Past Events

June 03, 2025 | THICK, SLIMY, SQUISHY, SQUIGGLY & GENERATIVE: A Conversation with Donna Haraway

Posted on by

Tuesday, June 03, 2025

3:30-6:00pm

UCSC McHenry Library, Special Collections & Archives, 3rd Floor

On June 3rd, 2025, join the UCSC Special Collections & Archives for a conversation with Donna Haraway, in dialogue with three former students and long-time intellectual companions: Chela Sandoval (Associate Professor of Chicana Studies at UC Santa Barbara), Katie King (Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland), and Caren Kaplan (Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis).

NOTE: Limited space available; plan to arrive early for seating. The conversation will start promptly at 4 pm and the event will continue afterwards with browsing in the archives.

Together with Haraway, these History of Consciousness alums will revisit the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transformative modes of thinking that shaped their time at UCSC in the 1980s and ’90s—and that continue to animate their work today. Reflecting on this shared historical moment, the conversation will trace the intersections, evolutions, and generative entanglements of their ideas over time—and consider why collectivity, friendship, integrity, and humor remain vital tools for navigating what Haraway has called the “thick and slimy” urgencies of our present.

This event also marks the opening of an exhibition that showcases select materials from the Donna Haraway Papers, newly processed and available for research at UCSC’s McHenry Library.

Organized by the University Library’s Elisabeth Remak-Honnef Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) and 2024-2025 CART Fellow Annika Berry.

Read also this campus news article about Donna’s recent international awards: Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department, receives international honors.

May 30-31, 2025 | A Dawn and Two Dusks

Posted on by

Friday-Saturday, May 30-31, 2025

5:30-8:30 pm

UCSC Arboretum

Co-conceived by sound and media artist Anna Friz (FDM) and choreographer Cid Pearlman (PPD), A Dawn and Two Dusks is a site-specific project taking place over three days on the grounds of the UCSC Arboretum in May 2025. Beginning with a dawn listening session on International Dawn Chorus Day (May 4), and continuing over two evenings of site-specific performance (May 30–31), the project proposes resilience and exuberant corporealities through interdisciplinary student, faculty and community collaborations, engaging the arts in community building and placemaking in response to urgent and unstable times.

—
FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
– Sunday, May 4, 5:15-7:00 a.m.: Dawn Chorus, a listening event
– Friday & Saturday, May 30–31, 5:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m.: A Dawn and Two Dusks, a site-specific performance event
—
ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
– Site information
– No registration required
—
PARKING
– Directions
– UCSC Arboretum parking

May 30, 2025 | BME80G Series: Joanna Radin on Tales From the Crypt: Craniometry, Computers and Mass Culture in 1960s Cambridge

Posted on by

Friday, May 30, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)

On Friday, May 30 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Joanna Radin.

Tales From the Crypt: Craniometry, Computers and Mass Culture in 1960s Cambridge

This is a story about what happened when an enterprising Ivy league, pre-med majoring in anthropology encountered a machine he was told could, among other miracles, transform the spoils of generations of racial conquest into anti-racist science. It is a cautionary tale, not unlike the ones this pre-med would become best known for when he abandoned medicine for mass-market publishing and Hollywood. I narrate this account not as a thriller, adventure, or mystery, but as a bad romance. Or more specifically a necromance, born out of opportunistic relationships to the dead and mass cultural movements to refuse civil rights. The story unfolds between Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, MA in the 1960s. Specifically, collections of skulls at Cambridge University and the gender and racially segregated halls of Harvard College. It traces the intersections of Black Power and the power of computers—specifically the IBM 7090–as a strategy for intervening in entrenched ideas about human racial and sexual difference. I follow the consequences of this skullduggery into the present, after calls for the release of human remains from Anthropology’s crypts amidst the Black Lives Matter movement during the twilight of Affirmative Action.

