Author Archives: Colleen Stone

February 21, 2023 | “Why Is Publishing So White?” An Evening with Richard Jean So

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Tuesday, February 21, 2023

5:00-6:30 PM

Humanities 1, 210

On Tuesday, February 21 at 5:00pm, Kresge’s Media & Society Series speaker, Richard Jean So, will present on “Why is Publishing so White?” (RJS flier PDF)

More on Kresge’s Media & Society Series can be found on the series website.

Richard Jean So is associate professor of English and Digital Humanities at McGill University. He uses computational and data-driven methods to study contemporary culture, from the novel to Netflix to social media. He has published academic articles in PMLA and Critical Inquiry and public-facing pieces in The New York Times and Atlantic. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP, 2021) and he is currently working on Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Race and Writing in the Digital Age.

Co-sponsored by Computational Media, Literature, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Science & Justice Research Center, and the Center for Cultural Studies.

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Published in CellPress: Trustworthiness matters: Building equitable and ethical science

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A new CellPress publication, “Trustworthiness matters: Building equitable and ethical science,” is out by Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon, founding director of the Science & Justice Research Center and collaborators Sandra Soo-Jin Lee (Columbia), Sara Goering (University of Washington, Seattle), Stephanie M. Fullerton (University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle), Mildred K. Cho (Stanford), Aaron Panofsky (UC Los Angeles), and Evelynn M. Hammonds (Harvard, Spelman) on their collaborative project LEED. LEED seeks to establish ethics and equity best practices for emerging forms of science and technology.

The article can also be accessed at Science Direct.

Learn more about LEED in this campus news article and on the project webpage.

January 27, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Kaushik Sunder Rajan on Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research

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Friday, January 27, 2023

12:15 pm – 1:30 pm

Humanities 1, 210

 

Wednesday, February 01, 2023

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Humanities 1, 210

SAVE-the-DATEs! On Friday, January 27 at 12:15pm, we will host a reading group with Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, in Humanities 1, 210. Then, on Wednesday, February 1, Rajan will present a talk titled, “Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research,” at 4:00pm.

This talk is the presentation of an emergent research trajectory. Drawing upon an imaginary of “multisituated” research design and practice, I elaborate the (often contingent and serendipitous) development of my recent work in South Africa, which includes a research project on health and constitutionalism and a teaching- and performance-based collaboration on the politics of breath. I am still wrestling with how to structure both, how they come together and diverge, their different conceptual modalities and political stakes. This includes a consideration of the stakes of legal archival research and life-history interviews in the context of contemporary and emergent research and political situations, as well as of thinking questions of ethnographic form in concert with others who are invested in considerations of literary or musical form. How to think about transformations of research practice in the context of unsettled and unresolved macro-political transformations in uncertain and fragile times? Why might it matter?

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at University of Chicago.

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

SNU in the World Winter 2023 Participant Bios

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ABOUT The SNU in the World Program Director

Doogab Yi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science Studies at Seoul National University and Director of The SNU in the World Program with SJRC at UCSC on Innovation, Science and Justice (Winter 2023, 2024, 2025). His broad research interests lay in the intersection between science and capitalism in the 20th and 21th centuries, and he is currently working on several projects related to the development of science and technology within the context of capitalism, such as the history of biotechnology, the relationship between science and the law, and the emergence of the technologies of the 24/7 self. He teaches courses in the history of modern science, science and the law, and environmental history. Learn more at: https://doogab.wixsite.com/doogabyi

ABOUT UCSC PARTICIPANTS (in alphabetical order)

CHESSA ADSIT-MORRIS is a Graduate Student in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Chessa is a curriculum theorist, assistant director of the Center for Creative Ecologies housed within the department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC  Santa Cruz, and the Graduate Student Researcher for the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC). She writes widely on the intersection of curriculum studies, posthumanism(s), ecological thought and SF, and is the author of “Restorying Environmental Education: Figurations, Fictions, Feral Subjectivities” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) (open access copy). Her current teaching, research and publications focus on transdisciplinary research and pedagogy, with particular reference to visual studies, socially engaged art, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, ecological thought and speculative fiction. Chessa works with SJRC specifically on the Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research initiative.

