeking to develop a framework for grappling with reconfigurations of race after the supposedly ‘post-racial’ moment. Their goal is to understand how knowledge of the genome and ideas of human difference circulate, taking on different meanings across diverse historical-geographical contexts. The group convened several meetings throughout the academic year with campus scholars and developed a publication plan including a series of dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism.

On November 20th 2020, the first installment of the series posted on the UCHRI Foundry website as, Black Geographies of Quarantine: A Dialogue with Brandi Summers, Camilla Hawthorne, and Theresa Hice Fromille. Special thanks to Science & Justice researcher Aitanna Parker (recent graduate of Critical Race and Ethic Studies and Technology and Information Management) for helping with the interviewing of UCSC Sociology alum Brandi Summers (now Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley), faculty Camilla Hawthorne and graduate student Theresa Hice Fromille.

In February 2021, Science & Justice researcher Aitanna Parker also conducted research on COVID-related racial health disparities and prepared for a second dialogue on data, racial justice, and COVID-19 between UCSC Assistant Professor of Sociology Jaimie Morse and Alexis Madrigal, journalist at The Atlantic and co-founder of the COVID Racial Data Tracker to be posted to The Foundry’s blog in fall.

Over Summer 2021 Science & Justice graduate researchers Dennis Browe (sociology), Lucia Vitale (politics) undergraduate Sophia Parizadeh (politics), with the support of Science and Justice Director Jenny Reardon  prepared to interview three scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, and located in different geographical locations on how COVID has changed existing debates on race and racism in different transnational contexts. Those interviewed included Abril Saldaña-Tejada an anthropologist at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico who studies mestizaje and health patterns (including noncommunicable diseases), Pedro Valdez a sociologist at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and a researcher at a national migration institute where he considers immigration, emigration, and healthcare access, and Felicity Amaya-Schaeffer professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz whose work considers border identities, citizenship and indigineity along the US/Mexico border.

These dialogues are part of an ongoing effort for SJRC researchers to develop frameworks for grappling with race and racism in this purportedly “post-racial” era. The COVID-19 pandemic provides particularly striking examples of the ways in which a post-racial moment has not yet come to pass, undermining a teleology already disrupted by the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the pandemic is replaying old narratives in new guises, we contend that it also affords a real-time global critique of narratives of race and science. Dynamics of COVID-19, and narratives about it, differ across national, state, city, and zip code lines. Placing these differing narratives in conversation, we suggest, disrupts 20th- and 21st-century epistemes that have clung strongly to narratives of race and pathology, race and biology. To make these differences manifest, and to develop a critique that attunes us to the racial justice questions of this moment, in this forum TRAR is curating a series of dialogues between scholars working in different geographic and political contexts about different themes at the intersection of COVID-19 and racism—from the politics of numbers and race-based data collection, to questions of race, space, surveillance, and quarantine.

Funding Undergraduate and Graduate Research

SJRC assisted students in identifying and applying for campus funding to conduct original and collaborative research. Campus funding was awarded to undergraduate Science & Justice researchers through the Undergraduate Research in Science & Technology Endowment (Tee Wicks, Sociology), the Genomics Institute’s Research Mentoring Internship Program (Aisha Lakshman, Sociology; Ryleigh Hales, Biochemistry, MCD Biology; Jessica Singh, MCD Biology, Legal Studies), and the Institute for Social Transformation’s Building Belonging Program (Andrea Asher, Sociology, Human Biology; Tamar Sasson, Economics, Sociology).

Over the Summer of 2020 SJRC awarded 5 undergraduate students (totaling $3000.55) and 7 graduate students (totaling $19,000) funds to conduct original and collaborative research. Over the Summer of 2021 SJRC awarded 3 undergraduate students (totaling $ 2200) and 3 graduate students (totaling $10,000) funds to conduct original and collaborative research. The awards supported general living expenses, fieldwork or travel (as allowed by COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions), presentation of work, and research.

For a complete list of the ongoing research our community conducted, refer to Appendix 3.

