Community Events

June 06, 2025 | BME80G Series: Tina Lasisi on Guilty by Genetic Association: Database Disparities, Family Structure, and the Racialized Reach of DNA Surveillance

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Friday, June 06, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)

On Friday, June 06 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Tina Lasisi.

Guilty by Genetic Association: Database Disparities, Family Structure, and the Racialized Reach of DNA Surveillance

Forensic DNA databases disproportionately contain the genetic profiles of Black Americans, reflecting systemic biases in policing practices and inequitable application of DNA collection laws. Yet, the ethical implications of genetic surveillance extend beyond individual inclusion, implicating entire families and communities due to shared genetic ties. Historical differences in family structure—characterized by higher variance in family size among Black Americans—further compound this disparity. Larger family sizes increase genetic detectability through familial DNA searches, effectively expanding surveillance across genetically related individuals, even when those individuals are not themselves the initial target of investigation.This dynamic exemplifies how technologies initially designed under one scientific paradigm—identifying single individuals through a limited set of genetic markers—can evolve, gaining unforeseen capabilities like familial identification. As genetic data continues to accumulate in diverse databases, including commercial ventures such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies, the potential for future uses beyond original intentions increases dramatically. This underscores the need for proactive ethical reflection and policy development to anticipate and mitigate unintended disparities, ensuring that the accumulation and repurposing of genetic data does not deepen existing racial injustices or create new vulnerabilities.

Tina Lasisi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan.

Tina Lasisi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. Her research integrates population genetics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to understand human biological variation, particularly focusing on hair, skin, and pigmentation. Her current work examines the ethical and social implications of forensic genetics, particularly how systemic disparities in genetic databases contribute to racialized surveillance. In addition to her academic work, she is committed to public scholarship, engaging in science communication initiatives that promote a more accurate and nuanced understanding of human variation.

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

July 31, 2025 | Public Research Action Network: Stand Up for Science; Stand Up for Knowledge

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Thursday, July 31, 2025

4:00 – 6:00 pm 

Oakes College 231

Join the newly-created Public Research Action Network!

Building on the momentum from the highly successful Stand up for Science UCSC rallies held in March 2025, faculty are forming a group that will meet regularly with the slogan “Stand Up for Science; Stand Up for Knowledge”. The goal will be to keep up with the changing landscape regarding publicly-based research across all disciplines. The format is collaborative, with a plan for ~30-45 minutes of sharing some current events and updates, and ~45 minutes of action—oriented outreach plans including possibly letter and op-ed writing, working on communications to the UCSC Academic Senate and/or administrators, connecting with state and federal leaders, or other ideas to be crafted together.

June 03, 2025 | THICK, SLIMY, SQUISHY, SQUIGGLY & GENERATIVE: A Conversation with Donna Haraway

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Tuesday, June 03, 2025

3:30-6:00pm

UCSC McHenry Library, Special Collections & Archives, 3rd Floor

On June 3rd, 2025, join the UCSC Special Collections & Archives for a conversation with Donna Haraway, in dialogue with three former students and long-time intellectual companions: Chela Sandoval (Associate Professor of Chicana Studies at UC Santa Barbara), Katie King (Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland), and Caren Kaplan (Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis).

NOTE: Limited space available; plan to arrive early for seating. The conversation will start promptly at 4 pm and the event will continue afterwards with browsing in the archives.

Together with Haraway, these History of Consciousness alums will revisit the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transformative modes of thinking that shaped their time at UCSC in the 1980s and ’90s—and that continue to animate their work today. Reflecting on this shared historical moment, the conversation will trace the intersections, evolutions, and generative entanglements of their ideas over time—and consider why collectivity, friendship, integrity, and humor remain vital tools for navigating what Haraway has called the “thick and slimy” urgencies of our present.

This event also marks the opening of an exhibition that showcases select materials from the Donna Haraway Papers, newly processed and available for research at UCSC’s McHenry Library.

Organized by the University Library’s Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) and 2024-2025 CART Fellow Annika Berry.

Read also this campus news article about Donna’s recent international awards: Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department, receives international honors.

May 30-31, 2025 | A Dawn and Two Dusks

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Friday-Saturday, May 30-31, 2025

5:30-8:30 pm

UCSC Arboretum

Co-conceived by sound and media artist Anna Friz (FDM) and choreographer Cid Pearlman (PPD), A Dawn and Two Dusks is a site-specific project taking place over three days on the grounds of the UCSC Arboretum in May 2025. Beginning with a dawn listening session on International Dawn Chorus Day (May 4), and continuing over two evenings of site-specific performance (May 30–31), the project proposes resilience and exuberant corporealities through interdisciplinary student, faculty and community collaborations, engaging the arts in community building and placemaking in response to urgent and unstable times.

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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
– Sunday, May 4, 5:15-7:00 a.m.: Dawn Chorus, a listening event
– Friday & Saturday, May 30–31, 5:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m.: A Dawn and Two Dusks, a site-specific performance event
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
– Site information
– No registration required
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PARKING
– Directions
– UCSC Arboretum parking

May 30, 2025 | BME80G Series: Joanna Radin on Tales From the Crypt: Craniometry, Computers and Mass Culture in 1960s Cambridge

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Friday, May 30, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)

On Friday, May 30 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Joanna Radin.