CHRIS BENNER is a Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies and the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz. He currently directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Institute for Social Transformation. His research examines the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structure of economic opportunity, focusing on regional labor markets and the transformation of work and employment. He has authored or co-authored seven books (most recently Solidarity Economics, 2021, Polity Press) and more that 75 journal articles, chapters and research reports. He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

DENNIS BROWE is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Dennis’ work lies at the intersections of medical sociology, science & technology studies (STS), public health, sexuality and gender studies, and feminist theory.

ANILA DAULATZAI is a political and medical anthropologist. She has taught in prisons, and in universities across three continents. Her past and current research projects look at widowhood, heroin use, and polio through the lens of serial war and US Empire in Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  She has published articles in Jadaliyya, Al-Jazeera,  several academic journals, and edited volumes and is a contributing member to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, since 2014. She is currently completing her book manuscript provisionally titled War and What Remains. Everyday Life in Contemporary Kabul, Afghanistan. At UCSC, Anila is a postdoctoral fellow in the history department working on the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine,” a project co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate and History Professor Jennifer Derr and SJRC Founding Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon. More information can be found at: https://raceempirebiomedicine.sites.ucsc.edu/.

JAMES DOUCET-BATTLE is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. James is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. James applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities. James is currently SJRC’s Director of Teaching who oversees the Science & Justice Training Program.

CAMILLA FORSBERG is a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. The Forsberg lab focuses on stem cell fate decisions of the blood system. Hematopoietic stem cells are responsible for generating a life-long supply of mature blood cells. Each stem cell is capable of making all of the mature blood cell types with widely different functions: some blood cells specialize in carrying oxygen, others fight off infections, and still others prevent bleeding in the process of blood clotting. How does a stem cell decide which cell type to give rise to? Are these decisions made by the stem cell itself, by its descendant multipotent progenitors, or both? How are these decisions dysregulated to cause cancer and other disorders? We tackle these questions from multiple angles – by in vivo and in vitro experimental approaches, by focusing on specific molecules as well as analyzing global changes. Ultimately, we want to understand the molecular determinants of hematopoietic stem cell fate decisions so that we can prevent and treat both genetic and acquired disorders of the hematopoietic system, including anemia, autoimmune disease, leukemias and lymphomas.

ANNA FRIZ is an Associate Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Anna creates media art, sound and transmission art, working across platforms to present installations, broadcasts, films and performances. Her works reflect upon media ecologies, land use, infrastructures, time perception, and critical fictions. 

LINDSAY HINCK is a Professor of Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology at UC Santa Cruz. The Hinck lab is interested in understanding how epithelial cells assemble into organs during development, and how the reverse process occurs during cancer when cells disassemble and metastasize to inappropriate locations. Recently, we have been focusing our studies on a family of positional cues, called Slits, which were originally identified in the nervous system where they direct the construction of elaborate networks of neuronal connections. Currently, the laboratory has projects in three areas: building an organ; stem cells and self-renewal; and loss of growth control and cancer.

CHRISTINE HONG is an Associate Professor of Literature and is the current chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, director of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. Christine’s book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, Christine co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. Christine serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and co-edit the Critical Ethnic Studies journal with Neda Atanasoski. Christine also co-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.” Christine specializes in transnational Asian American, critical Korean, U.S. war and empire, and comparative ethnic studies.

YOUNGEUN KIM is a graduate student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. YoungEun works on sound studies, diaspora studies, ethnomusicology, decolonial studies, audio technology, and ethnographic research.

KAREN MIGA is an Assistant Professor in the Biomolecular Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz and Associate Director at the UCSC Genomics Institute. Karen is the co-lead of the telomere-to-telomere (T2T) consortium and the project director of the human pangenome reference consortium (HPRC) production center at UCSC. Karen’s research program combines innovative computational and experimental approaches to produce the high-resolution sequence maps of human centromeric and pericentromeric DNAs. The Miga lab aims to uncover a new source of genetic and epigenetic variation in the human population, which is useful to investigate novel associations between genotype and phenotype of inherited traits and disease. More information can be found at: https://migalab.com/ 

TAMARA PICO is an Assistant Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. The Pico Group’s goal is to better understand past ice sheets and their stability. The Pico group uses ice sheet- solid Earth interactions as a lens to improve ice sheet and sea-level reconstructions on glacial timescales. By leveraging unconventional sea-level datasets, including ancient landscapes, we aim to target knowledge gaps on ice sheet growth and decay.

JENNY REARDON is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Humboldt Foundation, the London School of Economics, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and the United States Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.