Creating a UCSC Ethics in Practice

At an increasing rate, many forms of scientific evidence are met not just with questions of curiosity and interest, but also with skepticism and mistrust. Healthcare systems are challenged by entrenched inequalities and profit motives. Algorithms encode bias into the heart of big data approaches to science and engineering. The next generation of leaders in biomedical and life sciences, environmental science, and engineering need to be adept at addressing these challenges. At SJRC, we believe this requires bold new approaches to ethics and research practice in STEM fields. We strive to exceed narrow standards for the ethical approval of science and prepare our students to be powerful stewards of socially robust and reflexive science. Our vision of good science exceeds simple compliance and strives towards institutional change. We work with affiliates to realize this in practice.

In Winter and Spring 2021 Science & Justice director Jenny Reardon (sociology), James Doucet-Battle (sociology), and manager Colleen Stone worked with affiliates Angela Brooks (Biomolecular Engineering) and Zia Isola (Director, UCSC Genomics Institute Office of Diversity) to address areas identified as priorities of the Genomics Institute’s Diversity Committee.

In Winter and Spring 2021 Science & Justice director Jenny Reardon (sociology), James Doucet-Battle (sociology), and manager Colleen Stone met bi-weekly with affiliates Angela Brooks (Biomolecular Engineering), Zia Isola (Director, UCSC Genomics Institute Office of Diversity), and Lars Fehren-Schmitz (anthropology) to re-conceptualize SJRC and Genomics Institute partnerships and to discuss the governing structures needed and support needed to create a functioning Genomics & Society program. They also discussed how to address diversity, equity, and inclusion issues within the culture of genomics and bioethics.

Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design of STEM research (LEED)

This partnership work seeded a new center initiative led by Science & Justice founding director Jenny Reardon called Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design of STEM research, or LEED for short. We look forward to reporting more on this next year.

Science & Justice Training Program

Science & Justice Graduate Training Program

The SJRC is the home to the globally unique Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). The program teaches graduate students from across all five divisions how to collectively address the moments where questions of science meet questions of justice.

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, 2020 marked the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). Students who took the training program’s introductory course Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration in the Winter 2020 term with SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon entered the program in Spring and Fellows began conducting original research and collaborative projects. In the 2020-21 academic year, Reardon mentored graduate students who chose to go on to get a Science and Justice graduate certificate.

The seminar, to be offered again in Winter 2022 taught by James Doucet-Battle (sociology), draws together masters, early career PhD students and faculty from across all five Divisions of the University.

Over the last ten years, the introductory course for the Science & Justice Training Program has trained 91 graduate students representing 22 different UC Santa Cruz departments in creative approaches to science and justice. Participating in the program helps students build their careers and catalyzes new collaborative initiatives within the university. Our students have already had considerable early career success, demonstrated by their successful applications for fellowships, grants, postdoctoral positions and entrepreneurial efforts.

Science & Justice Training Program Fellow and Feminist Studies graduate student Vivian Underhill, was awarded a 2020-21 fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for research focused on intergenerational environmental-justice activism around fracking and groundwater in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The fellowships recognize recipients whose academic work and community projects empower women and girls. More information can be found in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/10/underhill-women-fellowship.html 

Science & Justice Training Program Fellow and Film & Digital Media graduate student Dorothy R. Santos was named an honoree by San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of their YBCA 100 for 2020! The sixth annual YBCA100 celebrated the creative changemakers and everyday heroes focused on building sustainable, equitable, and regenerative communities. In 2021-2022, Dorothy will be working with San Jose State University on an exhibition (as a teaching artist) “Hidden in Plain Sight,” a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and will be working with Bay Area-based artist and educator Rhonda Holberton and Bay Area-based artist, musician, and educator Sofia Cordova.

As Training Program students graduate, they take the skills and experience they gained in the program into the next stages of their careers in universities, industry, non-profits, and government. For example, founding Training Program Fellow, Tiffany Wise-West stays active in the community as the sustainability and climate action manager for the City of Santa Cruz Climate Action Program. Over the summer, Wise-West participated in an event hosted by the UCSC Sustainability Office to discuss what the City is implementing to make Santa Cruz more resilient to current and future climate realities (eg: the City’s Adaptation plan and the Climate Action Plan through 2030 seeking community input).

Recent Sociology PhD graduate and SJRC Graduate Researcher Andy Murray (2016-2019) was hired by SJRC as an Assistant Specialist helping to lead efforts in researching the ethical and justice issues surrounding the discovery and dissemination of RNA splicing-based therapies, and is helping the C.O.A.S.T. team understand the critical ethical and equity issues related to orphan-disease drug discovery and dissemination. Murray was also awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for the project, “The Global Observatory for Gene Editing: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics for Biotechnology and the Human Future.”

