Wednesday, November 19, 2025
3:00-5:00 PM
Oakes Academic Building, 2nd and 3rd floors
Join the Institute for Social Transformation, Center for Labor and Community, Right Livelihood Center, Center for Economic Justice & Action, and Science & Justice Research Center in celebrating our relocations and expanded spaces in Oakes College, complete with refreshments and mingling with faculty and staff.
Sunday, October 12, 2025
4:30PM
The Colligan Theater at the Tannery Arts Center (map)
As part of The Santa Cruz Film Festival, please join Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle at the Colligan Theater for their most recent documentary film, Playing With Fire! An Ecosexual Emergency.
The Santa Cruz Film Festival offers students a $5 General Admission ticket as well as $30 All Access Passes to all 35 screening events. The $5 student passes can be purchased through their ticketing site using the discount code STUFEST2025 at: https://www.goelevent.com/santacruzfilmfestival/e/PlayingwithFireAnEcosexualEmergency
View the trailer at: https://vimeo.com/1088579894.
From the creators of the first queer environmental documentary feature films comes a hot new offering. The third chapter is their most epic and daring yet — fusing art, activism, and intimate storytelling in a touching journey through crisis, change, and renewal. When a firestorm rips through their redwood forest home, two artist-activists — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle —emerge with a powerful message of love, resilience, and ecological hope, guided by a relationship with their magical peacock. Please join us after for a Q&A with Directors Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens!
Thursday, July 31, 2025
4:00 – 6:00 pm
Coastal Science Building
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.