JEREMY SANFORD is a Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. The Sanford Lab’s goal is to illuminate post-transcriptional networks coordinated by RNA binding proteins. To achieve this they employ genomic, biochemical and computational methods to identify cis-acting RNA elements recognized by a complete family of phylogenetically conserved, essential RNA binding proteins in a comprehensive manner.

DOROTHY R. SANTOS is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Dorothy is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. 

COLLEEN STONE manages all public relations and administrative aspects of the Science & Justice Research Center, its projects and grants, curriculum, training and visitor programs. Additionally, Colleen is the department assistant for Sociology, supporting faculty and student driven research.

ABOUT UCSC Programs and Research Initiatives (in alphabetical order)

The UCSC Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics (C.O.A.S.T.) is a collaborative effort between Science & Justice and Professors Jeremy Sanford (MCD Biology) and Michael Stone (Chemistry) 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. Learn more in undergraduate Aisha Lakshman’s (Sociology, Statistics) blog post on “Normalizing Slow Science,” in which she drew on work with C.O.A.S.T. and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. Using her two disciplines to interpret datasets to demonstrate social problems and catalyze social change, Lakshman has since expanded her post to a senior thesis, receiving honors, on “Normalizing “Slow Science” in the Case of RNA-Therapeutics: Research Pace and Public Trust in Science.“

The Everett Program for Technology and Social Change (video) develops young leaders who use the technical, educational, and research resources of the university to work directly with communities, empowering people to develop practical solutions to persistent problems. Everett’s educational philosophy is rooted in a holistic approach that engages students in linking theory, practice and personal development. Students are supported in making these connections through hands-on work contributing to social justice and environmental sustainability with community partners. Students work towards obtaining a major concentration or minor in Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES) administered through the Department of Sociology. Meet the Fellows. 

The Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” is a project co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate and History Professor Jennifer Derr and SJRC Founding Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon. More information can be found at: https://raceempirebiomedicine.sites.ucsc.edu/.

SJRC’s LEED 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. More information can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/research/projects/leed/ 

The Stem Cell Journal Club is hosted by The Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC) at UC Santa Cruz which aims to support and advance stem cell research by promoting interdisciplinary discoveries in biology, engineering, and information science. More information is here about the Stem cell agency (CIRM) that funds research training programs at UC Santa Cruz with IBSC and SJRC.

The UCSC SUSTAINABILITY OFFICE strives to foster a culture of diverse, equitable and inclusive sustainability at UC Santa Cruz. They actively engage students, staff, faculty and community members through education, leadership development, institutional change and behavioral transformation. They build partnerships with students and community members to improve UCSC’s environmental performance, seeking to model the way for how large institutions can work collaboratively to solve some of the world’s biggest environmental and social justice challenges. Students also work to advance inclusive sustainability and are leading our efforts at advancing education around the intersectionality between social and environmental justice. Read more about the effort toward the full decarbonization and electrification of the campus in this campus news article.

ABOUT NonUCSC PARTICIPANTS (in alphabetical order)

JULIE HARRIS-WAI is Associate Professor, Institute for Health & Aging in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Harris-Wai’s research focuses on examining the social and ethical factors influencing how and why genomic technologies are translated from the research setting into clinical care and the impact these technologies have on health disparities and underserved communities. The goal of her work is to identify methods for incorporating community and stakeholder perspectives into policy decision-making to improve the appropriate translation of research into clinical and public health programs. Dr. Harris-Wai is the Associate Director of the Kaiser Permanente/UCSF Center for Excellence in Research on Translational Genomics and Ethics (CT2G). She is currently working on an R21 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to use deliberative community engagement methods to inform policy decisions about the future of California’s Newborn Screening Program.

DONGOH PARK is a Senior Policy Advisor at Google’s Trust and Safety Team, where he is responsible for creating and overseeing policies for Chrome Browser and the web ecosystem to protect user safety and privacy. Prior to joining Google six years ago, Dongoh worked as a policy researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute in Korea and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. He also served as an information and communication officer in the Republic of Korea Navy. Dongoh holds a Ph.D. in Social Informatics from Indiana University, Bloomington and currently lives in the Los Angeles area with his family.

KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN is Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Dr. Rajan’s work lies at the intersection of Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with commitments to social theories of capitalism and postcolonial studies. Dr. Rajan’s presentation is part of a presentation to campus through the Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” co-led by SJRC faculty affiliate and History Professor Jennifer Derr and SJRC Founding Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon.

