News

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

Game launch! Sin Sol / No Sun by micha cárdenas

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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)

SJTP Fellows Ian Carbone and Derek Padilla with undergraduate Artist-in-Residence Kiko Kolbi inside greenhouse

Giving Day fundraiser for Science & Justice Training Program

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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday September 30th, for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help us celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) by supporting our graduate student researchers through the Science & Justice campaign. Incentives to give include matching funds: if you are interested in matching funds, please email scijust@ucsc.edu.

ABOUT the SJRC’s SJTP

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, 2020 marks the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). Now more than ever the training offered by the SJTP is critical to addressing the problems of our times: ecological destruction; data justice; growing inequalities. These are problems that are not the domain of one discipline or area of practice. They require working across fields of knowledge and practice. The SJTP provides the space and transdisciplinary tools and thought needed for social science, humanities, engineering, physical and biological science, and art students to collaborate to respond to core concerns of our times.

Our Science & Justice Training Program trains the next generation of researchers to maximize the public good of science and technology.

Why Support S&J

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on their Science & Justice projects during the summer. With your help, we can offer summer fellowships that supports this critical dimension of the training of these future leaders of science and justice.

Over the last decade, our students have produced innovative research and projects. An SJTP graduate fellow from Biomolecular Science and Engineering worked with marine biologists and illustrators to self-publish the children’s book Looking For Marla (Buscando a Marla), a tale of diverse expressions of gender and sexual identity among marine creatures. Physics graduate students and artists came together to develop a novel solar greenhouse that highlighted problems of energy use and access to new material sciences in agriculture. They went on to secure tenure-track positions in which they found a route to incorporating justice into both their teaching and research. In these and many other instances, the SJTP is part of the next generation of researchers who seek to place justice at the heart of the best science and technology.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and ask your friends to join us on September 30 by making a gift on Giving Day to support the Science and Justice Training Program!

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

structure of COVID-19

Royal Geographical Society publishes special COVID-19 issue

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A virtual special issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers features Politics Professor and S&J Advisor Matt Sparke’s article, “Contextualizing Coronavirus Geographically,” and provides free access to additional articles that provide perspective on the pandemic.

More in this campus news article, “Royal Geographical Society publishes special COVID-19 issue.”

Social Sciences Research Council Insights: V is for Veracity

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According to Jenny Reardon, professor of sociology and the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center, creating trust-worthy knowledge that can foster a more just world requires attending to both COVID-19 pandemic and the deep inequalities and fissures in the polity that this pandemic has laid bare.

Read more in this Social Sciences Research Council Insights: V is for Veracity article.

COVID-19 Pandemicene Zine

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Students in Director Jenny Reardon’s undergraduate independent study seminar, SOCY 194: Living and Learning in a Pandemic: The Sociology of COVID-19, have co-created a zine based on everyone’s unique quarantine experiences and interests in understanding local responses to the pandemic!

Full design credit and our special thanks go to Kathia Damian (Literature)!

 

COVID-19 Blogs

Here, four students in our internship which ran parallel to the course, share their series of blog posts, which each focus on a different issue and angle concerning COVID-19. Initial posts were posted on May 13, 2020, with further posts in the series to come.

Maryam Nazir – Bioethics and Equity-Based Frameworks Amidst a Pandemic; Reconciling the Irreconcilable Disparities in the Healthcare Industry

Kathia Damian – Privacy During a Pandemic: Digital Contact Tracing and Technosolutionism; Exposure Notifications, Digital Contact Tracing, and the Burden of Responsibility

Teresa (Tee) Wicks – The Global Medical Supply Chain, Neoliberalism, and COVID-19; Pharmaceuticals, a Vaccine for COVID-19, and Questions of Equitable Access; An Intersectional Narrative of Two Epidemics

Isa Ansari – COVID-19 Conversations with Dr. Kim TallBear and Dr. Jessica Kolopenuk; Re-Worlding in the time of COVID with Mesiah and Little Wind

 

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

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

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Call for Participation

Spring 2020 Undergraduate Student Researcher Opportunity

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

Undergraduate Research Fellowship

The award presents a paid research opportunity to first-generation, low income, under-represented groups, undocumented, and/or former foster youth. The award is intended as a stipend to support general living expenses, fieldwork or travel (as allowed by campus or state COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions), presentation of work, and/or research. Undergraduate students currently enrolled in any department at UC Santa Cruz may apply. Preference will be given to applicants currently involved in the project. Established to increase inclusiveness and a sense of belonging in research, the award will support research conducted by one undergraduate student working with the Center project:

Theorizing Race After Race

The student should:
  • Be currently enrolled as an undergraduate student (any department) at UC Santa Cruz during Spring 2020; summer enrollment is not required.
  • Be currently working on the established Center project: Theorizing Race After Race.
The student will:
  • Help design and articulate the project’s future. This may include conducting interviews and transcription, analysis and editing of interviews; as well as 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.
  • Adhere to IRB standards for working with human research subjects if applicable.
  • Be offered a $1,500 Fellowship with the SJRC and listed on the Project’s webpage.
To Apply:

By 12:00Noon, Wed May 13, 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, how your personal/work/research/career goals would benefit from the fellowship, and how it would contribute to your overall sense of belonging at UC Santa Cruz.
  4. A short statement on your experiences at UCSC or involvement with the SJRC as related to topics addressed by the Project (including human subjects research, events attended, classes taken, etc.).
  5. Any ideas briefly describing potential research to be completed over Spring and Summer 2020.

