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Call for Participation

Call for Participation | Winter + Spring 2021

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The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) invites up to 10 undergraduate students to join a cohort of researchers for both Winter and Spring 2021 terms. 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, Winter and Spring 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.). Students may also act as Critical Listeners (report on) select virtual related events (ie: Feb 2 IAS w/ SJRC colleague Ruha Benjamin).

Those interested in broadcast journalism, social documentation, digital and online student and public engagement are especially encouraged to apply.

Available Winter and Spring 2021

The COVID-19 Pandemicene Project: Re-Worlding Toward Justice – expand zine, blog and podcast to interview policy makers, practitioners, mutual-aid and community organizers. Current student leads are looking to add those interested in conducting interviews and those interested in getting the interview to the public via blogs, podcast episodes 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). Learn more: The Pandemicene Project.

Incarcerated Care – In addition to joining a cohort of SJRC researchers in the Pandemicene Project, up to 2 students will work directly with Film and Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel’s team to expand an interactive documentary website on COVID-19 in prisons and jails. Learn more: Public Art and Carcerality, Unjustly Exposed.

Orphan Drugs – In addition to joining a cohort of SJRC researchers in the Pandemicene Project, up to 2 students will work with an independent researcher and faculty (James Doucet-Battle, Jenny Reardon, Jeremy Sanford, Matt Sparke, Michael Stone) on items related to pharmaceutical licensing agreements, bringing drugs to the market, ethical and equity issues related to orphan-disease drug discovery and dissemination. Learn more: student blog.

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, up to 2 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 may 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.

To Apply:

By Monday, December 7, students should email (scijust@ucsc.edu) with their resume/CV and expressing 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 Winter and Spring 2021, include your preferred methods and mediums.

Theorizing Race After Race: Black Geographies of Quarantine

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The first installment of a series of dialogues on COVID-19 and Racism of the SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race working group is now live on the UCHRI Foundry website! Check out Black Geographies of Quarantine: A Dialogue with Brandi Summers, Camilla Hawthorne, and Theresa Hice Fromille.

Contributors

Special thanks to Science & Justice researcher Aitanna Paker (recent graduate of Critical Race and Ethic Studies and Technology and Information Management) for helping with the interview.

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 currently working with the Science & Justice Research Center, looking at datasets to understand how Covid is negatively impacting racialized populations in the United States. She wants to continue this work in graduate school.

Theresa Hice Fromille is pursuing her PhD in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, with designated emphases in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies. Her dissertation project draws insights from Black Geographies and youth studies to investigate how Black youth from the United States construct their racial identities during international travel.

Camilla Hawthorne is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, a principal faculty member in the UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program, and a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla’s current project explores the ways that citizenship has emerged as a key terrain of struggle over racial nationalism in Italy, and argues that citizenship is crucial for understanding how racism and race are being reconfigured in the twenty-first century.

Brandi Summers is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley and an alum of the UC Santa Cruz Sociology graduate program. Her research builds on epistemological and methodological insights from cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, African American studies, and media studies. Brandi’s first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City, explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C.

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Forthcoming Book release! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Clear blood vile with red cap against yellow background

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes. U Minn Press, March 2021.

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

The book will be available in March 2021 at: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sweetness-in-the-blood

Learn more in this campus news article, Uncovering the social factors lurking within diabetes risk.

About the Author

James Doucet-Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Fall 2020 Interim Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. He applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities.

CITRIS logo

SJTP concludes comparative cross-campus review of graduate curriculum that make questions of gender and social justice fundamental to STEM training

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With colleagues at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute (FRI) and the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center concluded a seed fund grant awarded in 2019 from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at the University of California under “2019-0112: Comparative Analysis of Interdisciplinary Training for STEM Scholars”.

More at: UC Santa Cruz researchers win four CITRIS seed funding awards

Summary

This project set out to compare two graduate training programs that center issues of gender, race, and social justice as fundamental to science training in STEM curriculums. Our comparison centered around the introductory seminars to the training programs taught during Winter 2020 by Dr. Kalindi Vora (UCD) and Dr. Jenny Reardon (UCSC).

FRI gathered data using field notes and a retrospective survey to analyze Seminar participants’ experiences. Notes, taken by the Graduate Student Researcher Maya Cruz, consisted of observations and analysis of seminar modules, discussions, and group activities. SJRC also gathered data through a retrospective participant survey, and Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe conducted an interview with SJRC’s Founding Director Jenny Reardon about the evolution of the Training Program and her experience teaching the introductory seminar. Due to IRB delays and campus disruptions, SJRC did not gather Seminar field notes. Both surveys asked participants to reflect on their learned capacity to recognize power and injustice in research environments; to intervene in research cultures and enact change-oriented research and practice; how their understandings of science and justice shifted throughout the course; and their experiences of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in their fields. GSRs Browe and Cruz met over Summer 2020 to compare findings and share the results with the team for discussion.