Tales From the Crypt: Craniometry, Computers and Mass Culture in 1960s Cambridge

This is a story about what happened when an enterprising Ivy league, pre-med majoring in anthropology encountered a machine he was told could, among other miracles, transform the spoils of generations of racial conquest into anti-racist science. It is a cautionary tale, not unlike the ones this pre-med would become best known for when he abandoned medicine for mass-market publishing and Hollywood. I narrate this account not as a thriller, adventure, or mystery, but as a bad romance. Or more specifically a necromance, born out of opportunistic relationships to the dead and mass cultural movements to refuse civil rights. The story unfolds between Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, MA in the 1960s. Specifically, collections of skulls at Cambridge University and the gender and racially segregated halls of Harvard College. It traces the intersections of Black Power and the power of computers—specifically the IBM 7090–as a strategy for intervening in entrenched ideas about human racial and sexual difference. I follow the consequences of this skullduggery into the present, after calls for the release of human remains from Anthropology’s crypts amidst the Black Lives Matter movement during the twilight of Affirmative Action.

Joanna Radin, Associate Professor of History of Medicine, Yale University,

Joanna Radin is Associate Professor of History of Medicine at Yale University, where she is a core member and Director of Graduate Studies of the Program in History of Science and Medicine. She also holds appointments in the Departments of History and of Anthropology and is an affiliate of the Programs in American Studies and in Religion and Modernity. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017) and with Emma Kowal, the co-editor of Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017). Her most recent publication is an essay in The Yale Review, “Is Celebrity Real?”

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 23-25, 2025 | California STS Network Retreat 2025

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Friday, May 23 – Sunday, May 25, 2025

5:00pm – 3:00 pm 

Nature Bridge

This year the California STS Network Retreat is returning to NatureBridge, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The retreat will be hosted by the UC Davis STS department and will be held from 5:00 PM on May 23rd – 3:00 PM on May 25th.

The STS Retreat is an opportunity to meet up with a mixture of faculty, postdocs and graduate students  interested and working in STS from across California. Sessions will be a mixture of mind-stretching STS related workshops, professionalisation workshops, and ‘theory walks’ in the beautiful headland landscape. Sessions are designed to provide attendees with the opportunity to get to know fellow scholars in a relaxed environment.

The cost is $200 including food and accommodation in bunk rooms. Transport to and from is not included.

If you have any questions or plan to attend the retreat, please email Bex Jones, UC Davis graduate student, at rljones@ucdavis.edu. Spaces will only be reserved and confirmed upon payment.

May 16, 2025 | BME80G Series: Benjamin Capps on A One Health Guide to Bioethics

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Friday, May 16, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

VIRTUAL (flyer) Zoom Registration

On Friday, May 16 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Benjamin Capps.

A One Health Guide to Bioethics

One Health connects the health of non-human animals and human beings to the environments they share.  The relationships are seen in the natural origins of zoonotic pandemics, which can be explained through animal welfare, conservation, ecology, as well as public health.  My work in bioethics attempts to define these connections.  However, I am often told that it’s all very well to define one health ethics, when all that is needed is a pragmatic, or practical ideal of the one health approach.  My response is that ethics is embedded in pragmatism, and you can’t escape ethical dilemmas by just being practical.  Moreover, by avoiding hard environmental questions, a one health approach often becomes a justification for public health.  Public health is anthropocentric and has no regard for the interests of animals or the non-human environment; in practice, it often excludes ethical conservation, ecology, and environmentalism.  In this seminar, I will define one health ethics, and try to answer (maybe) some hard questions using actual cases.  The objective is to appreciate that being practical (doing science or doing public health) is an inherently bioethical endeavour.

Benjamin Capps, Associate Professor, Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.

Benjamin Capps is  is an associate professor in the Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.  Before moving to Canada in 2014, he was a member of faculty at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore (2008-2014).  Since 2017, Ben has chaired the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) Committee on Ethics, Law and Society. He has published One Health Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Contested Cells: Global Perspectives on the Stem Cell Debate (co-editor, Imperial Collage Press, 2010), and Addiction Neurobiology: Ethical and Social Implications (with others, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2009).  In 2024, he was awarded a grant to lead a residential workshop at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, on The Ecological Genome Project and the Promises of Ecogenomics for Society.  He is a member of the Humanimal Trust’s scientific committee (registered charity, UK, since 2022), and served on the Neuroethics Working Group of the Bioethics Advisory Committee (Singapore; 2011-2014), and Pro-Tem National Oversight Committee for Human-Animal Combinations in Stem Cell Research (Ministry of Health, Singapore; 2011-2012).  He has been an advisor for the World Health Organisation, World Federation for Animals, Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission, and UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 15, 2025 | Activist Conversation with Erin McElroy on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

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Thursday, May 15, 2025

10:00-11:30 am

Humanities 1, Room 210

Science & Justice colleagues are invited gather on May 15th from 10:00-11:30 am in Humanities 1, Room 210 for a talk with Erin McElroy on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

About the Speaker

Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.

May 15, 2025 | Book Talk! Anita Say Chan on “Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future” (UC Press, 2025)

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Thursday, May 15, 2025

1:00-3:00pm

Humanities 1, Room 210 + Zoom

Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).

Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).

Science & Justice colleagues are invited gather on May 15th from 1:00-3:00pm in Humanities 1, Room 210 (or over Zoom) for a talk by Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).

About the Book

The book is available at UC Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/predatory-data/paper

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes.

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century’s anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.

While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

About the Author

Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

May 14, 2025 | Book Talk! Erin McElroy on “Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times” (Duke University Press, 2025)

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025

5:00-6:30pm

Humanities 1, Room 202

The Center for Racial Justice Presents: Book Talk with Erin McElroy.

About the Book

In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy examines how Silicon Valley’s technocapitalist model has expanded globally, focusing on its manifestation in postsocialist Romania. McElroy reveals how this expansion perpetuates gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic inequality both in the San Francisco Bay Area and Romania. The book also highlights Romanian resistance movements that draw on socialist legacies to envision more equitable social alternatives, ultimately arguing that technocapitalism represents an unsustainable model of economic growth.

About the Author

Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.