Donna Haraway, distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz, has been awarded the ‘Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement’ in Memoriam to the Italian architect and designer Italo Rota (1953-2024), of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia – Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
More information about the achievement and ceremony can be found here.
Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025)
In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center, on the history of genomics — and the absolutely mind-melting parallels it has with the trajectory of the AI industry.
Listen at: https://www.saysmaybe.com/podcast/power-over-precision-w-jenny-reardon
Posted from Digital Science.
As the Aaron Sorkin global political drama that is 2024 reaches its season finale in the USA today, we are thrilled to share an interview about the problem of the politicization of science with Professor Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz, and the Founding Director of Science and Justice Research Center. Jenny and I [Suze] met back in June [2024] when we both attended a workshop on Science at Social Justice at the Lorenz Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, as a result of a session at Sci Foo 2023 where like-minded people gathered to talk about the state of research and its impact on all of society.
SJRC’s LEED of STEMM published a new article!
The paper, “A conjunctural analysis of the origins of ‘embedded ELSI’ in U.S. genomic medicine” is available open access from The Journal of Responsible Innovation. It calls for an embedded approach, where ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) researchers are situated within larger scientific research studies.
Learn more about LEED in this campus news article and on the project webpage.
A concise and feisty takedown of the all-style, no-substance tech ventures that fail to solve our food crises.
The Problem with Solutions Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food (University of California Press, 2024)
Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today’s myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualize a more just and sustainable system.
The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector’s ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture. As this seductive approach continues to infiltrate universities and academia, Guthman challenges us to reject apolitical and self-gratifying techno-solutions and develop the capacity and willingness to respond to the root causes of these crises. Solutions, she argues, are a product of our current condition, not an answer to it.
The book is available at: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-problem-with-solutions/epub-pdf
More information can be found in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/09/guthman-problem-with-solutions.html
Julie Guthman is a geographer and Distinguished Professor in Sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her previous books include Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.
Toxic City Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco (University of California Press, 2024)
Toxic City presents a novel critique of postindustrial green gentrification through a study of Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. As cities across the United States clean up and transform contaminated waterfronts and abandoned factories into inviting spaces of urban nature and green living, working-class residents—who previously lived with the effects of state abandonment, corporate divestment, and industrial pollution—are threatened with displacement at the very moment these neighborhoods are cleaned, greened, and revitalized. Lindsey Dillon details how residents of Bayview-Hunters Point have fought for years for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment to be a reparative process and how their efforts are linked to long-standing struggles for Black community control and self-determination. She argues that environmental racism is part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives and concludes that environmental justice can be conceived within a larger project of reparations.
Lindsey Dillon is author of Toxic City and a critical human geographer and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.
SJRC’s Just Biomedicine Research Group published an article in Social Studies of Science examining how the logics of speculative revitalization imagine a future in which cities and biomedicine produce wealth and health harmoniously together. Read the article: Cells and the city: The rise and fall of urban biopolitics in San Francisco, 1970–2020.
Together with The University of Alberta, Canada, the Science & Justice Research Center is now accepting applications for a Graduate Student Researcher.
This position supports The Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. More information about The CIHSN project can be found on the project webpage.
In consultation with PIs Jenny Reardon and James Doucet-Battle (Sociology), and Colleen Stone (Program Manager) at the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) and PIs Jessica Kolopenuk (Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, UofA) and Kim TallBear (Native Studies, UofA), one UC graduate student researcher will be offered a GSRship (a total of $5000) in Summer 2024 with the possibility of extension to a 50% GSRship in Fall 2024 (or split 25% in Fall 2024 and 25% in Winter 2025).
The graduate student researcher will: 1) assist in developing and organizing a weeklong visit to the University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada including a Symposium; 2) help implement activities during the visit; 3) assist in developing a literature review on critical Indigenous health research, sovereignty, and governance; 4) and work with the team to produce a final end-of visit report on activities including plans of future in-person gatherings.
By Monday, May 28 at 12 Noon, email (scijust@ucsc.edu) expressing interest, letting us know and sending the following: