Community Events

April 23, 2025 | TechnoScience Improv

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025

12:15-2:00pm

Humanities 1, Room 210

This roundtable improv brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations. Rather than structured around formal talks, each conversation will start with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology.

Convener:

Dimitris Papadopoulos

Participants:

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.

James Doucet-Battle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor in the History Department.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Warren Sack is Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.

Kriti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Matt Sparke is Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

This talk is part of the earth ecologies x technoscience series in co-sponsorship with the History of Consciousness Department.

April 25, 2025 | Slow Seminar Book Celebration: Unmaking Botany

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Friday, April 25, 2025

11:00 am – 1:00 pm, reception to follow 

Humanities 2, Room 259 + Zoom (RSVP by April 17th)

Please join the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) for a hybrid slow seminar, a discussion (and celebration) of Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines, a new book by Professor Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez of the UCSC History Department. The slow seminar will be on Friday, April 25, from 11am-1pm. There will be a reception with light refreshments to follow. 
 
Please RSVP by Thursday, April 17th by filling out this form. Graduate students interested in a copy of the book will be able to indicate so on the form. 
 
Please feel free to circulate this email with the attached flyer to relevant groups. What is a Slow Seminar? Read our explainer and check out past events here.

About Unmaking Botany

Unmaking Botany traces a history of imperial botany in the Philippines from the last decades of Spanish rule through the first decades of US colonization. Gutierrez approaches this history through the tension between how vernacular knowledge systems both revealed the limits of botany at the same time as they reinforced the dominance of botanical science over other ways of knowing plants. These “sovereign vernaculars” both made and unmade botany, a concept that is a methodological provocation to study the history of science from multiple vantage points and examine the interplay between different knowledge systems.
 
The e-book is now available through the UCSC library at this link. A number of physical copies of the book will be available free of charge to graduate students, courtesy of the author. If you wish to order the book from Duke University Press, you may receive 30% off with discount code E25GUTRZ. 

About the Author

Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in Philippine history, postcolonial science and technology studies, histories of plant science, agrarian migration, and community-engaged research. Gutierrez is co-PI of the Watsonville is in the Heart community archive and research project and co-director of SEACoast.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of History, and the Science and Justice Research Center

May 02, 2025 | BME80G Series: Mohammed Mostajo-Radji on Consciousness and Neuroethics: Exploring the Boundaries of Personhood and Research

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Friday, May 02, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)

On Friday, May 02 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 Dr. Mohammed Mostajo-Radji.

Consciousness and Neuroethics: Exploring the Boundaries of Personhood and Research

Ethics Consciousness remains one of the most profound and debated topics in neuroscience, philosophy, and bioethics. This presentation explores diverse perspectives on consciousness, from philosophical frameworks like dualism and monism to cutting-edge neuroscientific approaches using human brain organoids. As organoid research advances, ethical questions surrounding personhood, animal welfare, and the moral status of artificially grown neural structures become increasingly urgent. By examining case studies of human brain organoids, chimeric models, and neural restoration techniques, we will discuss the ethical challenges of defining consciousness and its implications for medical research, end-of-life care, and the future of neuroscience.

Dr. Mohammed Mostajo-Radji, Assistant Research Scientist, UCSC Genomics Institute.

Dr. Mohammed Mostajo-Radji is an Assistant Research Scientist at the UCSC Genomics Institute, where his is part of the Braingeneers group, a multidisciplinary collective of geneticists, neuroscientists, and engineers focused on the human brain specification and function. His research explores neuronal specification and fate plasticity in the cerebral cortex using brain organoid models. Additionally, he leads the Live Cell Biotechnology Discovery Lab, which develops cloud-based experimental science education technologies. Dr. Mostajo-Radji earned his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training at University of California San Francisco Department of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research.

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

May 06, 2025 | Through the Image of the Animal: The Celluloid Specimen with Dr. Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa

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Tuesday, May 06, 2025

12:00-1:30pm

Communications Building, Classroom 130

Comparisons between humans and animals are foundational to the experimental branches of medicine and psychology. Yet converting the bafflingly complex bodies and behaviours of nonhuman animals into scientific models is not a straightforward process. Film has been an essential, yet largely overlooked, element within this process. Often treated as purely transparent scientific recordings, the films produced out of animal research are in fact deeply formalist works that tested what film could capture through the image of an animal—variously proposing that they could visualise pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of environment on an organism. Drawing on his recent book, Schultz-Figueroa will speak and present filmed examples of primate insight and creativity, Alfred Kinsey’s experiments into animal sexuality, lab rats made to live in a model of a dystopian future, animal recreations of Marxist theory, and more. This work uncovers a dynamic field of scientific looking, where the distinctions between nature and culture are inscribed and reinscribed into animal images, generating concepts that broadly shaped the politics of immigration, labor relations, educational practice, and gender identity, well beyond the walls of the lab.

Dr. Schultz-Figueroa is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Seattle University. His research focuses on the history of scientific filmmaking, nontheatrical film, and animal studies. His book The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (University of California Press) was published in 2023. He is currently working on two projects, tentatively titled Against Encounter: The Problem of Organicism in Animal Documentary and Beastly Futures: Rightwing Animal Aesthetics in the 21st Century.

