Past Events

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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

October 27, 2021 | Works-in-Progress with Rebecca Herzig

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Wednesday, October 27, 2021

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, Rebecca Herzig, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College on Science, Justice, and University Abolition.

This talk, part of a larger work-in-progress on US higher education, draws together left abolitionist approaches to the university and decolonial, anti-capitalist, and queer feminist critiques of science. Specifically, the talk takes up Boggs et al’s (2019) call to reckon with US universities’ complicity with settler colonial and racial capitalist regimes of accumulation by considering the distinctive positioning of contemporary “STEM,” ideologically and materially, within those regimes. Thinking Science & Justice within and beyond the carceral university, the talk suggests, requires struggle with academic science’s ongoing conditioning of twenty-first century racial-capitalist orders.

Rebecca Herzig is the author of several books, including Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America, and, with Evelynn Hammonds, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics. With Banu Subramaniam, Herzig co-edits the series, Feminist Technosciences. An essay from Herzig’s current project on higher education is forthcoming in Feminist Studies.

October 21, 2021 | Theorizing Race After Race

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Thursday, October 21, 2021

4:00 – 5:30pm

Zoom

Join Science & Justice scholars for an open discussion of Theorizing Race After Race!

At this session we’ll discuss our collective reading and writing projects.

Those interested in learning more or developing a dialogue or framework for grappling with race and racism in this so-called “post-racial” era, should join us. For the Zoom link, please contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) or Camilla Hawthorne (camilla@ucsc.edu).

The first two dialogues are linked below.

More information on the cluster can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2019/05/17/theorizing-race-after-race/.

October 13, 2021 | Works-in-Progress with Melina Packer

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SJRC scholars gathered on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 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 heard from Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Melina Packer on Toxicant Masculinity. Melina will offer a critical feminist historiography of toxicology, also known as “the basic science of poisons.” Drawing from ethnographic and archival research, Melina will show how U.S. toxicology’s founding fathers assumed the authority to predict and control toxicity, despite the inherent uncertainties of toxicants, in support of petrochemical industry and U.S. empire. The toxic legacies of such masculinist and militarist presumptions are palpable today, as environmental health scientists know precious little about the reproductive effects of 85,000+ actively circulating synthetic chemicals. What is more, sexualized and racialized peoples are disproportionately more burdened by toxic environmental exposures, around the globe. Applying queer feminist theory and methods, my engaged project urges contemporary toxicologists to re-situate the science of poisons in its sociopolitical context, confronting the discipline’s military-industrial history while centering the lived experiences of over-exposed communities, for both better science and environmental justice.

Dr. Melina Packer is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California–Riverside. As a scholar of queer feminist science studies, her research traverses entanglements of nature and culture, engaging political ecology and critical race theory primarily. She is currently writing a book about U.S. toxicology titled Toxic Sexual Politics: Economic Poisons and Endocrine Disruptions. Dr. Packer’s publications have appeared and are forthcoming in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Environment & Society: Advances in Research, The Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, The Washington Post, and In These Times. She may also be found hiking the California hills with her canine companion, an English Pointer named Pepper.

October 06, 2021 | Meet & Greet

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Wednesday, October 06, 2021

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

Please join us for a beginning of quarter social hour. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company, we will welcome new members to our community, and welcoming back others.

This will be a great chance for everyone to meet and foster emerging collaborations! Attendees are highly encouraged to bring and share their objects of study as it is a fun and helpful way to find intersecting areas of interest. Some previous objects shared have been: soil samples, a piece of the Berlin wall, bamboo, newly launched books, a stick, sugar, human blood, a human liver, and food.

Faculty or students interested in science and justice who want to learn more about SJRC collaborative projects, the Training Program seminar* offered in Winter 2022, or would like to affiliate with Science & Justice are highly encouraged to join us.

 

*The Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration seminar is the introductory course in the training program. The course draws together masters, early career PhD students and faculty from across all five Divisions. Fostering experimental and innovative practices for working together, this class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts to learn to labor together to understand and address critical issues. The seminar is cross-listed in multiple departments, including Sociology, Anthropology, Feminist Studies and Biomolecular Engineering and will be offered Winter 2022 and taught by medical anthropologist James Doucet-Battle (Professor of Sociology).

