News

designed intersecting points with title

Tech Futures: 52 Conversation Starter Card Deck

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by
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)

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Abstract greens

Forthcoming Book release! Hillary Angelo on How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Posted on by

About the Book

Abstract greens

Book Cover for Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2021)

As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts. 

Hillary Angelo is Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated with the SJRC at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The book is available at: The University of Chicago Press (use discount code UCPSOC for 20% off)

Science & Justice Training Program celebrates 10-year anniversary

Posted on by

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The SJTP is creating the next generation of path-breaking researchers who have the tools needed to not only be powerful stewards of socially robust science, engineering, and technology but to become more engaged as citizens concerned with racial, gender, and economic justice.

The introductory seminar of the SJTP, Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration, will be offered again Winter 2022 as BME/FMST/SOCY 268A and ANTH 267A and taught by James Doucet-Battle (Sociology). The course brings early career science and engineering graduate and masters students together with social science, humanities and arts students to foster experimental collaborative research practices and models collaborative conversations that pair a science and engineering scholar with a scholar from the social sciences, humanities and arts. Students develop the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, social and political analysis. Enrollment is by permission and limited to 15. Contact James Doucet-Battle and Colleen Stone to get on the list for a permission code (once available).

Learn more about our History, the Training Program, a cross-comparison study of the program, and meet the 10th anniversary cohort.

DONATE NOW to support the Science & Justice Training Program!

Call for Participation

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

Posted on by

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz is recruiting the first in a series of PhD students to begin in the fall of 2021 to pursue research on the history of science, the history of medicine, and/or environmental history in the Global South. Applicants may specialize in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, or indigenous communities across the globe.

The online application is available beginning October 1st (unless otherwise noted), and closes at 8:59 pm PST on December 10th.

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 is focused 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 & Justice Research Center, the Center for Cultural Studies, the program in Global 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, the successful applicant will receive funding for language training and research from a CAREER award 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/phd-program/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 questions regarding applying or the graduate program.

a gold field

Book Release! Madeleine Fairbairn on Fields of Gold, Financing the Global Land Rush, (Cornell University Press, 2020)

Posted on by

About the Book

a gold field

Book Cover for Fairbairn’s Fields of Gold, Financing the Global Land Rush (Cornell University Press, 2020)

Fields of Gold critically examines the history, ideas, and political struggles surrounding the financialization of farmland. In particular, Madeleine Fairbairn focuses on developments in two of the most popular investment locations, the US and Brazil, looking at the implications of financiers’ acquisition of land and control over resources for rural livelihoods and economic justice.

At the heart of Fields of Gold is a tension between efforts to transform farmland into a new financial asset class, and land’s physical and social properties, which frequently obstruct that transformation. But what makes the book unique among the growing body of work on the global land grab is Fairbairn’s interest in those acquiring land, rather than those affected by land acquisitions. Fairbairn’s work sheds ethnographic light on the actors and relationships—from Iowa to Manhattan to São Paulo—that have helped to turn land into an attractive financial asset class.

Madeleine Fairbairn is Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies and affiliated with the SJRC at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Find out more in this campus news article:

The global land rush: How investors have turned farmland into a lucrative financial asset class

The book is available for purchase or free download (for non-commercial purposes) at Cornell University Press.

screenshot of game character holding a digital device showing another game character.

Game launch! Sin Sol / No Sun by micha cárdenas

Posted on by

About the Game

screenshot of game character holding a digital device showing another game character.

(c)Kristine Eudey, 2019, micha cárdenas, “Sin Sol, Prototype” as part of “Arch”, Leslie-Lohman Museum.

Created by the UCSC Critical Realities Studio Sin Sol / No Sun is an augmented reality game that allows users to experience the feelings of a climate change event, in order to deeply consider how climate change disproportionately effects immigrants, trans people and disabled people. Players can find, see and hear a story told through poetry about living through climate change induced wildfires, from an AI hologram, Aura.

Set fifty years in the future, Aura tells the story of environmental collapse from the past, which is our present in 2018. Part environmental archiving project, the environments in the game include actual 3-D scans of present day forests from the Pacific Northwest. With the goal of multispecies survival and solidarity in mind, Aura’s dog, Roja, leads players on a journey to escape the wildfires and find oxygen capsules which contain poetry, telling more of the story as they progress through the game.

Find out more in this campus news article:

New art game explores intersection of personal trauma and climate induced wildfires

Sin Sol is available on the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Content Note: Sin Sol contains descriptions of sexual violence.

Watch the trailer on YouTube.

Game design, Writing and Direction by SJRC affiliate micha cárdenas (UCSC assistant professor of Art & Design: Games and Playable Media). micha directs the Critical Realities Studio and is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technology. Her book Poetic Operations, forthcoming from Duke University Press, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She is a first generation Colombian American. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, AI & Society, Scholar & Feminist Online, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, among others.

3-D modeling by Marcelo Viana Neto, Adrian Phillips and Kara Stone

Environments by Abraham Avnisan

Soundtrack by Wynne Greenwood and micha cárdenas

Character Design by Morgan Thomas

Produced by SJTP Fellow Dorothy Santos (Film and Digital Media)