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

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.

April 30, 2021 | Book Launch! How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens

On Friday, April 30, 2021 from 12:00pm–1:00pm PDT, S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Sociology Hillary Angelo, joined in conversation with Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Neil Brenner, and Claudio Benzecry to discuss and celebrate the launch of her book, How Green Became Good:Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens.

The book is available at: The University of Chicago Press (use discount code UCPSOC for 20% off)

About the Book and Conversationalists

Abstract greens

Book Cover for Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2021)

As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts. 

Hillary Angelo is Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated with the SJRC at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Claudio Benzecry is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and the author of The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (forthcoming 2021).

Neil Brenner is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford, 2019) and Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente, 2016), as well as the edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014).

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is a University Professor affiliated with the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of a number of books, most recently What is an Event? (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End (2005).

June 24, 2020 | V is for Veracity

On June 24, 2020, SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon joined Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication) for a conversation on Science & Justice, and to explore our intersecting work on democracy, justice, information, and truth.

As Reardon’s recently written in relation in “V is for Veracity” about Covid-19: An “us” versus “them” mindset engendered by the metaphor of war focuses our attention on viruses, vaccines, and victory. It leads us to believe that there is a discrete enemy out there—a virus—that we must defeat. Yet, as we focus on this so-called frontline, we risk missing the deeper, more systemic problems. All our efforts, staying home and holding the frontline, may only lead us into the next battle, if we do not attend now to the unraveling of relations that sustain trustworthy truths—the veracity required to live collectively.

Refer also to the SSRC article, “V is for veracity.

The conversation was recorded and will be linked here once available.

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.

June 05, 2020 | UCHRI The Fire This Time: Race at Boiling Point

Hosted by David Theo Goldberg and UCHRI on Friday, June 05, 2020.

UCHRI gathered Angela Y. Davis (Emerita, UC Santa Cruz), Herman Gray (Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz), Gaye Theresa Johnson (UC Los Angeles), Robin D.G. Kelley (UC Los Angeles), and Josh Kun (USC) to think differently together about the structural conditions and explosive events shattering our times.

In a wide-ranging conversation emerging out of the national and international protests in response to yet another spate of anti-Black police violence, these leading critical thinkers engage questions about intersectional and international struggle, the militarization of the border, racial capitalism, the feminist dimension of new social justice movements, the unsustainability of the nation-state, the power of the arts as a rallying force for imagining and sustaining solidarities, and much more.

Rapporteur Report by Dennis Browe (PhD Student, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz)

Moderator

Herman Gray (Professor Emeritus, Sociology; SJRC Advisor, UC Santa Cruz)

Participants

Angela Y. Davis (Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)

Gaye Theresa Johnson (Associate Professor, African American Studies, UC Los Angeles)

Robin D. G. Kelley (Professor, African American Studies, UC Los Angeles)

Josh Kun (Professor and Chair, Cross-Cultural Communication; Director, School of Communication, University of Southern California)

The Fire This Time: Race at the Boiling Point (recording), which took place on June 5, 2020, brought together a superb collection of scholars to think together about this powerful moment – a confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ‘fed up’-risings against police brutality and systemic racism taking place across the U.S. and globally. Hosted by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), over 9,000 people joined, indicating the energy of the moment and the hunger that so many have for real change and more justice both in the U.S. and abroad.

David Theo Goldberg, director of UCHRI, introduced the event and set the tone by noting the pain but also the hope engendering the circumstances of this necessary conversation. Dr. Goldberg also acknowledged the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike and larger UC graduate student struggle for secure living wages still taking place, linking the militarized police suppression of the strikes across numerous UC campuses (though especially the UCSC picket line) to the police repression we are seeing on the streets across the U.S. today. Directly connecting the COLA movement with the reason for this event, he stated: “The impacts [of disciplinary measures taken by administration] have fallen especially hard on students and faculty of color.”

Herman Gray served as the moderator of the panel. Repeating a powerful Black Lives Matter mantra, he began by individually naming those most recently killed by police: “Of course, we are here because of the public lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and David McAtee.” Much of the conversation centered around the transformative power of this moment and the types of hope that have been opened up. Panelists used a number of metaphors and analogies, borrowing other scholars’ words to describe these affective openings in the body politic. Gray relayed Antonio Gramsci’s phrase “the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will” to speak about opportunity in crisis, while Stuart Hall’s notion of this being a truly ‘conjunctural moment,’ full of possibilities, was also invoked. Additionally, Angela Davis mentioned Arundhati Roy’s recent writing on the novel coronavirus as a ‘portal’ that can lead to something new, something different.