FRED TURNER is a Professor of Communication at Stanford University and serves on the SJRC Advisory Board. Fred is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley; The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

TIFFANY WISE-WEST is the Sustainability and Climate Action Manager for The City of Santa Cruz and a founding graduate fellow of the Science & Justice Training Program at UC Santa Cruz. Tiffany is a licensed professional civil engineer with nearly 20 years of experience in municipal infrastructure planning, design and project management. Tiffany received her BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Purdue University and specialized in water, wastewater and solid waste systems for the first half of her career. In the second half of her career, after a stint teaching mathematics and environmental education to secondary students, Tiffany earned her MA and PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz where she focused her academic research on the techno-economic and policy elements of sustainability, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and issues at the water and energy nexus. Tiffany specializes in negotiating and managing public-private-academic partnership projects aimed at advancing green infrastructure, policy and programming. She leads the award-winning Santa Cruz GreenWharf initiative and currently works on state and regional climate and energy issues in her roles as Senior Environmental Engineer at EcoShift Consulting, the City of Santa Cruz’s Climate Action Outreach Coordinator, and the District 2 Commissioner on the Santa Cruz County Commission on the Environment.

SNU in the World Winter 2023 Schedule

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Professor Yi along with 26 undergraduate and graduate students will visit Santa Cruz beginning Sunday, January 29th for a two week visit! Select in-person lectures and activities allow for a few additional guests to join. Express interest by selecting which activities you are interested in attending by marking any that apply in this Google Form. Note: times will be posted as confirmed.

All activities are in-person unless otherwise noted.

Day 1 Sunday, January 29: Free Exploration + Arrival to Santa Cruz

  • Travel to Santa Cruz, check into hotel, sightsee and explore as time permits.

Day 2 Monday, January 30: UC Santa Cruz

  • 11:00 am – 12:30 pm. Welcome Lunch + Lecture with JENNY REARDON: “Welcome and Introduction to the Science & Justice Research Center: Origins of Science & Justice and Current Activities” [Location: The Oakes College Mural Room].
  • 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm. Lecture: KAREN MIGA, JAMES DOUCET-BATTLE, and JENNY REARDON: “Personalized Medicine, Biotechnology, Justice, and Inclusion” [Location: The Oakes College Mural Room].
  • 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm. Welcome Dinner with SNU + UCSC Participants and Organizers [Location: Oakes College Provost House].

Day 3 Tuesday, January 31: UC Santa Cruz

  • 10:00 am – 11:00 am. Lecture: JAMES DOUCET-BATTLE: “Training the Next Generation of Scientists and Engineers.” A conversation through a compounded STS, ELSI/bioethics, and health disparities lens, with allied reference to SJRC’s UC-HBCU work with North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University and the UCSC Genomics Institute. [Location: The Oakes College Mural Room].
  • 12:15 pm – 1:30 pm. Lecture with C.O.A.S.T.: JEREMY SANFORD and JENNY REARDON: “Open Access Splicing Therapeutics: for rare diseases and the questions of ethics and justice raised by this novel area of research.” [reading: 2021 Lakshman “Normalizing Slow Science.”] [Location: Biomed 300; map].

Day 4 Wednesday, February 01: UC Santa Cruz + Free Exploration Downtown Santa Cruz

  • 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm. Sawyer Seminar with KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN on Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research [Location: Humanities 1, Room 210; map].

Day 5 Thursday, February 02: Free Exploration San Francisco

  • 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Visit de Young Museum
  • Free Exploration at Golden Gate Park
  • 5:00 pm Dinner at San Francisco Piers
  • 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm Visit Exploratorium After Dark exhibit
  • 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm Return to Carousel Beach Inn

Day 6 Friday, February 03: Silicon Valley 

  • Stanford University campus tour
  • 11:00 am – 12:00 pm. Computer History Museum
  • 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Lunch with DONGOH PARK
  • 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm Google Office Tour with DONGOH PARK (Senior Policy Advisor, Global Policy & Standards, Trust & Safety).
  • 2:30-3:30 pm Lecture: DONGOH PARK: “Google’s Trust and Safety Operations”
  • 6:30 pm Dinner with SNU OIA DIRECTORS [Location: TBD near Carousel Beach Inn]

