Call for Participation

Summer 2022 | Undergraduate Student Researcher Opportunity (PAID)

The Science & Justice Research Center and the Sociology Department are now accepting applications for a:

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow

This position and the research conducted is supported by a Faculty Research Grant provided by the Committee on Research from the University of California, Santa Cruz awarded to Principal Investigator James Doucet-Battle (Assistant Professor of Sociology) under the project titled, “Building Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies”. The opportunity was established to support summer research conducted by a UCSC Sociology Undergraduate Student.

In consultation with Colleen Stone at the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) and the PI (Doucet-Battle), one undergraduate student researcher enrolled in the UCSC Department of Sociology will be awarded $2000 to develop and implement the proposed research project.

The researcher will: 1) assist developing and conducting a local study that compiles campus literature, conduct interviews and collect updates from relevant parties and those leading campus efforts, and helps identify novel mechanisms for strengthening diversity in Sociology and STS in our department, 2) assist with organizing a one day workshop to brainstorm/develop a 1-year action plan to implement at UCSC. Responsibilities may also include: assisting with organizing, planning, and co-facilitating groups and assist with documentation, reviewing research relevant to proposed themes and areas of inquiry, preparing for and conducting interviews, transcription and data analysis, creating outreach materials and reports based on findings or events including infographics, charts, and diagrams, developing and contributing to available communication channels (ie: blog posts, news articles) for sharing research findings. 

More information about the Building Diversity in Sociology and Science and Technology Studies” project can be found in the plan narrative for the UC-HBCU small grant initiative submitted in 2022 (pending award). 

The Student Must:

  • Be currently enrolled as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz and declared as a Sociology major (all Sociology majors may apply; enrollment during summer is not required).
  • Be interested in strengthening diversity and participation in sociology, science and justice, and science and technology studies.

The Ideal Candidate:

  • Will be interested in continuing the project beyond Summer 2022 and through the 2022-2023 academic year.
  • Will be interested in using this research as part of a senior thesis which could be overseen by Doucet-Battle. 
  • Will meet the eligibility requirements for the UC Santa Cruz Building Belonging Program.

The Student Will:

  • Be awarded $2000 [$1000 distributed at the beginning of summer and $1000 upon submitting an end-of-summer report. Equals a 25% effort (10 hrs/week) from July 1 – Sept 30 at $15 per hour].
  • Be offered a summer fellowship with the SJRC and listed on the Project’s webpage.
  • Adhere to IRB standards for working with human research subjects, if applicable.
  • Work closely with a team to develop clear goals, research methods, and intended outcomes with an outline of items to be completed over Summer 2022.
  • Submit an end-of-summer report of project status and/or research findings with suggestions for next steps.

To Apply:

By Monday, May 23 at 12 Noon, email (scijust@ucsc.edu) expressing interest, letting us know and sending the following:

  1. Your name, major, academic faculty advisor(s).
  2. Your resume/CV.
  3. Why you are interested in the project and how your learning/research/career goals would benefit from the fellowship.
  4. Your experiences with the project topic, if any.
  5. Any ideas briefly describing potential research to be developed or completed over Summer 2022.

Theorizing Race After Race: Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon

Over the past year SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR) research cluster has produced a series of dialogues grappling with COVID-19 and Racism. The first two dialogues, hosted on UCHRI’s Foundry site, cover Black geographies of quarantine and Metrics, enumeration, and the politics of knowledge.

During August 2021, TRAR student researchers hosted a third dialogue with four scholars from around the Americas discussing how COVID-19 has revivified or changed existing debates about race and racism in different trans/national contexts. This dialogue has been posted to The Foundry as Race, Contagion, and the Nation: A Dialogue with Pedro Valdez, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, and Jenny Reardon

Below you will find information about relevant contexts that shape the topics discussed during the full dialogue.

As a UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) report from 2020 summarizes, xenophobia and racism toward migrant workers around the world has grown since the start of the pandemic, attributed to fears of contagion and charging migrants with spreading the virus. For example, just as the U.S. ‘weaponized COVID against migrants’, the Dominican Republic’s long history of structural racism against Haitians as well  its and the U.S. governments’ deportations of Haitians during the past year threatened not only the general health of these migrants, but also caused a surge in COVID-19 cases in Haiti, already suffering from an unstable public health infrastructure.