Gray then pulled on the polyvalent slogan, “I can’t breathe” to link together a number of intersecting structural conditions that harm Black and Brown people. These conditions literally affect their ability to breathe, while breath also metaphorically stands in for conditions of the measure of the good life. First, it is often poorer Black and Brown communities that have to live near polluted environments and polluted air. Second, the devastating health impacts of COVID-19 are hitting Black and Brown communities the hardest – importantly, not due to ‘racial’ genetics but due to structural racial inequalities, such as socioeconomic status and living in dense, low-income housing. And third, this phrase has been engrained into national consciousness by a number of Black men – Eric Garner and George Floyd as just the two most well-known names – who whispered these final words through their constricted airways under the weight of police chokeholds and knee-holds. “I can’t breathe” captures this confluence of structural conditions that for Gray opens a space to think through this moment and the possibilities for real change. 

The panelists recognized that, while powerful, ultimately this hopeful moment will not last, and a main question becomes what people can do next, how to move in the direction of a better future. Gaye Theresa Johnson offered keen insight here by saying that when people ask what we can do next, they are thinking within institutions; instead, what we need is a fundamental shift around our notion that what we need is a leader (usually a man) to tell us what to do and where to go next. She stated: “we need to start doing this ourselves,” by starting conversations and sometimes simply listening to and supporting the people already doing this work. Johnson remarked on signs of hope coming from these uprisings: they are teaching us “a different kind of calculus of human worth,” one predicated on the inherent humanity of Black and Brown people, who deserve to be here simply because they are breathing, able to draw breath. The suffering, she said, of Black and Brown and trans people, is met with skepticism, putting the burden of proof on them over and over again in order to have to prove their humanity. However, it is through and in struggle that “we always have the lessons of what we need in order to become free.” Davis also referenced the 2015 uprisings against white supremacy at the University of Missouri, reminding us that while the intensity of that powerful moment did die down, it is vital to not lose sight of the openings created for systemic change, even if it is difficult to not see immediate results.

Robin D.G. Kelley noted that there has long been an ongoing war that preceded COVID-19 – a war against poor Black and Brown communities which includes preexisting conditions of racism and structural inequalities. Referencing Cedric Robinson – his teacher and teacher to many on the contours of racial capitalism – Dr. Kelley linked together a number of phenomena into this ongoing war: exacerbation of border closings and horrible conditions of immigrant detention centers; bypassing of labor laws by Amazon, Instacart, and other gig workers; the deeply unsafe conditions of working in the meatpacking industry; as well as the growth of authoritarian regimes all over the world. These interlinked phenomena are manifesting in the unequal effects of COVID-19 and this most recent set of murders by law enforcement, all laying bare the intensity and the possibilities of the current struggle to live collectively. As Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, argues in a recent essay, it is veracity – ‘trustworthy truths’ – that is required to help imagine and create a more just world, centered around recognizing our collective relations with others.

Josh Kun picked up on this thread, discussing the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border by highlighting the converging effects of policing Black and Brown bodies in this country, including how Homeland Security and ICE have become further integrated into domestic functions of policing (even as far back as 1992, the U.S. Border Patrol was used in Los Angeles to ‘clean up the streets’ and deport Latinos). Kun then discussed his work following Richard Misrach, an influential photographer who documented the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border during the Obama administration. Misrach found all sorts of white supremacist spray paint messaging across the border rocks: “These linked systems of hate and terror are actually written on the walls, written on the landscape and on the land that has been stolen.” While the fear and hatred of Latinx immigrants is so palpable for many in this country, Kun took this opportunity to remark that the strong networking of how domination and violence happens needs to be met with the same level of resistance networking, the same level of strength of convergence and coalition-building.

After the initial round of commentary, the conversation turned to the importance of a global perspective and the need to confront ongoing racial capitalism since, as Angela Davis reminded us, racism is not just a domestic problem. Importantly, the importance of a broad internationalist, solidarity-based perspective turns on the need for awareness of the limitations of the nation-state. The panelists all seemed to agree that, as Davis stated, “the nation-state as we know it is no longer possible.” The liberal nation-state, which, even with its short history in the U.S. (Kelley remarked that the social-democratic liberal U.S. state only appeared during Reconstruction and did not last long) has been hollowed out and dominated by market-based, neoliberal ideology. For the panelists, this is where the authoritarian regimes come in to maintain control of the nation-state – capital still needs to be allowed to freely cross borders, but these regimes use nationalist surges and fear tactics to gain followers. Johnson remarked how these authoritarian nationalist surges are not just a demonstration of power but are also a measure of white supremacy’s fragility. She pointed to a material metaphor to symbolize this white fragility by noting the flimsy chain-link fence that has been put up around the White House to keep protestors out: “It’s the narrative, the gesture that you are not welcome, this is our house. But it’s a permeable chain-link fence, it’s not going to keep anybody out or in.”