While each Seminar was taught through the unique lens of FRI and SJRC, overall they offered the same types of tools, models, and skillsets for guiding STEM graduate students through thinking about issues of gender, race, and justice in their work and fields. They covered topics such as the politics of doing science; critically interrogating how knowledge gets produced and claims to objectivity and neutrality; and thinking about intersectionality, race, and the promises and pitfalls of anti-racist technoscience. Additionally, we found that enrolling graduate students from a wide range of disciplines is key to fostering generative conversation. FRI enrolled students from eight disciplines and SJRC enrolled students from six. Building trust within the Seminar communities was necessary to being able to think through the hard questions that often lay implicit within the students’ scientific fields. Both Seminars also found it pedagogically effective to invite relevant postdocs, visiting scholars, and faculty as module participants and discussion leaders. Both Seminars focused on experiential learning through hands-on projects. The culmination of both classes was a final project that effectively guided students to apply a feminist and justice-oriented lens to their fields. At SJRC, this took the form of a collaborative project, while at FRI, this took the form of instructional design. 

Based on our findings, FRI and SJRC will continue to proactively recruit more science and engineering graduate students into their seminars. Further, both FRI and SJRC recognize the pedagogical importance of linking the course syllabus assignments to the events and projects happening concurrently at the Institute/Center during the academic year. Both will continue to build these connections within each respective Institute/Center, while also developing further collaborations between the campuses. Specifically, FRI and SJRC plan to host a cross-campus graduate student event over Zoom later this year, consisting of a roundtable discussion and manifesto writing workshop.

Website Launch! Unjustly Exposed – interactive documentary on COVID in prisons and jails

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UCSC Film and Digital Media Professor and Science & Justice Affiliate Sharon Daniel launches Unjustly Exposed (https://www.unjustlyexposed.com/), an interactive documentary on COVID in prisons and jails.

About Exposed

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Unjustly Exposed – an interactive documentary on COVID in prisons and jails

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over 2 million people, in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, their families, and staff.

EXPOSED is comprised of quotes, audio clips, and statistics from online publications and broadcasts that are assembled to create a cumulative public record and evolving social history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. Each quote is linked to its original source.

EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of suffering inside carceral spaces across the US as the virus continues to spread. The content is organized chronologically, along an interactive timeline, that on each day, provides abundant testimony to the trauma and precarity that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. For example, on July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made primarily by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardships. Unfortunately, their words are all we have access to. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted and the use of solitary confinement has expanded by orders of magnitude. The design of the interface, a monochrome image-less screen space that allows viewers to step through or select from thousands of ‘headline-style’ text sequences and audio clips, reflects the sense of confinement — the fragmentary and ephemeral forms of contact prisoners have with the outside — and signals that the injustice they collectively endure is structural.

Exposed Credits

By: Sharon Daniel
Design and Programming by: Erik Loyer
Research Assistant: Brian Myers
Research Interns: Alyssa Brouwer, Nailea Castillo, Brandon Castro, Anysia Deak, Srijeeta Islam, Jacinto Salz, Charlotte Schultz

The quotes, audio clips and statistics included in EXPOSED are excerpts from a wide array of online publications and broadcasts. All excerpts are linked in the interface to the original source.

Special thanks to Timothy James Young, Wayne La Mar Palmer and Ty Zimmerschied for their contributions.

Data Sources

UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project
The COVID Prison Project
The Marshall Project State-by-State Look at Coronavirus in Prisons
Vera Institute of Justice

Developed with Stepworks

This project has been supported in part by the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz

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Tech Futures: 52 Conversation Starter Card Deck

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The Science & Justice Research Center is co-sponsoring a project with the Center for Public Philosophy to create a deck of playing cards that will catalyze conversations about ethics and technology, and we want your ideas. Cards will not tell players what to think. They are a playful way to stimulate dialogue on some of the critical issues we need to face. If there’s a question about tech and ethics (or social justice or individual rights) you think is urgent or particularly troubling, submit your ideas to https://techfutures52.ucsc.edu/ by December 1, 2020 to receive a pack of cards.

Inquiries may be directed to pubphil@ucsc.edu.

Vivian Underhill standing outside in front of a snowy mountain and water

SJTP fellow awarded AAUW fellowship

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Congratulations to Science and Justice Training Program Fellow, Vivian Underhill, who has been awarded a 2020-21 fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The fellowships recognize recipients whose academic work and community projects empower women and girls.

Vivian Underhill is a PhD student in the Feminist Studies program with an emphasizing in critical race science studies at UC Santa Cruz. Previously, Vivian worked for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, a small, grassroots environmental nonprofit in Fairbanks, Alaska, that focuses on economic and climate justice in central and northern Alaska. Vivian’s work currently focuses on intergenerational environmental-justice activism around fracking and groundwater in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

More in this UCSC news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/10/underhill-women-fellowship.html

SJTP Fellow and GSR Lizzy Hare (Anthropology) was awarded a AAUW award in 2016-2017.

