Past Events

October 7-9, 2022 | Playing with Fire: a Hot Symposium

Posted on by

Friday, October 7th – Sunday, October 9th

Digital Arts Research Center, DARC 108 (map)

Playing with Fire: a Hot Symposium Exploring the pleasures, perils & politics of fire through art, theory, practice, science and activism. 

Stay tuned to the E.A.R.T.H. Lab for more information.

Confirmed speakers and participants include:
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: Keynote and Hosts
Roxi Power: Fire Poems
Becca Fenwick: Director, CITRIS Initiative for Drone Education and Research: Presenting UCNRS Fire Data
Karin Bolender: Artist and Director of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (RAW)
Justin Hoover, Artist and Director of the Chinese Historical Society of America
Brandon Smith, Director of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRC)
Benny Fillmore, Washoe Elder and Hotshot Firefighter
Laura Smith-Fillmore, Washoe Language Translator and Artist
Helen Fillmore, Environmentalist, Hotshot Firefighter
Julie Weitz, Artist: Golem: A Call to Action + Prayer for Burnt Forests

April 13, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Rachel O’Neill: the cultural politics of wellness

Posted on by

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Humanities 2, room 450, OR Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work – in our first post-covid hybrid event!

At this session, we will hear from Visiting Scholar and Wellcome Trust Fellow Rachel O’Neill, an Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics who is undertaking research on ‘wellness’ culture in the UK, with a particular focus on food and nutrition. Professor O’Neill is very much concerned with the cultural politics of wellness, including its gendered, classed, and racialised dimensions.

Professor O’Neill’s project examines the development of ‘wellness’ as a novel cultural formation and new commercial development in the UK, related to but distinct from various ‘healthy living’ trends that have come before it, and closely connected with the aspirational economies of social media. Ethnographic in character, fieldwork to date has involved attending a variety of wellness events, including food festivals, product launches, and industry conferences, alongside interviews with those who actively participate or are otherwise imbricated in this sphere, from ordinary consumers through to Instagram influencers, dietitians, health coaches, medics and clinicians. One of the project’s key concerns is to chart how the rise of wellness coincides – temporally but also ideologically – with the decline of welfare in the UK, not least as growing emphasis is placed on lifestyle change as a public health measure amid the ongoing wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr. Rachel O’Neill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, specialising in feminist media and cultural studies. Her research centers questions of subjectivity and inequality, primarily in the contemporary UK context but with attention to transnational circulations of culture and capital. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, published by Polity in 2018. Her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Theory, Men & Masculinities, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.

February 23, 2022 | Ruha Benjamin: 38th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation

Posted on by

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Professor of African American studies and founding director of Princeton University’s Ida B.Wells JUST Data Lab, Ruha Benjamin, will speak at the 38th annual UCSC Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation, which will take place on Wednesday, February 23, at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public; those who wish to attend the convocation may register in advance.

Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab and author of two books, People’s Science and Race After Technology, and editor of Captivating Technology. Benjamin is currently working on a fourth book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want and writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.

More in this campus news article: Distinguished sociologist and founding director of Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab to headline MLK Convocation.

February 23, 2022 | Global divisions of health: bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America

Posted on by

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work.

At this session, we will hear from one of our visiting scholars, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda in a talk titled, “Global divisions of health; bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing in Latin America.”

This project asks how scientific and non-scientific communities of knowledge production in Latin America have historically perceived ethical concerns regarding human genome editing and other reproductive technologies (MSRTs). The project explores how current frameworks, concerns and discourses in the United States and Europe engage with (or contradict) those in Latin America. Through a series of seminars, workshops and regional meetings /in-depth interviews with some key stakeholders (geneticists, legislators, academics), the project explores the implications of a geographical and discursive distance between those places where bioethical frameworks are produced (global north) and those where the actual practice of human genome editing (research and trials) could be potentially happening.

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, and focuses on the social determinants of health, genomics and postgenomics. She is currently exploring bioethical principles, practices and regulations on human genome editing and stem cell research in Latin America.

February 09, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Melissa Eitzel

Posted on by

Wednesday, February 09, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work.

At this session, we will hear from one of our remote visiting scholars, Melissa Eitzel Solera, now with the Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis.  Melissa will give us a brief report on the achievements from the work at SJRC as an NSF Science, Education, and Engineering for Sustainability postdoctoral scholar, some highlights of new collaborative projects at Davis, and then will workshop papers associated with the recently-published Modeler’s Manifesto.

February 07, 2022 | Book Launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

Posted on by

Monday, February 07, 2022

5:00 PM

To celebrate the launch of micha cárdenas’ new book, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, forthcoming from Duke University Press, the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies along with Performance, Play and Design will host a book launch event on Monday, February 7th at the Cowell Provost house at 5:00PM with Gerald Casel and Nick Mitchell as respondents!

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations.

More about the book can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2022/01/03/book-poetic-operations-cardenas/

January 19, 2022 | Works-in-Progress with Daphne Martschenko and Sam Trejo

Posted on by

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work.

At this session, we will hear from Daphne Martschenko, a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and collaborator Sam Trejo, an Assistant Professor in the Department Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, on how ethical, anticipatory genomics research on human behavior means celebrating disagreement.