The internationalist movement that has exploded across the globe is laying bare this white supremacist fragility, and the beauty of this new movement (which builds on but goes beyond work done by Occupy and on Black Lives Matter struggles over the past decade) is that is a coalescence of contesting anti-Black and anti-Brown state violence. Davis noted that when we say ‘abolish prisons’ and ‘abolish the police,’ we are thinking about a future in which we have moved beyond the bourgeois notion of the nation-state (which is constitutively anti-Black). Johnson beautifully remarked that the nation-state does not, and cannot, “hold all of the dreams and imaginings that we have for our communities, that we have in our own time… we have our own ideas about what freedom is…We are so infuriating to the authoritarian fascists because [we call] their bluff. We refuse their world because we have a whole different set of imaginaries that they cannot even comprehend, and these are ready to be enacted.”

Gray, in a way linking these alternate imaginaries of another world to the question of care – of taking care of one another in the streets through mobilization and protest – noted that this has been an essential element of these uprisings. Davis responded by asking, “Who usually does the care?,” conveying the importance of recognizing the feminist dimension of these new movements. Kelley then echoed a critique being made often this past month: why do police have all the equipment they need, but healthcare workers cannot get enough personal protective equipment (PPE)? This discrepancy speaks to the overfunding of the masculine-imperialist police force and the underfunding of more feminized healthcare work. 

After Kun’s discussion of the importance of cell phone video footage of racialized police brutality as producing a ‘new archive of truth,’ Gray introduced questions from the audience, covering topics including building multi-racial coalitions and organizing; the small-scale steps that people can take as well as what changes institutions need to make; and COVID-19’s economy of violence whereby we are seeing a shutdown of the economy and hundreds of thousands of deaths at the same time that there has been a massive distribution of wealth to the super wealthy. Panelists discussed structural issues that have become exacerbated during the pandemic such as the privatization of healthcare and the mainstreaming of corporate care about issues of anti-Blackness (See, for example, statements put out by Coca Cola and by 23andMe; as well as UC Press’s statement supporting Black Lives Matter). Kun highlighted how corporate maneuvers, which put out public, surface-level statements supporting Black Lives Matter while changing none of their own policies which contribute to racial inequalities amongst their workers, can actually increase capital accumulation on the backs of Black people.                                                                                         

The final part of the conversation revolved around the power of music and visual art as part of freedom struggles. Especially in this moment of isolation from COVID-19 quarantine as it has run up against the uprisings, the sonic dimension of sociality has become even more important. Davis remarked how one of the reasons why people all over the world are drawn to the Black struggle in the U.S. has to do with the power of Black music: along with the Black music that has traveled have been the stories of Black resistance. And this, she thinks, is one of the reasons why there is not nearly the same level of global solidarity with other freedom struggles such as of the Palestinians and Kurds. However, music has the power to open up solidarities across struggles.

Fittingly, this past January the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) co-hosted an event on the future of race in the U.S. (which was a conversation between Herman Gray and Alondra Nelson, with Jenny Reardon serving as moderator); the ongoing theme of that conversation centered around how to realize and create conditions of possibility for transformative social moments/movements. And now, just five months later, a massively transformative moment has arrived in full force, opening up new possibilities for taking action centered around a more expansive notion of freedom and for thinking about what work remains ahead.

I end with a comment from Kelley, based on an audience question asking how to reconcile two timelines of freedom: the freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution on the one hand, and on the other hand the fact that many groups such as Blacks still do not have that full freedom. He replied by remarking that these are not two separate timelines, since they are dialectically related. One freedom is dependent on the other: unfreedom. For whites in the U.S., their freedom has always depended on the unfreedom of others. Taking in and digesting the wisdom of these scholars pushes us to continue thinking through this powerful moment, envisioning how to build more livable presents and more just futures. Since freedoms are dialectically interdependent, this moment, however short-lived, offers a chance to think and act our way out of the differentially deadly contours of racial capitalism, imagining life-giving alternatives to the conditions of anti-Blackness that can transmute “I can’t breathe” into something like “We breathe better, beautifully together.” This will take massive work on a broad internationalist scale and is prone to opposition and counter-forces at every step along the way, but as this conversation showed, this moment of transformation is already here as an ongoing new beginning.