Joanna Radin, Associate Professor of History of Medicine, Yale University,

Joanna Radin is Associate Professor of History of Medicine at Yale University, where she is a core member and Director of Graduate Studies of the Program in History of Science and Medicine. She also holds appointments in the Departments of History and of Anthropology and is an affiliate of the Programs in American Studies and in Religion and Modernity. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017) and with Emma Kowal, the co-editor of Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017). Her most recent publication is an essay in The Yale Review, “Is Celebrity Real?”

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 28, 2025 | Making a Time Capsule of the Present As We Meet the Future: Collective Creative Reflection with the Science & Justice Training Program Fellows

Posted on by

Wednesday, May, 28, 2025

4:00-6:00pm

Oakes College Mural Room + Zoom (registration)

If we are packing a bag to move into the future of science, what values, practices, teachings and communities do we want to take with us from the past, what do we want to leave behind, and what do we want to make that we don’t already have?

In this event, fellows from the Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) will come together to reflect on this question, and others: What happened over the rather extraordinary last year? What were our most urgent questions a year ago, and what are they now? What has changed?

The audience will then be invited into a creative storyboarding session, where we will reflect in small groups on these same questions – what we would “pack” and leave behind as we move into the future, what science and justice means to us now – and collect these reflections into a “time capsule” documenting this moment of conflict and inquiry around science and justice.

The SJTP fellows are a highly interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students from across all five UCSC divisions who came together in Winter 2024 in the graduate seminar class “Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration” taught by Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies Kriti Sharma. The fellows have continued to incorporate learnings from the class into their research practices throughout the year and will be coming together for this culminating event. More information about the SJTP can be found here.

Co-sponsored by the UCSC Women’s Center.

May 23-25, 2025 | California STS Network Retreat 2025

Posted on by

Friday, May 23 – Sunday, May 25, 2025

5:00pm – 3:00 pm 

Nature Bridge

This year the California STS Network Retreat is returning to NatureBridge, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The retreat will be hosted by the UC Davis STS department and will be held from 5:00 PM on May 23rd – 3:00 PM on May 25th.

The STS Retreat is an opportunity to meet up with a mixture of faculty, postdocs and graduate students  interested and working in STS from across California. Sessions will be a mixture of mind-stretching STS related workshops, professionalisation workshops, and ‘theory walks’ in the beautiful headland landscape. Sessions are designed to provide attendees with the opportunity to get to know fellow scholars in a relaxed environment.

The cost is $200 including food and accommodation in bunk rooms. Transport to and from is not included.

If you have any questions or plan to attend the retreat, please email Bex Jones, UC Davis graduate student, at rljones@ucdavis.edu. Spaces will only be reserved and confirmed upon payment.

May 23, 2025 | BME80G Series: Ma’n Zawati on Crowdsourcing Smartphone Data for Biomedical Research and Algorithm Training: Ethical and Legal Questions (CANCELLED)

Posted on by

Friday, May 23, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

VIRTUAL (flyer) Zoom Registration

On Friday, May 23 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Ma’n Zawati.

Crowdsourcing Smartphone Data for Biomedical Research and Algorithm Training: Ethical and Legal Questions

More than 5 billion people in the world own a smartphone.  More than half of these have been used to collect and process health-related data, the existing volume of potentially exploitable health data is unprecedentedly large and growing rapidly.  Indeed, mobile health applications (apps) on smartphones are increasingly being used for gathering and exchanging significant amounts of personal health data from the public. This data is often utilized for biomedical research purposes and for algorithm training. While there are advantages to utilizing this data for expanding biomedical knowledge, there are associated risks for the users of these apps, such as privacy concerns and the protection of their data. Consequently, gaining a deeper comprehension of how apps collect and crowdsource data is crucial. This presentation will provide a better understanding of these concerns and ways to address them.

Ma’n Zawati, Associate Professor, Research Director, Centre of Genomics and Policy, McGill University.