Further intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic has been mass protests (both in the U.S. and internationally) against racism, white supremacy, and police brutality sparked, in part, by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in Spring 2020. Much discussion ensued about the need to understand white supremacy and racism as factors creating structural threats to health. As one open letter signed by over 1,200 U.S.-based public health professionals and community advocates put it, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”

In an effort to think through these developments, the dialogue ranged widely with panelists offering their uniquely situated takes. First, panelists were asked about the possibilities and impediments to the collection of COVID data based on ‘race’ in their countries (the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the United States). Next, they discussed strategies to move away from the biologizing and racializing discourse on pre-existing conditions and COVID-19 vulnerability that become tied to certain racial/ethnic groups. As one strategy, Dr. Saldaña made the case for treating social-structural forces, such as racism and poverty, as pre-existing conditions themselves. The discussion covered the utility of seeing whiteness as a race and the ways the power and privilege of whiteness becomes invisibilized even as it leads to harmful effects on others – for example, white U.S. citizens vacationing in Mexico without getting tested for COVID-19.

The dialogue further covered the function and role of borders, and understandings of the border as a racialized and carceral space of containment and expulsion. Panelists discussed how legacies of colonialism have gutted many national and transnational public health responses to the pandemic, thus failing to ensure adequate health and safety for those most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. Panelists concluded the dialogue by discussing ways the meaning of racial justice has shifted trans/nationally since early 2020, and how they are grappling with these developments as they move forward with their work and projects.

Contributors

Dennis Browe is a Sociology PhD student who works across medical sociology, science and technology studies, and feminist theory. He studies the rise of precision medicine in the U.S., as well as the field of biogerontology, which links questions of population aging to the biomolecular study of aging in cells and organisms.

Sophia Parizadeh is a second-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Politics. She is interested in understanding systemic racial inequality and how it has been magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic. She hopes to shed light on other social justice issues and work towards forming solutions to today’s problems.

Dr. Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology at UCSC and Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Dr. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is an anthropologist at the Universidad de Guanajuato in central Mexico whose work includes scholarship on mestizaje and health patterns of non-communicable diseases and healthcare access. 

Dr. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is a Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC who works on science and technology studies, border identities, indigeneity, and citizenship regimes, especially related to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Pedro Valdez is affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, who currently holds a position at a national migration research institute.

Lucia Vitale is a PhD student in the UC Santa Cruz Politics department and interdisciplinary global health scholar whose work explores the right to healthcare (see “COVID’s Co-Pathogenisis”). She uses citizenship to frame inclusion/exclusion practices occurring at both the transnational scale in global health policy, and at the national scale in social policy. You can find her on twitter.

Book cover for Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (2022)

Book Release! Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (Oxford University Press, 2022)

About the Book

Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (2022)

People have always sought medical care that is tailored to every individual patient. Alongside with the historical development of institutions of care, the vision of personal and ‘holistic’ care persisted. Patient-centred medicine, interpersonal communication and shared decision making have become central to medical practice and services.

This evolving vision of ‘personalized medicine’ is in the forefront of medicine, creating debates among ethicists, philosophers and sociologists of medicine about the nature of disease and the definition of wellness, the impact on the daily life of patients, as well as its implications on low-income countries. Is increased ‘precision’ also an improvement on the personal aspects of care or erosion of privacy? Do ‘precise’ and ‘personalized’ approach marginalize public health, and can this care be personalized without attention to culture, economy and society?

The book provides a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary discussion of the ethos and ethics of precision/personal medicine, involving scientists who have shaped the field, in dialogue with ethicists, social scientists and philosophers of science. The contributing scholars come from all over the world and from different cultural backgrounds providing reflective perspectives of history of ideas, critical theory and technology assessment, together with the actual work done by pioneers in the field. It explores issues such as global justice, gender, public health, pharmaceutical industry, international law and religion, and explores themes discussed in relation to personalized medicine such as new-born screening and disorders of consciousness.

This book will be of interest to academicians in bioethics, history of medicine, social sciences of medicine as well as general educated readers.

About the Authors

Edited by Y. Michael Barilan, Margherita Brusa, and Aaron Ciechanover with contribution by Professor of Sociology and SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon from their participation in the workshop, “The Revolution of Personalized Medicine: Are We Going to Cure All Diseases and at What Price?,” that took place April 8-9, 2019 in Vatican City.

Read more in this campus news article: Jenny Reardon participates in Vatican workshop on personalized medicine.

Book launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

About the Book

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University
Press, 2021)

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano’s holographic art, Esdras Parra’s and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry, Mattie Brice’s digital games, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations

About the Author

micha cárdenas is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as coauthor of Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs and The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities.

Mellon Foundation Humanities Grant To Investigate Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine

Thanks to a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, faculty and students at UC Santa Cruz will have a chance to critically investigate the relationships among medicine, race, and the environment both in the United States and in other regions of the globe shaped by the influence of American medicine.

