News

Call for Participation

Summer 2021 Undergraduate Student Researcher Opportunity

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

Summer Undergraduate Fellowship

The award was established to support summer research conducted by undergraduate students currently working on established collaborative Center research projects. Undergraduate students in any UC Santa Cruz department may apply. Preference will be given to applicants currently involved in projects. The award is intended as a stipend to support general living expenses, fieldwork or travel (as allowed by COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions), presentation of work, and/or research. Fellowships may support: assisting with conducting interviews and transcription, data analysis and editing of interviews; creating infographics and outreach materials, articles or reports based on findings or events; sharing findings with the broader public (ie: blogposts, news articles). More specifically, tracking, collecting, and organizing articles about the social, political, and economic dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic written by prominent theorists of race, inequality, and STS; or assist with research on and collecting materials related to pharmaceutical licensing agreements bringing drugs to the market, as well as ethical and equity issues related to orphan-disease drug discovery and dissemination. Award amounts may vary up to $500 based on proposed budgets and outcomes; a maximum $2000 in total will be distributed.

CURRENT COLLABORATIVE SUMMER PROJECTS

Incarcerated Care

Theorizing Race After Race

The student should:

  • Be currently enrolled as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz (enrollment during summer not required).
  • Work on an established Center project with support from the faculty lead.
  • Propose clear goals and intended outcomes with: an outline of items to be completed over summer 2021, the methods of your research project; and briefly outline or describe the expenses to be supported by the award.

The student will:

  • Be awarded at the beginning of summer.
  • Adhere to IRB standards for working with human research subjects if applicable.
  • Submit an end-of-summer report of project status and/or research findings.
  • Be offered a fellowship with the SJRC and listed on the Project’s webpage.

To Apply:

By Monday, May 24, students should 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 work/research/career goals would benefit from the fellowship.
  4. Your role and experiences with the current project as related to items listed in an outlined proposal.
  5. Any ideas briefly describing potential research to be completed over Summer 2021.
Call for Participation

Summer 2021 Graduate Student Researcher Opportunity

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

Summer Graduate Fellowships

The award was established to support summer research conducted by graduate students currently working on established collaborative Center research projects. Graduate students in any UC Santa Cruz department may apply. Preference will be given to applicants who are currently going through or have completed the Training Program. The award is intended as a stipend to support general living expenses, fieldwork or travel (as allowed by COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions), presentation of work, and/or research. Fellowships may support: organizing, planning, and co-facilitating groups; training and coordinating a team of undergraduate researchers and assist with documentation, interviews, transcription and data analysis; fostering collaboration and teamwork among researchers; creating infographics and posters, outreach materials, or articles and reports based on findings or events; sharing findings with the broader public (ie: blogposts, news articles). Award amounts may vary up to $2,500 based on proposed budgets and outcomes; a maximum $10,000 in total will be distributed.

CURRENT COLLABORATIVE SUMMER PROJECTS

Incarcerated Care

Just Biomedicine

Theorizing Race After Race (TRAR)

______

The student should:

  • Be an enrolled graduate student at UC Santa Cruz (enrollment during summer not required).
  • Work on an established Center project with support from the faculty lead.
  • Propose clear goals and intended outcomes with: an outline of items to be completed over summer 2021, the methods of your research project; and briefly outline or describe the expenses to be supported by the award.

The student will:

  • Be awarded at the beginning of summer.
  • Adhere to IRB standards for working with human research subjects when applicable.
  • Submit an end-of-summer report of project status and/or research findings.
  • Be offered a fellowship with the SJRC and listed on the Project’s webpage.

To Apply:

By Monday, May 24, students should email (scijust@ucsc.edu) expressing interest. Please let us know 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 work/research/career goals would benefit from the fellowship.
  4. Your role and experiences with the current project as related to items listed in an outlined proposal.
  5. Any ideas briefly describing potential research to be completed over Summer 2021.
Tamara Pico smiling at camera wearing a blue shirt

Meet new Science & Justice affiliate, Tamara Pico!

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Tamara Pico, Earth & Planetary Sciences

We are delighted to welcome our new Science & Justice affiliate, Tamara Pico! Dr. Pico is a postdoctoral scholar and incoming Assistant Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences who researches ice sheets, landscapes, and the social cultural histories of the geosciences. While completing her PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, she also focused on a secondary field in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, making her fit right into our culture here of fostering transdisciplinary conversations and projects centered around justice and the sciences.

At her Works-in-Progress talk on February 24, 2021, titled “Linking Past to Present in a Postcolonial Field Science: Towards Critical Studies in US Geology,” Dr. Pico discussed the ways in which scientific racism was embedded in 19th century early U.S. geology (during the founding of the discipline) and how many of these assumptions and practices continue to shape the culture and values of geoscience today. Beginning with the story of John Wesley Powell, who led the 1869 Powell Expedition—the first U.S. government-sponsored expedition through the Colorado River into the grand canyon—Dr. Pico described how racist ideologies shaped the work of major figures in the field. For example, Powell wrote about finding ways to prove the inferior, “barbaric” status of the Ute people inhabiting the canyonlands and indigenous peoples more broadly, and wrote government reports recommending Native American assimilation.