Day 7 Saturday, February 04: San Francisco

  • Morning: Free Exploration
  • 1:00 pm. “Welcome To UC San Francisco” by JULIE HARRIS-WAI. [Location UC San Francisco, Mission Bay Campus, Fisher Banquet West room]
  • 1:15 pm – 2:15 pm. Discussion with FRED TURNER (Stanford University) on “Arts and Innovation”. [Location UC San Francisco, Mission Bay Campus, Fisher Banquet West room].
  • 2:30 pm – 3:00 pm. DENNIS BROWE (UCSC), Introduction to the Just Biomedicine “SF Third Street Project.”
  • 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm. “SF Third Street Walking Tour” with JENNY REARDON and DENNIS BROWE. [Begins at UCSF Mission Bay campus].

Day 8 Sunday, February 05: Free Exploration

  • 8:30 am – 10:00 am. Carousel Beach Inn → San Francisco MoMA
  • 10:00 am. Free Exploration of San Francisco MoMA
  • Ragnar Kjartansson, *The Visitors* (“Revisiting ‘The Visitors’: An Oral History of Ragnar Kjartansoon’s multimedia masterpiece”)
  • TBD Option 1: Bike across Golden Gate Bridge (rentals: Sports Basement in the Presidio, Blazing Saddles, Golden Gate Bridge Bike Rentals).
  • TBD Option 2: walking tour of Haight-Ashbury, Castro District, and Twin Peaks
  • TBD Option 3: laze away at North Beach coffee houses, browse through books at City Lights Bookstore
  • 6:30 pm. Dinner at Haight-Ashbury
  • 8:00-9:30 pm. San Francisco → Carousel Beach Inn

Day 9 Monday, February 06: UC Santa Cruz

  • 10:30 am – 12:00 pm. Lecture: ANNA FRIZ, YOUNGEUN KIM, DOROTHY SANTOS: “Arts and AI Innovations” [Location: The Oakes College Mural Room].
  • 1:30 pm. Lecture and Lab Visit with TAMARA PICO: “Geoscience and Colonialism” [Location: Earth & Planetary Sciences A308, map].
  • 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm. Lecture: CHESSA ADSIT-MORRIS: “Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design (LEED) of STEM Research.” [reading: 2023. Reardon et all. “Trustworthiness Matters: Building Equitable and Ethical Science” CELL] [Location: The Oakes College Mural Room].
  • 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm. Conversation + team dinner with the UCSC EVERETT PROGRAM FELLOWS and CHRIS BENNER [Location: room 47, Social Sciences 2 Building, map]

Day 10 Tuesday, February 07: UC Santa Cruz

Day 11 Wednesday, February 08: UC Santa Cruz

Day 12 Thursday, February 09: UC Santa Cruz, Farewell + Free Exploration

  • 10:00 am. SNU Student FINAL PRESENTATIONS + Farewell Lunch with SNU + SJRC organizers [Location: The Oakes College Mural Room].
  • Travel from Santa Cruz to the Bay Area for Free Exploration

Day 13 Friday, February 10: Free Exploration in the Greater Bay Area

  • Field trip to TBD

Day 14 Saturday, February 11: Free Exploration in the Greater Bay Area

  • Field trip to TBD
SJRC logo

Statement of Accountability: Affirming Inclusive, Encouraging Scholarly Communities

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In the wake of the recent accounts of harm in some parts of the STS community, we at Science & Justice stand in solidarity with all of those who have suffered, and all those who are working to create fair practices of accountability, and the structural changes needed to ensure that everyone has encouraging and safe environments in which to work and thrive. In the face of the hierarchical cultures and political economies of academia that tend to lionize and reward single figures, catalyze abuses of power, and marginalize historically underrepresented communities, we re-assert our longstanding commitment to center collective modes of governance, equity and justice in all the ways that we operate–from how we make decisions and focus research energies, to how we share logistical duties for events. We affirm and pledge to build our support and care for all members of our community (at all levels of their careers) through purposeful, lateral and mutual mentoring. We re-commit to proactively challenge systems of oppression and to disrupt power structures that lead to exclusive spaces, while simultaneously centering the priorities of those most marginalized in our communities, as we plan the future development of our collective work together.