April 20, 2020 | Book Launch! Vital Decomposition Soil Practitioners and Life Politics

Vital Decomposition (Duke University Press, 2020)

Monday, April 20, 2020

1:30 pm PST / 4:30pm EST

online: https://sasupenn.zoom.us/j/767737043

 

Celebrate the launch of Kristina Lyons’ new book, Vital Decomposition Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke University Press, April 2020).

Kristina M. Lyons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.

June 6, 2019 | Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence  

Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, June 6, 2019

7:00 PM (registration)

UC Santa Cruz, Kresge College Seminar Room

The Right Livelihood Laureate Lecture presents

an evening with Nicanor Perlas, Right Livelihood Award Laureate, followed by panel discussion with UC Santa Cruz Faculty Anthony Aguirre (Associate Professor of Physics), Lise Getoor (Professor of Computer Science and S&J Affiliate), and Sikina Jinnah (Associate Professor of Politics).

The 21st century is the Age of Science and Technology. It is also the Age in which humanity faces a unique and unprecedented challenge. This is the challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If properly developed and aligned with the values of humanity, AI will bring tremendous benefits to society. However, if AI is used inappropriately, it could undermine human civilization and, ultimately, with the emergence of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), lead to the extinction of humanity, in as little as 10 to 20 years. Scientists, philosophers and engineers call this latter possibility the “alignment challenge” or “existential risk” of AI. The fate of our future lies literally in our hands. In navigating the turbulent waters of extreme technology in the 21st century, two sources of hope are visible in the horizon: new more ethical developments from within science and technology itself, and the rapid and widespread emergence of societal change agents, whether they are activists in the realm of culture and civil society, visionary legislators in the realm of polity and government, or enlightened entrepreneurs in the realm of the economy and business.

For a full “deep dive” experience exploring these unprecedented challenges and possibilities, UC Santa Cruz will also host a week-long summer institute, July 8-12, with Right Livelihood Award laureate Nicanor Perlas, who received the “alternative Nobel” in 2003 for his work opposing corporate globalization.

Co-sponsored by Kresge College, Social Sciences Division, Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

More can be found at: https://rightlivelihood.ucsc.edu/events/perlas.html

June 5-7, 2019 | Wrong at the Root: Racial Bias and The Tension Between Numbers and Words in Non-Internet Data

Wednesday, June 5 – Friday, June 7, 2019

Melvin Calvin Laboratory

University of California Berkeley

 

Sponsored by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Sloan Foundation

Artificially intelligent systems extrapolate from historical training data. While the training process is robust to “noisy” data, systematically biased data will inexorably lead to biased systems. The emerging field of algorithmic fairness seeks interventions to blunt the downstream effects of data bias. Initial work has focused on classification and prediction algorithms.

This cross-cutting workshop will examine the sources and nature of racial bias in a wide range of settings such as genome-wide association studies, social and financial credit systems, bail and probate calculations, black box medicine, and facial recognition and robotic surveillance. We will survey state-of-the-art algorithmic literature, and lay a more concrete intellectual foundation for advancing the field of algorithmic fairness.

Full schedule: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/schedule/10757#

Register at: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/fairness-workshop-1

June 3, 2019 | Book Release! Warren Sack on The Software Arts

Monday, June 3, 2019

3:00PM – 4:30PM (Poster)

Communications 139, UC Santa Cruz

 

The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) by Warren Sack

The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) by Warren Sack

The Department of Film and Digital Media invite you to a book party to celebrate the release of The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019) by Warren Sack, S&J Faculty Affiliate, Professor and Chair of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

With his new book, Warren Sack provides an alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the very center of software’s evolution. Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.

The book is available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-arts

Overview

In The Software Arts, Warren Sack offers an alternative history of computing that places the arts at the very center of software’s evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists’ step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans, Sack shows that programming languages are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts.

Sack offers a reading of the texts of computing—code, algorithms, and technical papers—that emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical arts—including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, and simulation—into terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms of digital life. He considers, among other topics, the “arithmetization” of knowledge that presaged digitization; today’s multitude of logics; the history of demonstration, from deduction to newer forms of persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The Software Arts, Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.