Information on SJRC’s TRAR project can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2018/11/27/theorizing-race-after-race/

structure of COVID-19

SJRC Response to COVID-19

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COVID-19: The Pandemicene

Due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, UC Santa Cruz, like many other higher education institutions, announced the suspension of in-person instruction, lectures and discussion sections through the full spring quarter, including all labs, studios, field research, and field study courses.

Now, with many communities ordered to stay-in-place, with only essential business allowed to operate, we find ourselves in the midst of a historic remaking of our entangled worlds. Science & Justice will be in real time working with our friends and colleagues around the world to make sense of and respond to this moment, the pandemicene.

How do we do science and justice remotely? Re-learn.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, developing news items, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

Undergraduate Curriculum & Training

The SJRC will gather several undergraduate researchers to focus current Center research projects on the following emerging areas in the context of COVID-19:

  • Re-Worlding: Living and Learning Alone Together in the Pandemicene
  • Community, Civil Society and Social Justice Responses to COVID-19
  • Just Biomedicine in an Age of COVID-19:  How Can Researchers (Public Health, Genomics, Virologists, Bioethicists) Collaborate in New Ways?
  • The Challenges of Knowing and Responding in the Age of No Data and Mis-information
  • The Crisis of Public Health in Infrastructures of Care and Incarceration

Read more on these developing areas of concern in the campus news article, “Discrimination, governance, and trust in the age of COVID-19”, featuring SJRC Director Jenny Reardon.

Additionally, several courses have been designed to be offered in Spring 2020.

Founding Director Jenny Reardon has designed an undergraduate independent study seminar SOCY 194: Living and Learning in a Pandemic: The Sociology of COVID-19, that will draw upon insights from the Sociology of Medicine, Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Studies and Critical Race Theory to study the current pandemic, COVID-19.

Sociology Assistant Professor Rebecca London has designed an undergraduate course, SOCY 139T-02: Coronavirus and community: Sociological research on impacts and responses to the pandemic, that will center around a call for papers from Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public.

Graduate Training Program

In Winter 2020, the SJRC celebrated the Science & Justice Training Program’s 10th anniversary. As the accessibility of the university is being utterly transformed, we want to ask: how can what the COVID-19 public health crisis makes visible help us to rebuild a different university in the wake of this pandemicene? Meet our new cohort of fellows and learn more about their projects.

Developing Blogs & Calls To Action

The SJRC aims to make visible the many themes and calls to action that will emerge. SJRC affiliate faculty, undergraduate and graduate student researchers may contribute towards our developing blogs or use the platform to post their own writings for public consumption. Students of the SOCY 194 course and SJRC interns are developing an online zine. Calls will be shared and archived in the Center’s News Feed and on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

Contact Founding Director Jenny Reardon (readon1@ucsc.edu) to get involved.

Announcing 2020-2021 SJTP Fellows

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

Now more than ever the SJTP provides critical skills for addressing problems of our times, whether ecological destruction, growing inequalities, or a global pandemic. These are problems that span disciplines and areas of practice, and the SJTP provides the space for transdisciplinary thought and collaboration needed to respond to them. It is creating the next generation of path-breaking researchers who have the tools needed to place justice at the heart of our best science and technology. Read about their innovations as reported in the Danish Daily Information and Le Monde.

Offered Winter 2020 as BME/FMST/SOCY 268A and ANTH 267A, the Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration, the introductory seminar of the SJTP brought early career science and engineering students together with social science, humanities and arts students to foster experimental collaborative research practices.

We are proud to welcome the newest cohort of graduate students to the SJTP as Fellows this Spring 2020, joining us for our 10th anniversary, are Colette Felton, Jonas Oppenheimer, and Jennifer Pensky! Learn more about them below.

In addition to working with SJRC affiliated faculty, Fellows connect with SJRC’s network of local, regional, and international partners to inform projects that explore how questions of science and knowledge meet questions of ethics and justice. Fellows gain access to funding for projects and events, mentorship and training, and experience designing innovative collaborative transdisciplinary research and public dialogues.

MEET the FELLOWS

Colette Felton is a first-year member of Professor Angela Brooks’ Lab in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics. Colette is working on analyzing long-read transcriptomics, especially in identifying and visualizing gene fusions. Colette’s SJTP project is focused on improving the accessibility of scientific research to students from marginalized backgrounds.

Jonas Oppenheimer is a second-year member of the paleogenomics lab with Beth Shapiro in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics. Jonas works to understand the evolutionary dynamics of Beringian megafauna through ancient DNA, investigating the consequences of climate, population history, and hybridization on these species. Jonas is also a Fellow with CITL (Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning) learning pedagogical techniques to make an education in science accessible to all.

Jenny Pensky is a third-year member of Professor Andrew Fisher’s hydrogeology lab in Earth & Planetary Sciences. Jenny focuses on how managed aquifer recharge (MAR) can be used to improve both water supply and quality. For their SJTP project, Jenny and Jonas will explore the relationships between “invasive” plants, botanical gardens, and colonialism.