The $225,000 award will support “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine,” a Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture, that, starting in Fall 2022, will bring scientists, physicians, and scholars of the humanities and social sciences together with students and members of the UC Santa Cruz community for a series of public lectures, reading groups, and research fellowships at the graduate and postdoctoral levels.

The effort is led by S&J affiliated faculty Jennifer Derr, associate professor of history, the founding director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and Jenny Reardon, professor of sociology, the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center.

Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine

Call for Participation

Prospective Student Opportunity | history of science, medicine, environment in the Global South

The Department of History at UC Santa Cruz is recruiting two PhD students to begin in the fall of 2022 to pursue research on the histories of science, medicine, and/or the environment in the Global South. Applicants may specialize in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, East Asia, or indigenous communities across the globe. Applicants may – but need not be – from the geographies that fall within the broad category of the Global South as long as their research agenda is focused on the geographies described.

UCSC is known for its reputation as a center for the study of science (e.g. feminist science studies, multispecies studies, the study of race and genomics). The successful applicant will become part of an interdisciplinary community of scholars whose work focuses on questions of science, medicine, and the environment. In pursuing a research agenda situated in the Global South, they will have the opportunity to join researchers across the university and to participate in various transdisciplinary forums that include the Science and Justice Research group, the Center for Cultural Studies, the program in Global and Community Health, the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions, and events sponsored by the Departments of Politics, Sociology, History of Consciousness, Feminist Studies, Anthropology, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. In addition to university support, successful applicants will receive funding for language training and research from a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation on the theme of “The History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns,” whose Principal Investigator is Jennifer L. Derr (History).

Further information about the history department’s graduate program can be found on their web page (https://history.ucsc.edu/graduate/index.html).

Please contact Jennifer L. Derr (jderr@ucsc.edu) or the Graduate Program Coordinator for the Department of History, Cindy Morris (morrisc@ucsc.edu) with any questions regarding applying or the graduate program.

Applications must be submitted no later than December 11, 2021.

Book release! Life as We Made It How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books 2021)

About the Book

From the first dog to the first beefalo, from farming to CRISPR, the human history of remaking nature

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)

When the 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, it underlined our amazing and apparently novel powers to alter nature. But as biologist Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, she claims, reshaping nature—resetting the course of evolution, ours and others’—is the essence of what our species does.

In exploring our evolutionary and cultural history, Shapiro finds a course for the future. If we have always been changing nature to help us survive and thrive, then we need to avoid naive arguments about how we might destroy it with our meddling, and instead ask how we can meddle better.

Brilliant and insightful, Life as We Made It is an essential book for the decades to come.

Learn more in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

Beth Shapiro is a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, PI of the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab, and an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Call for Participation

Fall 2021 Undergraduate Student Researcher Opportunity

The Science & Justice Research Center is pleased to announce we are now accepting applications for a:

Undergraduate Individual Study

The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) invites undergraduate students to join a cohort of researchers for the  Fall 2021 term. The Individual Study can range from 2-5 units and are part of a group. Independently, students can also work on senior thesis projects in areas related to Center themes (ie: forensic genomics, queer ecology, CRISPR, data privacy and biosurveillance, health care disparities and incarceration, the future of public goods, artificial intelligence and ethics, reproducibility and diversity in research).

SJRC student researchers help inform collaborative research, contribute to co-authored developing blogs, podcasts, and websites, opinion pieces, papers and proposals as well as help design Center programming. Students may track, collect, and organize articles from prominent theorists of race, inequality, and science and technology studies to continue our study of the social, political, and economic dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, opportunities include: working with a current cohort of students, staff and faculty affiliates to continue work in progress, conduct interviews and prepare transcriptions, edit interviews, create outreach materials sharing findings of research activities with the broader public (ie: writing blogposts, articles or reports, creating infographics, podcast episodes, animations, illustrations, interactive documentary websites, etc.).

Those interested in broadcast journalism, social documentation, digital and online student and public engagement via blogs, podcasts and additional mediums (ie: animations, soundscapes, illustrations, etc.) and promotion methods (ie: social media, charts, graphics, photographs, maps, other new or historical oral and written materials) are especially encouraged to apply.

 

Available Fall 2021

Incarcerated Care – up to 4 students will work directly with Film and Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel’s team of researchers to expand the Unjustly Exposed interactive documentary website on COVID-19 in prisons and jails. Learn more: Unjustly Exposed, Public Art and Carcerality.