Hosted by the Center for Documentary Arts and Research and the Film & Digital Media Department.

May 07, 2025 | Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments

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Wednesday, May 07, 2025

3:00-4:30pm

Humanities 1, Room 210

On Wednesday May 7th, join Science & Justice Visiting Scholar Jaco de Swart for a talk, “Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments.”

Laboratory sciences crucially depend on experiments being clean. But what is clean? In this talk, I open up versions of clean relating to different ontological registers, and trace the material practices of cleaning as they are attuned to experimental specificities. My case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy which is meant to detect dark matter in the form the hypothetical WIMP – the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. This experiment is clean when it is ‘free from signals that mimic dark matter’. In practice, such cleanliness has been difficult to achieve – soaps may be radioactive, steel may spread electronegativity, and humans are altogether dangerously filthy. And because, at least thus far, dark matter remains elusive, it is impossible to tell whether the meticulously cleaned detector is adequately clean. Additional cleaning efforts will make the detector sensitive to neutrino particles: a background that cannot be cleaned away. As the experimenters dread the possibility that this means their experiment will end in limbo, other physicists are now trying to detect other hypothetical dark matter particles with other kinds of experiments, requiring other kinds of cleanliness. The XENONnT experiment itself, meanwhile, has had to ensure that it does not interfere with environmental cleanliness, as per the demands of the surrounding society.

This work is done in collaboration with Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam).

Jaco de Swart is an AIP Helleman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Program in STS and Department of Physics, and a visitor at UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center. He received his PhD at the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. His research focuses on historical and anthropological studies of open problems in cosmology and he is currently writing a book on the history of dark matter under contract with MIT Press. De Swart is also a member of several physics collaborations to help develop social and environmental responsible research practices. He has a passion for science communication—appearing in PBS NOVA’s Decoding the Universe—and is bassist in the band X Raiders.

May 08, 2025 | Public Research Action Network: Stand Up for Science; Stand Up for Knowledge

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Thursday, May 08, 2025

6:00 – 7:30 pm 

Coastal Science Building CBB110

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. Meetings will take place once/month on the 2nd Thursday.

Parking at the Coastal Science Campus is available with no permits after 5pm.

May 08, 2025 | Nauenberg History of Science Lecture with Jessica Riskin

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Thursday, May 08, 2025

5:00-7:00pm (registration)

Seymour Center, La Feliz Room

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution. Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism – he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings – brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble. During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him. Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes. This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making. Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance. The lecture will present Lamarck’s radical, embattled, and perhaps re-emerging approach to living things, their evolutionary and ecological agency, and the science that studies them.

Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick\ (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

May 09, 2025 | BME80G Series: Malia Fullerton on Ethical Implications of Legacy Data Storage and Use: the HGDP as Case Study

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Friday, May 09, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)

On Friday, May 09 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 Stephanie Malia Fullerton.

Ethical Implications of Legacy Data Storage and Use: the HGDP as Case Study

Much biomedical research, including genetic research, relies on easily accessible, individual level data on hundreds or thousands of research participants. As the need for larger and larger sample sizes grows and where prospective data collection is challenging, the norm is for investigators to draw on in silico genomic data derived from previous studies, available open-access or via various controlled-access data sharing mechanisms. One such open-access resource, the Human Genome Diversity Project collection, includes cell lines from 1063 anonymous individuals sampled from 52 populations around the world. The cell lines were developed from specimens collected decades prior to the collection being made available in 2002, and in partial response to controversy about prospective collection in Indigenous and marginalized communities. There is no extant record of what biospecimen donors were told about the ways that their samples would be used and very few of those involved in collecting the original samples are still living. Nevertheless, the cell line collection and extensive genetic data derived from the cell lines, including whole genome sequence information, continue to be widely used in many kinds of human genetic research. While evidence of individual harm is lacking, Dr. Fullerton will argue that ongoing open-access use of data of unclear provenance poses numerous risks for the broader genomics research community.

Malia Fullerton, Professor of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine.

Malia Fullerton, DPhil, is Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She received a doctorate in Human Population Genetics from the University of Oxford and later re-trained in Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) research with a fellowship from the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute. Dr. Fullerton contributes to a range of empirical projects focused on clinical translational genomics including in collaboration with the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, the Polygenic Risk Methods in Diverse Populations (PRIMED) Consortium, and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC).

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

May 13, 2025 | Contesting Techno Fascisms Now!

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Tuesday, May 13, 2025

3:30-5:00pm

Namaste Lounge

This panel explores ways that fascism today manifests in unexpected sites and imaginaries, including visions of techno-utopia, nationalist movements for animal rights and calls to colonize outer space. The panelist assembled here will each take a keyword of the emergent fascist trends and think through ways to contest fascisms now.
 
Panel Participants:
  • Neda Atanasoski; Professor and Chair, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism
  • Felicity Amaya Schaeffer; Chair, CRES and Professor FMST, UCSC. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism
  • Neel Ahuja; Professor, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Environmental Fascism
  • Erin McElroy; Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Keyword: Techno-Feudalism

Hosted by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department

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)

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.