Founding Training Program Fellow, Colin Hoag, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Smith College, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to write a book manuscript on water and ecology in Lesotho, tentatively titled “The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy.” The book manuscript is forthcoming Summer 2022 with University of California Press.

A Model for Interdisciplinarity

Following their November 2019 visit, SJRC Advisor Kim TallBear (UCSC HistCon, Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment) with UofA colleague, Assistant Professor Jessica Kolopenuk, continue discussing with SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and Center Manager Colleen Stone the SJRC Training Program and potential grant opportunities to develop a similar program at the University of Alberta. They have since co-developed an Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research hub and Training Program (www.IndigenousSTS.com) at the University of Alberta. We look forward to future collaborations.

In Fall 2020 Science & Justice interim director James Doucet-Battle (sociology) and manager Colleen Stone worked with affiliates Angela Brooks (Biomolecular Engineering) and Zia Isola (Director, UCSC Genomics Institute Office of Diversity) identified alternative funding agencies (eg: NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) to support the two HBCU Summer Undergraduate Training Program proposals previously submitted for UCOP-funding. These programs will incorporate a novel Genomics and Justice component into each training program. We plan to continue to develop the partnership and curriculum to potentially re-apply.

In July 2021, SJRC affiliate Kate Weatherford Darling (University of Maine, Augusta) and colleagues looked towards the SJRC for ways to foster the next generation of researchers in an article, “Introducing the Microbes and Social Equity Working Group: Considering the Microbial Components of Social, Environmental, and Health Justice” published in the American Society for Microbiology Journal.

“The success of transdisciplinary efforts requires novel funding and training opportunities as well as new epistemic frameworks and methods for integrating social, ethical, and justice issues into technoscientific practice and the design of technologies.” – Ishaq et al

Building Science and Justice Undergraduate Curriculum

UC Santa Cruz offers a wide range of courses across its many disciplines that address the relationships between science, society and justice. Science & Justice affiliates have long desired to create a large core course that would teach undergraduates the fundamentals of Science and Justice. Over this last year,  SJRCs Steering Committee discussed the potential with faculty across campus for creating a minor in Science and Justice. A Science & Justice minor could offer students an opportunity to learn the transdisciplinary field of science and justice studies while at the same time receiving training in their major discipline. SJRC will continue to gather faculty to discuss and conceptualize new courses and a proposal for a minor in Science and Justice to be hosted by the newly established Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department.

Funding the Future of Science & Justice

Director Jenny Reardon and Manager Colleen Stone with the advice of the SJRC Steering Committee continue to work closely with University Relations and Development Officers to develop strategies for funding the future of science and justice at UC Santa Cruz. 

On September 30, we hosted a Giving Day campaign to support SJTP Fellows (pictured), case statements and concrete fundraising goals for the research center and the graduate training program. Our immediate grant-writing and fundraising goals include fellowship support for the Science & Justice Training Program graduate fellows, and support for Center staff and faculty. With the support of the SJRC Steering Committee, we will continue to pursue grants to support the Center’s collaborative research, training and advocacy activities.

To support the next iteration of the Science & Justice Training Program, to be offered in Winter 2022 by Assistant Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle, and to celebrate his new book “Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes“, SJRC hosted a book launch and planned a fundraiser in April 2021. 

Additional grant funding and donor contributions will secure our efforts to build an internationally recognized program that trains the next generation of scholars to responsibly take up the important social and scientific problems of our time. Higher levels of grant writing support will help us to develop our research infrastructure and our ability to obtain large-scale grants. Our ambitious fundraising goals and sustained efforts to pursue grant and foundation funding will continue the growth and vitality of our work and community.

As we look to the future, we seek to continue to build SJRC as a hub for extramural funding of research projects with links to science and justice.

Reflecting on Our Progress and Looking Ahead

The 2020-2021 academic year marked the end of our ninth year as a research center. The SJRC has become a dynamic and collaborative infrastructure for training the next generation of humanities, natural and social science researchers and engineers who are trained to pursue their research and make discoveries in ecosystems where ethics and justice are primary concerns.  The Center and its affiliated faculty remained key partners in creating innovative training, curriculum, and research across campus that recognizes the questions of ethics and justice at stake as we forge knowledge and innovations. In particular, we continued to deepen our collaborations with our colleagues in Science and Engineering, particularly through the C.O.A.S.T. project and future HBCU Summer Undergraduate programs; and our colleagues in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies to develop an undergraduate minor in Science and Justice.