Ma’n Zawati (LL.B., LL.M., Ph.D. (DCL)) is an Associate Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Research Director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy in the Department of Human Genetics. He is also an Associate Member in the Department of Medicine, the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy and the Faculty of Law. His work is interdisciplinary, drawing together perspectives from law, ethics, genomics, and policy. His research mainly focuses on the legal, ethical and policy dimensions of health research and clinical care, specializing in data sharing, governance, professional liability, and the use of novel technologies (e.g., mhealth apps, WGS, WES and Artificial Intelligence). During COVID-19, Prof. Zawati was instrumental in establishing the ethics governance for multiple initiatives, including the Quebec COVID19 Biobank (BQC19), CGEn’s HostSeq project and the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force. His work has facilitated access and use of data and samples across jurisdictions.

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 19-23, 2025 | The BioSocioCultural Interdisciplinary Research Network Visit

Posted on by

The BioSocioCultural Interdisciplinary Research Network, administered by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, is a university-led, government-funded initiative to rethink theories and research practices on biodiversity and gender. The visit to the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at UC Santa Cruz is coordinated through the SJRC’s Visiting Scholar Program in collaboration with Professor Claudia Matus, Director of the Center for Educational Justice at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. This visit forms part of the BioSocioCultural Interdisciplinary Research Network grant awarded under the 2024 “Concurso de Fomento a la Vinculación Internacional para Instituciones de Investigación” to Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Itinerary coming soon.

To take part in the visit, contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) or Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).

ABOUT PUCC The BioSocioCultural Interdisciplinary Research Network PARTICIPANTS

CLAUDIA MATUS is a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Full Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Faculty of Education, and UC Center for Educational Justice Director. Her main areas of research are the production of the gender binary norm in scientific research, the interdisciplinary linkage between Social Sciences and Natural Sciences for the production of data, and the theoretical development of the BioSocioCultural perspective for the study of inequalities.

RODRIGO DE LA IGLESIA’s  research group is dedicated to understanding how coastal microbial communities respond to environmental perturbations, especially those of anthropogenic origin. We use molecular tools, experimental approaches and field work to study the local adaptation of photosynthetic microbial communities in polluted systems. Our aim is to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the resilience and adaptation of these microorganisms to environmental variability and stress caused by human activities, such as pollution and climate change. We work with a wide range of marine microorganisms in a variety of coastal habitats, from intertidal zones to deeper ecosystems.  Through interdisciplinary collaborations, we integrate data from the genetic to the ecosystem level, allowing us to address complex questions of marine microbial ecology and physiology. Our research aims to provide a sound scientific basis for the management and conservation of marine resources, thereby contributing to the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems.

VALENTINA RIBERI is an economist with a master’s in Public Policy from the Universidad de Chile and a PhD in Education from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has led large-scale quantitative studies for Chilean ministries, focusing on arts, education, health, and social policy, including innovative projects like developing Chile’s cultural statistics framework. Her doctoral dissertation, Measurements of the Vulnerable in Education: Productive Apparatuses and Their Relational Implications for Social Justice (2022), critically examined educational measurement practices using a Cultural Studies perspective. She has co-authored significant works, including An Ethnography of Vulnerability: A New Materialist Approach to the Apparatus of Measurement (2021) and The Agency of Difference in Chilean School Policies and Practices (2022). Currently, as Executive Director of the UC Center for Educational Justice, her research explores the intersection of measurement technologies and gender, including her role as co-investigator in the project Sampling, Instruments, Data, and Gender: A Biosociocultural Approach (2024–2025), which investigates how biodiversity data reinforces binary gender conceptualizations.

CAMILA MARTÍNEZ has a science degree with a Biology major from the University of Chile and a PhD in Neurolinguistics from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She has developed research on ​​reading learning difficulties and language disorders using behavioral and neurophysiological evaluation tools. Additionally, she has participated in developing and implementing learning and evaluation tools in digital format for different populations with typical development and special educational needs. She has been teaching Psychobiology of Learning at the University of O’Higgins since 2019, an institution in which she participated as a postdoctoral researcher from 2019 until 2022. She is currently an associate researcher in the research line for Disability Inclusion of the Center for Educational Justice.

