Community Events

Feb 17/18, 2017 | Democratizing the Green City: Sustainability and the Affordable Housing Crisis

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democratizing-green-city

This two day conference examines a paradox: urban sustainability initiatives that are so vital in countering climate change can, through their improvements, contribute to driving up rents and driving out residents, and in the process, exacerbate sprawl, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change itself. Our speakers examine this growing link between environmental improvement and social displacement and ask: How is it possible to break this link? What would it mean to include affordable housing and equity within sustainability efforts? And what are the consequences—socially and ecologically—if we don’t?

 

February 17, 2017 5:00pm-7pm | Digital Arts Research Center 108
February 18, 2017 9:30am-6pm | Red Room, Rachel Carson College

We begin with a focus on the housing crisis that is transforming our own state and region. Renowned for greening and sustainability initiatives—from transit-oriented development to locavore food sheds to green building—California is also home to the most unaffordable housing markets in the country, including Santa Cruz. Thus greening interacts with gentrification and increased consumption, declining diversity and rising inequality, displacement and longer commutes, and multiple environmental health and ecosystem impacts, including habitat fragmentation, loss of groundwater, and increased carbon footprints. Our region, however, is not alone. We bring together a new generation of scholars, planners, and activists addressing ‘the housing question’ and green affordability crises across the Americas —in Mexico City and New York, Seattle and Medellin, Sao Paulo and Oakland— as well as emerging strategies for democratizing the green city.

For more information on the schedule, locations and registrations visit: https://democratizing-the-green-city.sites.ucsc.edu/

Organizers: Miriam Greenberg and Hillary Angelo, UCSC Sociology, Urban Democracy Lab/Democratizing the Green City NYC (NYU), Critical Sustainabilities Project (UCSC)

Sponsors: Urban Democracy Lab, The UCSC Sustainability Office, Rachel Carson College, UCSC Sociology Department, The Science and Justice Research Center

April 20, 2017 | Data Under Threat: Rescuing Environmental Data in the Trump Era

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Thursday, April 20, Noon-1pm
2nd Floor Instruction & Outreach Alcove
McHenry Library

In recognition of Endangered Data Week, Dr. Lindsey Dillon will discuss her recent experience as a coordinator of a network of academics and non-profits monitoring potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy data at the onset of the Trump administration.

Discussion will follow the presentation. Bring your lunch, questions, observations and experiences. Learn about data rescue efforts such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), the End of Term Web Archive, #DataRescue, DataRefuge, DataLumos, and Open Access Week.

Dr. Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSC where she is affiliated with the Environmental Studies Department and the Science & Justice Research Center. She is also chair of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), “an international network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce.”

Endangered Data Week (April 17-21, 2017) is a new, nationwide effort to raise awareness of threats to publicly available data.

Sept 28, 2016 | TJ Demos on Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

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The Center for Emerging Worlds, The Center for Cultural Studies and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences present a book talk with TJ Demos.

HAVC professor and influential art and visual culture historian critic TJ Demos will present from his new book, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.

DEMOS poster

September 28 | 5:30 pm | Humanities 1, RM 210

Oct 22, 2016 | Superfest | International Film Festival

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Oct 22 – 23 | Multiple times and locations

superfest2016 marks 30 years of disability and cinema. Superfest, the world’s longest running disability film festival, celebrates disability as a creative force in cinema and culture. It features films with fresh ideas and images that inspire thought and meaningful conversation.  Times and locations for the 2016 film selections can be found here.

 

Sept 13, 2016 | Blum Center | SEEDS, SOILS and POLITICS: An Anthropology Roundtable

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Blum Seeds and Soils

Twenty anthropologists and ethnographers from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America will discuss new forms of public and private governance over seeds and soils, how these influence farmers engagement, and how do citizens mobilize to regain control over the seeds and soils on which their daily sustenance, their health and well-being depend.

By considering the relationship of farmers with the living things of soil and seeds together with their relationship to different forms of national and international policy-making, anthropologists engage this comprehensive approach to examine how environmental change is co-created through policies and practices. They will share the outcome of their recent discussions in this roundtable.

Contemporary ways of cultivating and agricultural development strategies are framed by the marketplace: typically today such measures are privatized, corporate, and profit driven, and thus they frequently neglect or even devalue local survival strategies among the world’s poorest. Please join in this public panel that will address the ways in which states and corporations govern living objects that shape peoples’ sustenance, determine the survival of mankind, and the quality of life which have fueled the mobilization of citizens worldwide. Anthropologists have started to analyze the discourses and strategies of farmers, foodies and environmentalists who try to shed the status of consumer, stakeholder or expert and reclaim the status of citizens and of food sovereignty instead of food security. How is the issue of citizenship, the right to food, the claim to be protected from fake food and seeds reformulated? How do these notions impact on decision-making, and the notion/perception of economic democracy?

 

Co-sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, UCSC Blum Center, Science and Justice Research Center, and UCSC Dept. of Anthropology.

 

September 13 | 2:00-4:30pm | Louden Nelson Community Center, room 1

Sept 11, 2016 | Paul Edwards

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12PM-1:30PM | Humanities 1, rm 210

Paul N. Edwards (Professor, School of Information and Department of History, University of Michigan) will present ‘Afterworld: Technosphere, Anthropocene, Geostory’. Edwards’ current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, the history of climate science, and other large-scale information infrastructures. Edwards is the author most recently of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010). See more.

Oct 19, 2016 | SFSU Women’s and Gender Studies

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12:35PM-1:50PM SFSU, Humanities 119

On October 19th S&J Assistant Director, Katherine Weatherford Darling, will present on “Chronic Crisis: Managing HIV as a Chronic Condition in Biomedicalized Bureaucracies”. And on November 2nd S&J Faculty Affiliate and Feminist Science Studies Assistant Professor, Kristina Lyons will present on “Evidentiary Ecologies and Variations of Justice: Science & Nature in Times of War and Peace”.

SFSU Lecture Series Poster