Reflecting on our progress and growth, we continue to refine Center practices, and document them in the SJRC Handbook. Center Manager, Colleen Stone continued to meet with Director Jenny Reardon and Sociology Department Manager Jessica Lawrence to better understand and delineate responsibilities of administrative tasks related to running the Center. Reardon and Stone also continued to envision specific ways in which SJRC can provide effective support to the educational and research efforts of our diverse faculty community.

We are committed to developing future research collaborations, and seek collaborators from all divisions at UCSC and in the UC system, as well as in the community. We will continue to provide a critical and dynamic space that supports the diverse needs of our faculty, researchers, students, and staff.

As we look forward to the year ahead, we look forward to working with our new colleagues Karen Miga (Biomolecular Engineering), Tamara Pico (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and Kathleen Gutierrez (History), and to developing out work with our colleagues Michael Stone (Biochemistry) and Jeremy Sanford (MCD Biology) as we seek to develop just forms of RNA Therapeutics, and with the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells PI’s Camilla Forsberg (Biomolecular Engineering) and Lindsay Hinck (MCD Biology) as we help forge stem cell research training that addresses questions of ethics and justice. If awarded funds from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), we will embark on a 5-year training program for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the biological sciences, social sciences and humanities and will work towards making a Distinguished Emphasis in Stem Cell Research an option for Social Science PhD students and PBSE students.  

SJRC’s promise is simple and bold. The benefits are manifold: improved outcomes not just for humans, but for the many non-human lives as well; approaches to science and technology that balance prosperity and justice, health, ecological survival and ethics. Our affiliated researchers and interdisciplinary teams have built decades of scholastic expertise examining the life sciences and biomedicine, health, environment, food, and racial and economic justice. The Center provides the critical milieu in which the creative sharing of this expertise leads to novel justice praxis and knowledge sharing that fosters and supports diverse lives and futures.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

In Memoriam: Maya K. Peterson

We also want to take a moment to recognize the sudden passing and profound loss of Science & Justice affiliated faculty, Maya K. Peterson, associate professor of history. Our thoughts and condolences remain with Maya’s family.

 

Peterson’s research engaged questions of health, the environment, and the transnational histories of science and technology in the modern era. Her first monograph, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge UP, 2019), was a finalist for the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s Award for Best Book in History and the Humanities. Professor Peterson held a B.A. in History with High Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from Swarthmore College, and an M.A. in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia Studies and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, where she was also a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the History of Science Department.

 

Appendix 1: Visiting Scholars

Melissa Eitzel Solera | National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellow, Sociology (through December 2021)

In 2021-2022, the following remote scholars will join us.

Kim Hendrickx | Research Associate, Spiral, University of Liège (Belgium). Kim was also a 2017-2018 visiting scholar. Refer to Kim’s September 2021 article in Frontiers in Pharmacology on Orphan Drugs, Compounded Medication and Pharmaceutical Commons.

Rebecca Herzig | Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Bates College.

Appendix 2: Science & Justice Working Group (SJWG) Events, Experimental Mixers, and Reading Groups

Our 2020-2021 events are linked below for more information, rapporteur reports and recordings.

Fall Science & Justice Writing Together

October 14, 2020 | Meet & Greet

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

Winter Science & Justice Writing Together

Feb 24, 2021 | Works-in-Progress with Tamara Pico

March 9, 2021 | V is For Veracity: a University Forum

April 7, 2021 | Book launch! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes

Spring Science & Justice Writing Together

May 4, 2021 | Book launch! Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance

May 12, 2021 | Works-in-Progress with Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez

May 26, 2021 | Book Launch! Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice

Appendix 3: Research Clusters & Projects

The Pandemicene

The Science & Justice project The Pandemicene produced the following podcast episodes that addressed overlapping topics of institutions of care, genomics, health and society.