Multiple lines of counterpoints

World Records Journal Vol. 4 | In The Presence of Others

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multiple lines of counterpoints

Figure 5. Graphic included in the Data Ethics Decision Aid, a handbook for assessing ethical issues with regard to data projects, developed by the Utrecht Data School in conjunction with The Ethics of Coding project.

Using Hannah Arendt’s writings to rethink the role of documentary in visualizing and producing common worlds, The World Records Journal has launched Vol. 4 In The Presence of Others.

This issue of World Records puts Arendt’s work into counterpoint with documentary media and cultures.

Included is Conditions: Warren Sack in conversation with Jenny Reardon and Bonnie Honig, a trialogue to discuss questions like:

  • What are the prevailing trends in science, biotech, and software engineering?
  • What kinds of trajectories are implied by computational theory and machine learning? What are the risks of these developing fields as they come into contact with modes of privatized, bureaucratic rationality, or with statism and surveillance?
  • How does Arendt’s work help us think more deeply about these questions?

Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work has been exhibited at SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media. Warren is an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center and Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019).

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017).

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993, Scripps Prize for best first book), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009, David Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted. (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017).

Grid with plant roots

Forthcoming Book release! Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Grid with plant roots

Book cover for Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press)

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, forthcoming) brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Compiled by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, including: evictions and root shock, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures.

By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present. Understanding the tech boom and its effects means looking beyond San Francisco’s borders to consider the region as a socially, economically, and politically interconnected whole and reckoning with the area’s deep history of displacement, going back to its first moments of settler colonialism.

Counterpoints combines work from within the project with contributions from community partners, from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures. In this way, Counterpoints is a collaborative, co-created atlas aimed at expanding knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.

Counterpoints includes a chapter from the SJRC Just Biomedicine research cluster on “Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in SF’s Biotech Hub” as well as a visual summary and map from a large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants by the No Place Like Home initiative.

The book is available for preorder at PM Press.

About the campus contributors:

The Science & Justice Research Center’s Just Biomedicine research cluster, overseen by Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon, contributed a chapter titled: ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in San Francisco’s Biotech Hub.’ This chapter examines the different visions for health and healthcare that have been imagined and practiced along the Third Street corridor. At the north end stands Mission Bay, a newly revitalized neighborhood centered around UCSF’s biomedical campus and a biotechnology ecosystem. Just three miles south along Third Street, however, stands Bayview-Hunters Point, which remains one of the city’s most marginalized communities, home to a disproportionate disease burden and struggling public health clinics. This project brings into view for public discussion the effects of the resulting financial and ideological investments in an imagined “future of medicine,” and how they are changing the political landscapes, built environments, and health of Bay Area residents right now. 

The No Place Like Home project overseen by Sociology Professors Steve McKay and Miriam Greenberg contributed a visual summary and map from their large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants. The map helps amplify how the uneven geography and demography of the county is reflected in (and by) inequalities on critical issues such as rent burden, over-crowding, and forced moves and evictions. The survey results also provide a springboard for the study’s wider discussion of local and regional policy options in addressing the housing crisis, particularly for renters.

About the editorial collective behind Counterpoints:

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia storytelling collective that documents displacement and resistance struggles on gentrifying landscapes. With chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Los Angeles, the collective works with numerous community partners and housing justice networks in order to provide data, maps, stories, and tools for resisting displacement. AEMP has produced hundreds of maps, oral histories, and multimedia pieces, as well as dozens of community events and reports, and numerous academic and public facing articles, book chapters, and murals. AEMP’s work has been presented in a variety of venues, from art galleries and collectives to neighborhood block parties, from academic colloquia and conferences to community workshops and book fairs.

Covid-19 Pandemicene Podcast

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The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce 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.

The SJRC Pandemicene Podcast

Podcast Episodes

Each new episode airs Sunday evenings, 6:30 – 7 pm, on KZSC Santa Cruz.

Episode 1: Isa Ansari with Kim TallBear and Jessica Kolopenuk on Indigenous led Techno-Scientific Innovation

Episode 2: Kathia Damian with Joan Donovan on State-sponsored Misinformation

Episode 3: Maryam Nazir with Misha Angrist on Thinking Beyond Bioethics

Episode 4: Gina Barba with Sharon Daniel on Public Art and Carcerality

Episode 5: Maryam Nazir with Rebecca DuBois on a COVID-19 Vaccine.

Episode 6: Gina Barba with Erin McElroy on Housing Justice and Big Tech

Episode 7: Tee Wicks with Owain Williams on the Political Economy of Global Health

Episode 8: Paloma Medina with Martha Kenney on Building Community Resilience

Episode 9: Isa Ansari with Ruth Müller on Collaborative Thinking

Pandemicene Project Information

Graduate and undergraduate student interns in the Pandemicene Project and Theorizing Race After Race groups have co-created this podcast series based on interviews with SJRC’s robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners. Our goal has been to capture everyone’s unique quarantine experiences, interests in understanding local responses to the pandemic, and the world-building projects they have been undertaking!

Our special thanks go to S&J undergraduate researcher Kathia Damian (Literature, Talk and News Director KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM)

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.