To Apply:

By Tuesday, October 12 at 12 noon, students should email (scijust@ucsc.edu) with their resume/CV to express interest. We’re excited to learn about you, teach you what we’ve learned from each other, and incorporate your ideas! Please let us know the following:

  1. your name, major(s), any faculty advisors.
  2. any experiences with related items, why you are interested in being involved and how your curriculum, research, or career goals would benefit from the internship.
  3. propose any ideas or intended outcomes you would be interested in completing over Fall 2021, including your preferred methods and mediums.

Theorizing Race After Race: Metrics, Enumeration, and the Politics of Knowledge in Estimating Racial Health Disparities in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The second installment of a series of dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism of the SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR) Collective is now live on the UCHRI Foundry website! Check out “Metrics, Enumeration, and the Politics of Knowledge in Estimating Racial Health Disparities in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, Co-Founder of The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project.”

This dialogue follows the first in the series entitled “Black Geographies of Quarantine.” In this dialogue, SJRC affiliate faculty and Assistant Professor of Sociology Jaimie Morse, with Film & Digital Media graduate student Dorothy Santos, and UCSC undergraduate student alum Aitanna Parker (as part of the TRAR Collective) are in dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, journalist and co-founder of The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project that operated from April 2020 to March 2021. The Atlantic is a major media outlet that produced alternative statistics on COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths during the first year of the pandemic, acting as a watchdog on the federal government’s data and reporting. The Atlantic was among the first media outlets to report racial health disparities through its COVID Racial Data Tracker before the CDC released data by race. In this dialogue with Alexis Madrigal, we explore the politics of knowledge production and how data can advance racial justice. What follows is an edited, condensed transcript of the dialogue.

Contributors

Alexis Madrigal is a journalist. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic and co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Information School and the Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine. He is an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He is the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.

Jaimie Morse is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. She studies knowledge, technology, and policy in biomedicine and public health, with a focus on the interplay of law, health, and human rights in processes of policy change.

Aitanna Parker is a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz, with a BA in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and a BS in Technology and Information Management. She plans to use her technical abilities for social good. Aitanna is a former fellow at the Science & Justice Research Center, looking at datasets to understand how Covid is negatively impacting racialized populations in the United States. She furthers her study at Lund University pursuing a Masters in Information Systems.

Dorothy R. Santos is pursuing her Ph.D in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis on Computational Media. Her dissertation project examines voice recognition and assistive technologies through the lens of feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, tech, race, and ethics.

Book release! Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

About the Book

Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth

In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory.

What’s sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely—or, perhaps, broadly—what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment. Ever since, they have been not just pushing but obliterating the boundaries circumscribing biology and ecology, creating ecosexual art in their performance of an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, posthuman, materialist, exuberant, and steeped in humor.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality—for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles; for Beth, savoring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents’ Appalachian farm. The book describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, which involved influential performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, including the Chemo Fashion Show, Cuddle, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, and Ecosex Walking Tours. Over the years, they celebrated many more weddings to various nature entities, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. To create these weddings, they collaborated with hundreds of people and invited thousands of guests as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth.

As entertaining as it is deeply serious, and arriving at a perilous time of sharp differences and constricting categories, the story of this artistic collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, art and environmentalism, to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position is available for purchase here with a 40% discount (using code MN88300) through December 1, 2021, as part of the National Women’s Studies Association conference sale.

Select Reviews

Tuned to the more than human, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have married widely and well, mating with the airs, waters, and places of Earth, inviting their companions into profligate kinning for earthly survival. They have taken me on their ecosexual journeys, rolling around with them on their theoretical and performative ground to get sufficiently soiled to be brave enough to join the old whore and the hillbilly in their radical practices of joy, love, and rage. Read this book, revel in its wacky seriousness, risk its call to transformative art and life.

— Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

In Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens dance with diverse thinkers across theoretical, artistic, and planetary ground in their polyamorous love of the natural world. Sex can heal, and ecosexuality—taking the Earth as lover—is curative. Ecosexual art, activism, and other intimacies help quell society’s anthropocentric hierarchy so we might better nurture all of our relatives, both human and more-than-human.

— Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

About the Authors

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been life partners and 50/50 collaborators on multimedia projects since 2002. They are authors of the Ecosex Manifesto and producers of the award-winning film Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary feature that premiered at documenta 14 and screened at MoMA in New York. Sprinkle is a former sex worker with a PhD in human sexuality. Stephens holds a PhD in performance studies and is founding director of E.A.R.T.H. Lab at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Jennie Klein is professor of art history at Ohio University. She is editor of Letters from Linda M. Montano and coeditor of Histories and Practices of Live Art and The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art.

Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and professor of English, drama, and environmental studies at New York University. She is coeditor of Animal Acts: Performing Species Today and coauthor of Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher and curator. His books include Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era and Countersexual Manifesto.