Episode  1: Isa Ansari with Kim TallBear and Jessica Kolopenuk on Indigenous led Techno-Scientific Innovation

Episode  2: Kathia Damian with Joan Donovan on State-sponsored Misinformation

Episode  3: Maryam Nazir with Misha Angrist on Thinking Beyond Bioethics

Episode  4: Gina Barba with Sharon Daniel on Public Art and Carcerality

Episode  5: Maryam Nazir with Rebecca DuBois on a COVID-19 Vaccine.

Episode  6: Gina Barba with Erin McElroy on Housing Justice and Big Tech

Episode  7: Tee Wicks with Owain Williams on the Political Economy of Global Health

Episode  8: Paloma Medina with Martha Kenney on Building Community Resilience

Episode  9: Isa Ansari with Ruth Müller on Collaborative Thinking

Episode 10: Pandemicene Team Roundtable

Episode 11: Sandy Chung with Dora Khuu and Kiesha Xiao on Anti-Asian Racism in the U.S.

Episode 12: Sophia Parizadeh on Women of Color’s Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Episode 13: Isa Ansari and Dennis Browe with Dean Spade on Mutual Aid

Queer Ecologies Research Cluster

Queer Ecologies is a group led by Training Program Fellows Paloma Medina and Dennis Browe. The cluster investigates how sexuality and concepts of nature have been historically linked. In particular, they are interested in how evolutionary and ecological science has informed what is “natural” and how we use this information to delineate certain sexual behaviors as normal or aberrant. Queer Ecologies seeks to examine the historical making of the natural as it relates to sexuality while communicating the overwhelming diversity of sex and gender in biology.

Just Biomedicine

Just Biomedicine is a UC Santa Cruz-based research collective that examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. Many hope that this convergence will democratize access to health information and produce revolutionary new medical treatments that new companies will make available to the public through market mechanisms. Yet, as in other domains, living with technoscientific transformations over time reveals how they produce new inequalities and injustices: new challenges to democratic governance; new surveillance regimes; and new forms of social stratification.

The team began presenting their findings at other academic institutions and professional academic associations. In May 2021, led by Sociology graduate student and Science & Justice GSR Dennis Browe, the team presented its work at the Precision Medicine and Society Conference at Columbia University.

Also in May SJRC affiliate Katherine Weatherford Darling (University of Maine), who co-led the SJRC contribution presented at the previously mentioned launch of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021). A recording can be found on YouTube. In August 2021, graduate student researcher Dennis Browe (sociology) will present at the American Sociological Association.

SJRC Director Jenny Reardon continued her service on the advisory board for the Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA). CERA is a new national center establishing a reliable online platform for scientists, scholars, policymakers, journalists and the general public to learn about the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics and genomics (ELSI) and fostering a community of multi-disciplinary researchers focused on ELSI research. CERA is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-led by the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Division of Ethics at Columbia University in partnership with The Hastings Center and the Personal Genetics Education Project at Harvard University by Co-Principal Investigators Mildred Cho (Associate Director Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics) and Sandra Soo-Jin Lee (Chief, Division of Ethics Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University).

Socio-Ecological Justice

Visiting Scholar Melissa Eitzel Solera continued working with SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon and Ken Wilson (The Muonde Trust) and colleagues to wrap up publications for the NSF-funded project, “Understanding Resilience in a Complex Coupled Human-Natural System: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Information and Community-Based Action Research.” Dr. Eitzel Solera led the NSF-funded project 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.”

Dr. Eitzel Solera worked closely with SJRC scholars, including award-winning journalist Sally Lehrman, Andrew Mathews (anthropology), Katherine Weatherford Darling (University of Maine), and Jenny Reardon, for advice and feedback on theoretical framings for a manifesto, approaches to collaborative writing, and background on qualitative methods. With the support of the Center’s staff and affiliated scholars, the project was able to raise questions about more just and collaborative modeling from both theoretical and practical angles, contribute to a group of rural Zimbabwean researchers’ ability to define and address their own land management challenges with the tools of digital mapping and modeling, and apply these experiences to community-based citizen science in California. Their efforts were written up in the first article in a series planned and published by The Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal as “A modeler’s manifesto: Synthesizing modeling best practices with social science frameworks to support critical approaches to data science (describing the modeling process). Eitzel Solera plans for a second paper about applying the manifesto to cases of modeling work, testing it to see if it actually results in ‘better’ modeling; and a third paper about how the process of making the manifesto worked pedagogically and in practice. In Fall 2021, Eitzel Solera will join UC Davis’ Center for Community and Citizen Science.

