Community Events

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

May 18-19, 2017 | Environmentalism Outside the Box: An Ecosex Symposium

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Flyer for Environmentalism Outside the Box: An Ecosex Symposium

Environmentalism Outside the Box: An Ecosex Symposium

A multi-disciplinary gathering to explore our relationships with the environment and social justice, engage in human/non-human collaboration, critique ideologies and debate new sexualities. Let’s examine where our “bodies” end and “nature” begins. What happens when we posit the Earth as our lover?

Schedule to include keynotes by Kim TallBear (Professor of Indigenous Studies, University of Alberta) on Decolonizing Settler Sexuality and Chris Cuomo (Professor from University of Georgia) on Race and Environmentalism, a post screening conversation with Donna Haraway following feature film Story Telling for Earthly Survival and panel discussions with Joe Dumit (Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Performance Studies, UC Davis), Beth Stephens (Professor of Art, UCSC), Lisa Rofel (Professor of Anthropology, UCSC) and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (S&J UC President’s Postdoctoral fellow).

Symposium is free. Parking is $4.

See schedule at https://earthlab.ucsc.edu/ecosex-symposium/

 

May 18-19, 2017 | All Day | Digital Arts Research Center, DARC 108

May 10, 2017 | CRISPR Cas9 and Justice

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Sponsored by the CRISPR User Group, SJRC Director Jenny Reardon (Professor of Sociology) will present a talk, to divert our gaze from the spectacular—we will cut out deadly genes; we will fundamentally alter the human species—to focus on the more mundane, but more profound changes of which CRISPR technologies are apart—changes that that call into question how we live and know today.

Rather than a threat to the future of humanity or life on earth, Reardon will argue that CRISPR helps make visible these more fundamental transformations in modes of knowing and governing.

Pizza will be provided.

 

May 10, 2017 |12Noon-1:00PM | Biomed 200

April 19, 2017 | Food For Thought’s Unequal Healthscapes in California’s “Biohub”

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Wednesday, April 19th
5:30-7:30 pm
Namaste Lounge

Hosted by the College Nine and Ten CoCurricular Programs Office, SJRC Assistant Director, Kate Weatherford Darling will present her research centering social justice and health inequalities in the discussion of biomedicine and US healthcare and policy. Asking the question: What would it take to build new California “healthscapes” (Clarke 2010) with visions of disability justice and health equity?

Unequal Healthscapes in California’s “Biohub”

California’s recent Tech Boom buoyed the Bay Area economy and transformed the political geography of the state and a global center of wealth. Venture capital / philanthropic investment along with public policies to promote “entrepreneurism” are rapidly changing the spaces, places of biomedical science and healthcare practice. In this talk, Kate offers an incomplete map of our unequal “healthscapes” (Clarke 2010), the cultural, economic and political terrains of health. Drawing on findings from her current and forthcoming research, she asks: What would it take to build new California healthscapes with visions of disability justice and health equity?

Katherine Weatherford Darling is Assistant Director at the Science and Justice Research Center and faculty in UCSC Sociology Department. Her research and teaching bridges Sociology of Health, Illness and Disability and Feminist Science Studies. Her current projects span diverse topics including: Post-Genomic epidemiology and HIV/AIDS science and health policy in the U.S. With UCSC and Bay Area collaborators, her new projects examine how the social and built environments of Bay Area’s tech and biotech economies are impacting the health of low-income Californians.

Flyer for Food for Thought

Flyer for Food for Thought

Feb 22, 2017 | Rick Prelinger, “Silence, Cacophony, Crosstalk: Archival Talking Points”

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The Center for Cultural Studies hosts Rick Prelinger, an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC, as well as Founder of the Prelinger Archives and a board member at the Internet Archive.

Prelinger currently researches the political economy and aesthetics of archives. He produces live urban history film events made for participatory audiences and is in the early stages of a film counterposing the lived experience of city dwellers as shown in home movies with the pronouncements of urban theorists and historians.

More event information.

February 22, 2017 | 12:00 -1:00 PM | Humanities Building 1, Room 210