CARLA MUÑOZ is a sociologist and PhD candidate in Education at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has a robust background in research, project coordination, and evaluation in education, childhood, and early childhood. Her professional expertise includes leading studies on classroom interactions, inclusive education, and migration. She has worked with prominent foundations like Fundación Luksic and public institutions, including JUNJI, focusing on early and secondary education. Muñoz has also contributed to international research, such as serving as an External Quality Observer for the OECD International ECEC Staff Survey. Her academic achievements include co-authoring publications on migrant children’s educational experiences and inclusive education. An ANID National Doctorate Scholarship supports her and actively explores the intersections of gender, education, and childhood through qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.

SEBASTIÁN  DEHNHARDT is a PhD student in Biological Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a Research Assistant at the Millennium Institute for Integrative Biology (iBio). His research focuses on microbial genetics, molecular biology, and bioinformatics, particularly the genetic transformation of microorganisms and the application of CRISPR-Cas9 technologies. He is committed to advancing knowledge in microbial systems through interdisciplinary approaches and innovative experimentation.

May 16, 2025 | BME80G Series: Benjamin Capps on A One Health Guide to Bioethics

Posted on by

Friday, May 16, 2025

1:20 – 2:25 pm 

VIRTUAL (flyer) Zoom Registration

On Friday, May 16 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Benjamin Capps.

A One Health Guide to Bioethics

One Health connects the health of non-human animals and human beings to the environments they share.  The relationships are seen in the natural origins of zoonotic pandemics, which can be explained through animal welfare, conservation, ecology, as well as public health.  My work in bioethics attempts to define these connections.  However, I am often told that it’s all very well to define one health ethics, when all that is needed is a pragmatic, or practical ideal of the one health approach.  My response is that ethics is embedded in pragmatism, and you can’t escape ethical dilemmas by just being practical.  Moreover, by avoiding hard environmental questions, a one health approach often becomes a justification for public health.  Public health is anthropocentric and has no regard for the interests of animals or the non-human environment; in practice, it often excludes ethical conservation, ecology, and environmentalism.  In this seminar, I will define one health ethics, and try to answer (maybe) some hard questions using actual cases.  The objective is to appreciate that being practical (doing science or doing public health) is an inherently bioethical endeavour.

Benjamin Capps, Associate Professor, Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.

Benjamin Capps is  is an associate professor in the Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.  Before moving to Canada in 2014, he was a member of faculty at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore (2008-2014).  Since 2017, Ben has chaired the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) Committee on Ethics, Law and Society. He has published One Health Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Contested Cells: Global Perspectives on the Stem Cell Debate (co-editor, Imperial Collage Press, 2010), and Addiction Neurobiology: Ethical and Social Implications (with others, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2009).  In 2024, he was awarded a grant to lead a residential workshop at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, on The Ecological Genome Project and the Promises of Ecogenomics for Society.  He is a member of the Humanimal Trust’s scientific committee (registered charity, UK, since 2022), and served on the Neuroethics Working Group of the Bioethics Advisory Committee (Singapore; 2011-2014), and Pro-Tem National Oversight Committee for Human-Animal Combinations in Stem Cell Research (Ministry of Health, Singapore; 2011-2012).  He has been an advisor for the World Health Organisation, World Federation for Animals, Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission, and UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 15, 2025 | Activist Conversation with Erin McElroy on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

Posted on by

Thursday, May 15, 2025

10:00-11:30 am

Humanities 1, Room 210

Science & Justice colleagues are invited gather on May 15th from 10:00-11:30 am in Humanities 1, Room 210 for a talk with Erin McElroy on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

About the Speaker

Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.

May 15, 2025 | Book Talk! Anita Say Chan on “Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future” (UC Press, 2025)

Posted on by

Thursday, May 15, 2025

1:00-3:00pm

Humanities 1, Room 210 + Zoom

Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).

Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).

Science & Justice colleagues are invited gather on May 15th from 1:00-3:00pm in Humanities 1, Room 210 (or over Zoom) for a talk by Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).

About the Book

The book is available at UC Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/predatory-data/paper

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes.

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century’s anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.

While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

About the Author

Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.