After offering further examples of the racist assumptions baked into the work of leading early geologists, Dr. Pico discussed how these assumptions motivated earth system studies — they are not peripheral to the field but have always been a core part of studying the earth system. She then asked: What parts of those practices from 19th century geology do geoscientists still have and use today? Through “Linking past to present in a postcolonial field science,” she discussed some ways these early frameworks of scientific racism still show up today: 1) through concepts of “the outdoors” and undergraduate recruitment; and 2) through the absence of historical knowledge of the field’s original links to racism, imperialism, and colonialism in standard undergraduate geology programs.

During the question & answer session, the conversation took a number of turns, illustrating the importance of beginning to build a historical knowledge base to educate those entering the discipline. Participants discussed geology’s understanding of and approach to climate change; the field’s deep ties to the oil industry; the literal clothes and outfits worn by geoscientists conducting fieldwork; and conducting research projects in conjunction with local communities as full research partners and beneficiaries of the knowledge created. The meeting ended with a  provocative question: to shift training practices in the geosciences, is it enough to simply include the racist and masculinist history of the field when teaching undergraduates, or might there be a need to more fundamentally shift geological and ontological ways of knowing the earth’s materiality and its systems? After the participants offered multiple perspectives on this question, Dr. Pico remarked that she is inspired by the many ways that people know and can sense the earth, which she believes that geologists are now starting to grapple with more seriously.

Dr. Pico is currently collaborating on a project related to training geoscientists: GeoContext

Alondra Nelson speaking from a podium

Alondra Nelson named as Deputy Director for Science and Society at OSTP

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Science & Justice sends our congratulations to longtime friend and collaborator Alondra Nelson, who has been appointed by the Biden/Harris administration to the position of Deputy Director for Science and Society in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dr. Nelson will be the first person to fill this Science and Society role, which will bring social science expertise to national science and technology policy.

Nelson made clear in her acceptance speech that she will make inclusion, equity and justice core guiding principles at the OSTP.  As she eloquently explained:

“I believe we have a responsibility to work together to make sure that our science and technology reflects us, and when it does that it reflects all of us, that it reflects who we truly are together.  This too is a breakthrough.  This too is an innovation that advances our lives. We have an incredible opportunity ahead of us to approach our science and technology policy in ways that are honest and inclusive, to bring the full strength of our communities—our experiences, our concerns and our aspirations—to every table as we think through emergent forms of science and technology. There has never been a more important moment for scientific development—to get scientific development right or to situate that development in our values of equality, accountability, justice, and trustworthiness.”

We are thrilled by Dr. Nelson’s appointment. We look forward to the values of social justice and the insights of social science guiding science and technology policy on the national stage.

Congratulations, Dr. Nelson!

Links:

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SJTP Fellow Dorothy R. Santos named YBCA 100 Honoree of 2020

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Congratulations go to Science & Justice Training Program Fellow and Film & Digital Media graduate student Dorothy R. Santos has been named an honoree by San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of their YBCA 100 for 2020!

The sixth annual YBCA100 celebrates the creative changemakers and everyday heroes focused on building sustainable, equitable, and regenerative communities. Learn more at: https://ybca.org/honoree/dorothy-r-santos/

 

The Pandemicene Podcast Season 2 launches January 27!

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The SJRC Pandemicene Project to reworld towards justice Season 2 of the podcast series begins airing January 27th!

Episode #10 of the series will feature a roundtable discussion with the Pandemicene Team graduate and undergraduate students who crafted and produced 9 podcast episodes, 9 blogs, and a zine for Season 1.
Podcast episodes air Wednesday evenings, 7:00 – 8:00PM PST, on KZSC Santa Cruz. Tune in to 88.1FM or http://streaming.kzsc.org/. Podcast episodes are also available on Spotify and archived on the project site.

The Pandemicene Project launches website for student podcasts and blogs

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How do we create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture, in the middle of a viral pandemic, and a pandemic of social inequality and racial discrimination that has sparked global unrest?

The SJRC Pandemicene Project to Re-world Towards Justice has launched a new website to host student podcasts and blogs!  The Pandemicene Project can be found at: https://pandemicene.ucsc.edu/.