Endorsements

“Warren Sack’s creative thinking across the arts and sciences has kept my cyborg on her toes, provoked again and again to test out how to reinvent practices for thinking, designing, working, and playing together for less deadly worlds. Sack’s historically attuned book investigates the folded zones linking the mechanical and liberal arts as new languages called programs have been built for emerging worlds. Rhetorics, epistemologies, and procedures are at stake in the digital media that shape and are shaped by the arts of computation. This is an important book about how things come to be in the workshops of the software arts that can never pretend to the separation of interpreting, making, and thinking.”

Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of  California, Santa Cruz

May 30-31, 2019 | Indigeneity and Climate Justice

Indigeneity and Climate Justice

Thursday May 30 – Friday May 31

9:30-3:30pm – (schedule) (poster)

Arboretum Horticulture Hall II

The UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department presents a Feminist Science Studies Conference on Indigeneity and Climate Justice, organized by Professors of Feminist Studies Karen Barad (Science & Justice Director of Teaching) and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer.

Thanks to Zoe Todd for the use of her artwork!

Thanks to Zoe Todd for the use of her artwork!

Anthropogenic climate change is the notion that human actions are the main driver of the current climate crisis. The identification of the anthropos as origin and cause of global climate change elides the fact that climate change is not, and has never been, a universal homogenous process produced by all humans and affecting all humans equally, or as if by chance, some communities more than others (e.g., because they just happen to be living in precarious places). Rather, driven by the forces of capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and imperialism, climate change has been and continues to be perpetuated by the few, while those subjected to precaritization and violence are made to disproportionately absorb the ill effects of “progress” and “development.” In other words, climate change has always been a matter of geopolitics and the ongoing precaritization of oppressed peoples, dominated lands, and other-than-human beings that are part of living landscapes. And lest we think of global climate change as a new phenomenon, a 2015 study of ice core samples reveals that European colonization of the Americas killed so many native peoples so rapidly (approximately 56 million in less than 100 years) that it cooled the Earth’s climate.

The 2019 UCSC Feminist Science Studies conference takes as its focus the theme of “Indigeneity and Climate Justice.” Climate Justice, as opposed to the more narrow framings of “environmental justice,” marks the consideration of the entanglement of ecological, cultural, social, political, geological, biological and other forces, understood as simultaneous and mutually constitutive. A shared concern among our esteemed keynote speakers is the question of how to respond to the challenges and potentials of collaborative engagements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to caring for the Earth.  We invite them to engage in conversation with each other and students, faculty, staff, and other conference participants about these pressing questions of multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and uneven responsibilities.

Free and Open to the Public.

Keynote Presentations – full schedule

From Environmental Case Study to Kin-Study: 
Weaponized Fossil Kin, Fish, Water, and Métis Legal Orders and Relationality in the Alberta Petro-Economy

Zoe Todd
Métis Scholar of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada
Visiting Professor of History, Yale University

Current and Future Effects of Climate Change on the Amah Mutsun Tribe: Local Steps to Take Now!

Valentin Lopez
Chairman, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band

Upside Down Country

Timothy Neale
Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Anthropology and Geography
Deakin University, Australia

Who Has the Right to Declare the Urgency of Addressing Climate Change?

Kyle Powys Whyte
Timnick Chair in the Humanities
Associate Proefssor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability
Michigan State University

Co-sponsored by: the UC Santa Cruz Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, The FMST Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair, Humanities Division, The Humanities Institute, the Center for Creative Ecologies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, Research Center for the Americas, the Science & Justice Research Center, and the departments of Environmental Studies and Sociology.

Mar 15, 2018 | Making Worlds with Crows: A Multispecies Ethics Workshop with Thom van Dooren

Thursday, March 15, 2018 | 3:15-5:15 PM | Humanities 1, Room 202

Thom van Dooren will present an overview of his new book, Making Worlds With Crows; we will then discuss its final chapter, “Provisioning Crows: Cultivating Ecologies of Hope. Please email mfernan3@ucsc.edu for the chapter.

Ubiquitous in their global presence, crows are now found almost everywhere that people are: from critically endangered island crows living in disappearing forests to abundant urban species finding new ways to exploit changing cities. In this way, crows offer a broad range of instructive sites for exploring the challenges and possibilities of multispecies life in the context of escalating processes of globalisation, urbanisation, climate change, and extinction. This talk offers an overview of a recently completed monograph that focuses on changing human/crow relationships in five key sites in an effort to develop approaches and practices for a situated, attentive, multispecies, ethics.

Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017-2021) in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press). His research and writing focuses on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), Making Worlds With Crows: A Multispecies Ethics (2018), and co-editor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), all published by Columbia University Press. www.thomvandooren.org

Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Emerging Worlds, and the Science and Justice Research Center.