Appendix 4: SJRC Publications

Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021)

Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021) by UCSC alum Harlan Weaver (assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at Kansas State University), examines pit bulls and animal shelter politics through the lens of what Weaver terms “interspecies intersectionality” in order to identify how relationships between humans and non-human animals shape and are shaped by experiences of gender, race, colonialism, nation, and sexuality. Traversing themes ranging from contemporary claims to “rescue,” the history of the human, the ontological emergences / becomings of human / pit bull relationships, and the queer possibilities for challenging normative kinship inherent in pit bull politics, Bad Dog provides a compelling interdisciplinary argument for a justice that engages the needs, desires, and imaginings of marginalized humans and non-human animals together.

 

 

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021)

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021) brought together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Compiled by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (co-founded by UCSC Feminist Studies graduate Erin McElroy), each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, including: evictions and root shock, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures.

The atlas featured original research from multiple campus contributors including SJRC’s Just Biomedicine research cluster and the No Place Like Home initiative.

The Empty Year: An Oral History of the Pandemic(s) of 2020 at UC Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz Library)

Bearing witness to COVID at UC Santa Cruz, Science & Justice graduate researchers Dennis Browe (Sociology) and undergraduate researchers Kathia Damian (Literature), Maryam Nazir (Philosophy) and Aitanna Parker (Technology and Information Management and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies) contributed to The Empty Year: An Oral History of the Pandemic(s) of 2020 at UC Santa Cruz, an immersive project showing how community members coped in the time of COVID-19. The Empty Year collects the oral histories of UC Santa Cruz undergraduate and graduate students last year under the guidance of the University Library’s Regional History Project. These stories of resilience and loss are preserved in a 540-page published book with full-color images as well as an online electronic version with SJRC students mentioned on page 8.

 

 

How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by affiliated faculty and Assistant Professor of Sociology Hillary Angelo, uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement.

Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) by affiliated faculty and Assistant Professor of Sociology James Doucet-Battle, challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

Learn more in this campus news article, “Uncovering the social factors lurking within diabetes risk.”

 

 

 

World Records Journal Vol. 4 | In The Presence of Others (2020)

Using Hannah Arendt’s writings to rethink the role of documentary in visualizing and producing common worlds, SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon with affiliated Film and Digital Media faculty and media theorist, software designer, and artist Warren Sack and Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University Bonnie Honig published and article in The World Records Journal that launched Vol. 4 In The Presence of Others puting Arendt’s work into counterpoint with documentary media and cultures.

This issue of World Records  Included is Conditions: Warren Sack in conversation with Jenny Reardon and Bonnie Honig, a trialogue to discuss questions:

• What are the prevailing trends in science, biotech, and software engineering?
• What kinds of trajectories are implied by computational theory and machine learning? What are the risks of these developing fields as they come into contact with modes of privatized, bureaucratic rationality, or with statism and surveillance?

Appendix 5: SJRC Funders

Grants

SEES Fellows: Understanding Resilience in a Complex Coupled Human-Natural System: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Information and Community-Based Action Research

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

Principal Investigator: Jenny Reardon (for SJRC Postdoc Melissa Eitzel Solera)

NSF Award No: 1415130; 2014-12/31/2020

Amount: $520,412

 

The UCSC Center for Orphan-disease Alternative Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.)

Funding Agency: UC Santa Cruz center-scale seed funding initiative

Principal Investigator: Michael Stone

Amount: $75,000 (Office of Research $60,000) and (Physical and Biological Sciences Dean Koch $15,000)

 

Toward a Sociology of Bioethics (applied; Finalist)

Funding Agency: Wellcome Trust Research Development Award in Humanities, Social Science and Bioethics

Principal Investigator: Jenny Reardon (Primary Sponsor: Institute for Advanced Study, Alondra Nelson)

Amount: $487,098 (UCSC’s portion)

 

Syndemics and Structural Racism: COVID-19, Type 2 Diabetes, and Climate Change (applied)

Funding Agency: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Principal Investigator: James Doucet-Battle; Co-PI: Nancy Chen

Amount: $293,000

 

EDUC 4: CIRM Research Training Grant “CIRM Scholar” Awards (applied)

Funding Agency: California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)

Principal Investigator: Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells: Camilla Forsberg, Co-PI: Lindsay Hinck

Amount: $4,913,271 ($2,500 SJRC portion)

 

CRRSAA: Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act 2021 (a.k.a. CRRSAA or HEERF II), a supplement to CARES Act funds.