Feedback and Suggestions

The SJRC does not tolerate any type of abusive, bullying, harassing, or discriminatory behavior. If you have a suggestion for how the Center can better cultivate and promote a healthy climate, let us know via the anonymous Center Climate Feedback and Suggestion form or by email to scijust@ucsc.edu, or Center Manager Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu), or Director Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu), or Director of Teaching James Doucet-Battle (jbattle@ucsc.edu), or any of our campus Steering Committee Members.

Resources

What can you do about bullying/abusive conduct? Refer to:

How can we build together more just practices of knowledge production? 

The SJRC in collaboration with its colleagues has launched the Leadership in the Equitable, Ethical Design (LEED) of STEM initiative. The LEED initiative seeks to create guidelines for the design and conduct of STEM research that integrates DEI and ELSI in a manner that leads to more equitable and just science and technology. If you would like to take part in or contribute to this project, learn more.

The CLEAR (an innovative feminist, anti-colonial marine laboratory) is a values-based lab that seeks to integrate ethics into all their practices. You can learn more here. If you are considering writing a collaborative report, please refer to the CLEAR Lab’s guidance in determining author order. 

To learn about transforming complaint into institutional change, read Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021) and explore the Feminist Kill Joys blog.

To learn about the new Ethics and Code of Conduct Policy of the Society of Social Studies of Science (4S) visit their website: https://www.4sonline.org/4s-ethics-and-code-of-conduct-policy/.

UC Santa Cruz Principles of Community

UC Santa Cruz is committed to promoting and protecting an environment that values and supports every person in an atmosphere of civility, honesty, cooperation, professionalism and fairness. As a member of our affiliated community, these Principles of Community, Policies, Procedures, and Codes of Conduct, extend to you. If you witnessed or have been a target of a hate or bias motivated incident while participating in a university sponsored activity, please report the incident at: https://reporthate.ucsc.edu/how-to-report/index.html.

We strive to be:

Diverse: We embrace diversity in all its forms and we strive for an inclusive community that fosters an open, enlightened and productive environment.

Open: We believe free exchange of ideas requires mutual respect and consideration for our differences.

Purposeful: We are a participatory community united by shared commitments to: service to society; preservation and advancement of knowledge; and innovative teaching and learning.

Caring: We promote mutual respect, trust and support to foster bonds that strengthen the community.

Just: We are committed to due process, respect for individual dignity and equitable access to resources, recognition and rewards.

Disciplined: We seek to advance common goals through reasonable and realistic practices, procedures and expectations.

Celebrative: We celebrate the heritage, achievements and diversity of the community and the uniqueness and contributions of our members.

Canceled – November 28, 2022 | Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

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Monday, November 28, 2022 – CANCELED DUE to the STRIKE.

2:00-4:00 PM

Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom

On November 28th 2022, you are invited to a book launch celebration for Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne’s new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Hawthorne will be in conversation with Savannah Shange (Anthropology) and Steve McKay (Sociology).

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. In Contesting Race and Citizenship, I focus 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, of Europe itself. This book opens discussions of the so-called migrant “crisis” by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. I trace 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.

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

Learn more in the campus news article: New book explores citizenship rights and Black anti-racist politics in Italy

Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of the 2021 volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and author of  Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 “Women of the Year” for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy, and she was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Society Humanities Award in 2021.

Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, History of Art and Visual Culture, Sociology, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Canceled – November 17, 2022 | Book Launch! Unsettled Borders: Militarized Border Technologies and Indigenous Sacred Science

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Thursday, November 17, 2022 – CANCELED DUE to the STRIKE.

3:00 PM

Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom

On November 17th, join the book launch celebration for Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2022) by SJRC faculty affiliate Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Shaeffer will be in conversation with Jennifer Gonzalez (History of Art and Visual Culture) and Kat Gutierrez (History).

In Unsettled Borders, Prof. Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of the Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land, tracing 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 and ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.

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

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

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

Co-Sponsored by the Feminist Studies Department and the Science & Justice Research Center.

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

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Wednesday, November 02, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM 

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 02, 2022 | Giving Day

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Wednesday, November 2, 2022

All-Day

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

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

Share our Campaign for Justice!

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

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

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

ABOUT the SJRC

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

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

Visit and share SJRC’s campaign page

ABOUT SJRC’s LEED Initiative

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

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

Visit and share the LEED campaign page

Why Support S&J

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

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

With your support we can also:

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

Share our Campaigns for Justice!

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

Thank you for making a more just world possible!