 

book

Re-worlding Towards Justice: Undergraduate students join SJRC researchers

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Through engaging our communities the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) is producing knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

As the SJRC responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, we began Season 1 of our Pandemicene Project in March 2020 from the premise that creating trust-worthy knowledge that can foster a more just world requires attending to the deep inequalities and fissures in the polity that this pandemic has laid bare. The developing areas of concern were captured in the campus news article, “Discrimination, governance, and trust in the age of COVID-19”, featuring SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon. In Season 1, UCSC faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students worked together to interview members of the Science & Justice network about scholarly responses to this critical historical moment. A podcast series with 9 episodes produced by students aired on our local radio station (KZSC 88.1 FM) Sunday evenings, and the blog series on the SJRC website expanded. The Daily Beast Interview, featuring James Doucet-Battle, assistant professor of sociology and interim director of SJRC, highlighted the glaring race problems of COVID-19 vaccine trials, while the special issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers featuring S&J Advisor and Politics Professor Matt Sparke’s article, “Contextualizing Coronavirus Geographically,” provided additional articles and perspectives on the pandemic. The first installment of the series, Dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism, by SJRC’s Theorizing Race after Race (TRAR) working group, “Black Geographies of Quarantine: A Dialogue with Brandi Summers, Camilla Hawthorne, and Theresa Hice Fromille” published on the UCHRI’s The Foundry.

Attending to what is going on locally (e.g., from the shelter-in-place locations of researchers), while drawing on the power and insights of our community elders and networks, over Winter and Spring 2021 the SJRC’s Pandemicene Project will launch Season 2. Season 2 will produce another round of podcast episodes and will expand to work in tandem with  several new and established collaborative SJRC projects, as described below, that in their own way each help answer our overarching question of how to create knowledge that orients us towards justice in the middle of both a viral pandemic and a pandemic of social inequality and racial discrimination that has sparked global unrest. In Winter quarter, undergraduate student interns, representing the following 14 majors and minors, will join current SJRC researchers: Biochemistry, Cognitive Science, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Economics, Feminist Studies, Film and Digital Media, Legal Studies, Literature, Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, and Statistics. Learn more about the students and independent researchers.

Our work over Season 2 will culminate in an ImaginACTivism workshop in Spring term. Stay tuned for a Call for Participation and Papers.

The following collaborative center projects will help feed Season 2:

The COVID-19 Pandemicene Project: Re-Worlding Toward Justice – Researchers will expand the zine, blog and podcast series by interviewing policy makers, practitioners, and mutual-aid and community organizers. Current student leads are looking to incorporate 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). Students will help design and guide an ImaginACTivism workshop in Spring term. Learn more: The Pandemicene Project.

Incarcerated Care – In addition to joining a cohort of SJRC researchers in The Pandemicene Project, students will work directly with Film and Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel’s team to expand the Unjustly Exposed interactive documentary website on COVID-19 in prisons and jails. Learn more: Season 1 Episode 4: Public Art and Carcerality.

Just Biomedicine: Orphan Drugs – In addition to joining a cohort of SJRC researchers in The Pandemicene Project, students will work with Dr. Andy Murray (UCSC Sociology alumni, SJTP graduate fellow and independent researcher) and UCSC faculty associated with the Center for Open Access Splicing Therapeutics (Jeremy Sanford, Michael Stone, Jenny Reardon, James Doucet-Battle, Matt Sparke). Students will research items related to pharmaceutical licensing agreements and bringing drugs to the market, and help the C.O.A.S.T. team understand the critical ethical and justice issues related to orphan-disease drug discovery and dissemination of splicing-based therapies. Learn more: Season 1 Student Blog.

Just Biomedicine: Third St. – In May, research from the SJRC Just Biomedicine Third St. research cluster will publish a chapter, “Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in SF’s Biotech Hub” in a book (an atlas) titled, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Students will help SJRC celebrate and advertise its launch with contributors in Spring. Learn more: Season 1 Episode 6: Housing Justice and Big Tech. 

Laboratory Life and Social Death: The Problem of Diversity in Science and Society – In addition to joining a cohort of SJRC researchers in the Pandemicene Project, students will work directly with Sociology Assistant Professor James Doucet-Battle on linkages between the social sciences, African Diaspora Studies, history, politics, and genomic science curriculum and training to conceptualize and develop an engaging and interactive online summer program in partnership with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Students will assist with research on and collecting materials related to the rigor, reproducibility and diversity of biomolecular data; identify other all-campus resources serving ABC students (ie: partner with AARC, HSI initiative, ODEI) and known challenges specific to summer sessions (refer to current BSU demands). Learn more: Bioethical Matriarchy (Doucet-Battle 2016), UC/HBCU initiative.

Theorizing Race After Race – In addition to joining a cohort of SJRC researchers in the Pandemicene Project, students will work directly with Sociology faculty James Doucet-Battle, Camilla Hawthorne, Jaimie Morse, and Jenny Reardon on a series of COVID-related racial health disparities research projects. Learn more: Black Geographies of Quarantine.

UCSC arts professor documents spread of COVID-19 inside prisons, jails, and detention centers

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The interactive web project by Film & Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel creates cumulative public record and evolving history of the pandemic’s impact on those incarcerated. Exposed is the latest in a series of new media documentary projects created by Daniel that reveal social and economic injustice across public institutions, including the criminal justice system, the prison industrial complex, the public health system, and the public education system.

Learn more in this campus news article, “UCSC arts professor documents spread of COVID-19 inside prisons, jails, and detention centers.”