Funding Agency: Federal

Amount: $12,113

Major Donors

Robb Mass with GS Gives

Major Sponsors

Department of Sociology

Division of Graduate Studies

Division of Humanities

Division of Physical & Biological Sciences

Division of Social Sciences

The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute

SJWG Event Co-Sponsors

Department of Feminist Studies

Department of Sociology

The Humanities Institute

The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute

The UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation

The UC Santa Cruz University Relations Special Events Office

Major SJRC Co-Sponsored Events

V is For Veracity: a University Forum

Book launch! Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021)

Book launch! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (U. Minn Press, 2021)

Appendix 6: SJRC 2020-2021 Org Chart

SJRC Org Chart 2020-2021 (PDF)

Appendix 7: SJRC Faculty Affiliates at UC Santa Cruz

The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) partners with multiple regional and international units to provide a discipline-neutral space to freely express and address areas of common concern through facilitated discussions, student exchanges, research, and training. Find out more about how affiliates support the Center.

UCSC Affiliated Faculty

SJRC Affiliated Faculty add to the liveliness of the S&J Community.

Elliot Anderson, Art

Hillary Angelo, Sociology

Neda Atanasoski, Feminist Studies

Karen Barad, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Philosophy

Chris Benner, Environmental Studies, Sociology

Micha Cárdenas, Art and Design: Games and Playable Media

Nancy Chen, Anthropology

Sharon Daniel, Film & Digital Media

Jennifer Derr, History

Lindsey Dillon, Sociology

James Doucet-Battle, Sociology

Madeleine Fairbairn, Environmental Studies

Lise Getoor, Computer Science

Herman Gray, Sociology

Julie Guthman, Community Studies

Kathleen (Kat) Gutierrez, History

Camilla Hawthorne, Sociology

Dee Hibbert-Jones, Digital Art and New Media

Zia Isola, Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering

Andrew Mathews, Anthropology

Jaimie Morse, Sociology

Maya Peterson, History

Tamara Pico, Earth and Planetary Sciences

Jenny Reardon, Sociology

Warren Sack, Digital Arts and New Media

Beth Shapiro, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Matt Sparke, Politics

Beth Stephens, Art, E.A.R.T.H. Lab

Susan Strome, Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology

Anna Tsing, Anthropology

Anjuli Verma, Politics

UCSC Steering Committee

Members of the SJRC Steering Committee serve for 1 academic year (renewable). The committee advises the Center on its research, community involvement, programing, and building the Science and Justice platform. It also reviews committee members and assignments, the Center’s research themes, events, visiting scholars, and steers the Center’s overall programing. The committee meets twice per term. 

Jennifer Derr, History

James Doucet-Battle, Sociology

Lise Getoor, Computer Science

Jenny Reardon, Sociology

Jaimie Morse, Sociology

Matt Sparke, Politics

Internal Advisory Board

Members of the SJRC Advisory Board serve for 3 academic years (renewable).Board members advise the Center on institutional support and fundraising, cultivate connections and synergy amongst partners, and help forge the overall Center vision and plans. The Board meets annually in Spring. 

Elliot Anderson, Art

Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies

Nancy Chen, Anthropology

Herman Gray, Sociology

Ed Green, Biomolecular Engineering

Zia Isola, Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering

Jaimie Morse, Sociology

Warren Sack, Digital Arts & New Media

Matt Sparke, Politics

Anna Tsing, Anthropology

External Advisory Board

Geoffrey Bowker, Bioinformatics, University of California – Irvine

Joe Dumit, Anthropology, University of California – Davis

Sally Lehrman, SJRC Visitor

Laura Mamo, Health Equity Institute, San Francisco State University

Safiya Umoja Noble, Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles

Janet Shim, School of Nursing, University of California – San Francisco

Kim TallBear, Native Studies, University of Alberta, Canada

Fred Turner, Communications, Stanford

Appendix 8: SJRC Key Accomplishments

Key Accomplishments (eg: external and internal funding, grants, press coverage, research collaborations) can be found here.