Despite the many social and ethical considerations in human genetics, researchers and communities remain largely siloed as for-profit direct-to-consumer genetic testing and the application of polygenic scores to in vitro fertilization services become increasingly prevalent. The multifaceted challenges facing genomics, both empirical and ethical, require collaborations that foster critical dialogue and honest debate between communities inside and outside the research enterprise. This works-in-progress argues that in order to respond to the premature or inappropriate use of genomic data in industry, the scientific community needs to embrace, understand, and be in dialogue about its disagreements. We begin by introducing the research framework of adversarial collaboration as a way to celebrate disagreement and then discuss ideas from the Genetics & Social Inequality chapter of our ongoing book project ‘Debating DNA’.

Sam and Daphne are currently writing a book together for Princeton University Press that unpacks various social, ethical, and policy issues related to the DNA revolution. Their goal is to present a genuine middle ground, moving past the dichotomies—interpretivist vs. positivist, qualitative vs. quantitative, optimism vs. pessimism regarding biological explanations—that vex the biosocial sciences.

Daphne O. Martschenko PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and co-organizer of the international Race, Empire, and Education Research Collective. Daphne’s work advocates for and facilitates research efforts that promote socially responsible communication of and community engagement with social and behavioral genomics.

Sam Trejo PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. He is quantitative social scientist interested in how social and biological factors jointly shape human development across the life-course and specialize in quasi-experimental, biosocial, and computational methods. Sam’s research capitalizes on two data sources that, until recently, were unavailable to researchers: (1) large administrative datasets and (2) longitudinal studies containing molecular genetic data.

November 10, 2021 | Book Launch! Life As We Made It + SJTP Fellow Presentation

Posted on by

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)

On Wednesday, November 10, 2021 from 4:00-5:30 PM we joined in celebrating the launch of SJRC affiliate faculty Beth Shapiro’s new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)! (poster – PDF)

Science & Justice Training Program Fellows, Jonas Oppenheimer and Jenny Pensky presented findings from their collaborative research project exploring the relationships between “invasive” plants, botanical gardens, and colonialism – as well as – put their work into conversation with Shapiro’s Life as We Made It.

A link to the research and a rapporteur report will be posted once available.

Learn more about Life as We Made It in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

Beth Shapiro is a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and PI of the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab.

Jonas Oppenheimer is a 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 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.

 

November 10, 2021 | Graduate Training Program Informational Meeting

Posted on by

The Science and Justice Research Center will host an Informational Meeting on our internationally recognized interdisciplinary Graduate Training and Certificate Program:

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

12:00-1:30PM

Zoom Registration

Our Science and Justice Training Program (SJTP) is a globally unique initiative that trains doctoral students to work across the disciplinary boundaries of the natural and social sciences, engineering, humanities and the arts. Through the SJTP we at UC Santa Cruz currently teach new generations of PhD students the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, and public communication. Students in the program design collaborative research projects oriented around questions of science and justice. These research projects not only contribute to positive outcomes in the wider world, they also become the templates for new forms of problem-based and collaborative inquiry within and beyond the university.

As SJTP students graduate they take the skills and experience they gained in the training program into the next stage of their career in universities, industry, non-profits, and government.

Opportunities include graduate Certificate Program, experience organizing and hosting colloquia series about the research projects, mentorship, potential for additional research funding and training in conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and society.

WINTER 2022 COURSE:

Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration (SOCY/BME/FMST 268A and ANTH 267), Assist. Prof. James Doucet-Battle, scheduled Monday’s 1:30-4:30pm, Rachel Carson College, 301. Enrollment in the course is required for participating in the Training Program. Attending the informational meeting is strongly encouraged, but not required.

Students from all disciplines are encouraged to attend

Prior graduate fellows have come from every campus Division.

22 Represented Departments: Anthropology, Biomolecular Engineering, Digital Arts & New Media, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, Film & Digital Media, History, History of Consciousness, Latin American & Latino Studies, Literature, Math, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, Social Documentation, Sociology, and Visual Studies.

Past collaborative research projects have included:

  • Physicists working with small scale farmers to develop solar greenhouses scaled to local farming needs.
  • Colloquia about the social and political consequences of scientific uncertainties surrounding topics such as climate change research, food studies, genomics and identity.
  • Examining how art can empower justice movements.
  • Working with local publics to improve African fishery science.

For more information on the Science & Justice Training Program, visit: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/about-sjrc/sjtp/

Join the SJRC at the October 6th Meet & Greet from 4:00-5:30!

November 03, 2021 | Giving Day

Posted on by

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, November 3rd, for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help support our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) and the next cohort of student researchers by giving 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 marked the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP), and will be offered again in 2022. Now more than ever the training offered by the SJTP is critical to addressing the problems of our times: ecological destruction and pandemics; data justice in an age of AI; growing inequalities in access to novel therapeutics; access to basic health care in the jails and prisons. These are problems that are not the domain of one discipline or area of practice. They require working across fields and industries of knowledge, methods, and practice. The SJTP provides the space and transdisciplinary tools and thought needed for social science, humanities, engineering, physical and biological science, and arts students to collaborate with each other and our community partners to respond to core concerns of our times.

Our Science & Justice Training Program trains graduate student researchers to place a commitment to ethics and justice at the heart 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 support this critical dimension of the training of future leaders in the emerging field of Science and Justice.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 3.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!