October 05, 2021 | Assuming the Ecosexual Position Book Celebration with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens

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On Tuesday, October 5, 2021, we gathered for a book launch celebration for Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover with Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle w/ special guest appearances from:

Linda M. Montano—Performance artist, author
Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Allison Lovejoy—Artist-Poet & Musician.
Jennie Klein—Beth & Annie’s collaborator on Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Art history professor at Ohio University.
K-HAW & Alias the Ass—Rural Alchemy Workshop artists
Courtney Desiree Morris—artist, professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.
Joy Brooke Fairfield—Theater director.
Evelyna Jarosz, Justyna Górowska and a.r. brine shrimp—Artist-scholars from Poland and brine shrimp brides.
Dragonfly Diva—Storyteller, culture warrior, ecosexual.
Paul Corbit Brown—Director of Mountain Keepers Foundation, environmental activist.
Emma McNairy & Emily Casey—Opera singer & heavy metal rocker.
Butch—Beth & Annie’s dog.

A recording of the celebration is forthcoming and will be made available.

In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, setting them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, their seven-year art and exhibition project with performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young.

Throughout the pages of the book, Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, celebrating their vows to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth. The collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, and art and environmentalism to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

As written in CNN, Stephens and Sprinkle’s “collaborative projects bring joy amid injustice and hardship… make saving the planet a bit sexier.” The book launch is planned as another joyful project in the struggle against climate change.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position is available for purchase here with a 40% discount through December 1, 2021, as part of the National Women’s Studies Association conference sale. Discount code: MN88300​

This event is collaboratively produced by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Arts Research Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been life partners and collaborators on multimedia projects since 2002. They are authors of the Ecosex Manifesto and producers of the award-winning film Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Water Makes Us Wet. Sprinkle is a former sex worker with a PhD in human sexuality. Stephens holds a PhD in performance studies and is founding director of E.A.R.T.H. Lab at University of California at Santa Cruz.

COVID-19: Online Events

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Image credit: CDC/Alissa Eckert; Dan Higgins

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 for action, and organizing and participating in online events.

 

Help Spread the Word of These Online Events

C-Span | State and Federal Covid-19 Briefings and Legislative Deliberation | (schedule)

Archived Events

February 8, 2021 | Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics | Medical Apartheid Goes Viral: How Infection Catalyzes Bioethical Erosion with Harriet Washington (recording)

Jan 15, 2021 | Schmidt Futures + SSRC | COVID-19 — Case Studies from 23 Nations (recordings)

Dec 7, 2020 | Harvard Data Science Initiative| Trust in Science, Trust in Democracy (recording)

Sept 24, 2020 | Boston Medical Library | History in an Epidemic: The Puzzles of Covid-19 (recording)

July 23, 2020 | UCSC Molecular Diagnostic Lab | Tales from a pandemic pop-up lab with Isabel Bjork, Jeremy Sanford, Olena Vaske, and Michael Stone (recording)

July 17, 2020 | UCSC University Forum: The Lessons of COVID for Global and Community Health with Nancy Chen and Matt Sparke (recording)

July 1, 2020 | COVID-19: The scientific basis for what we know (and don’t!) and the exit strategy it provides with Marm Kilpatrick (recording)

June 22, 2020 | University Forum: Solidarity Economics for the Coronavirus Crisis & Beyond with Chris Benner (recording)

June 17, 2020 | The Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce | Health Care Inequality: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19 and the Health Care System (recording)

May 28, 2020 | American Medical Association (AMA) | Prioritizing Equity: The Root Cause (recording)

May 27, 2020 |UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation | The Coronavirus Crisis and Social Change: Flash Talks on Social and Economic Dimensions of the COVID-19 Pandemic | Moderated by Dean Katharyne Mitchell (registration)

May 26, 2020 | UC San Diego Health | Lessons Learned: Ramping Up Telehealth Services During COVID-19 | Presented by Lawrence Friedman, Kristian Kidholm, Micaela Monteiro, and Lisa Moore (recording)

May 22, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | COVID-19: The Scientific Basis for What We Know and the Exit Strategy it Provides | Hosted by Infectious Disease Expert Marm Kilpatrick (recording)

May 14, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz  Institute for Social Transformation and UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative| Webinar: Health Care Access, Service Delivery, and Youth Civic Engagement in the Central Valley during the COVID-19 Pandemic (recording)

May 8 – 9, 2020 | Princeton University| Pandemic, Creating a Usable Past: Epidemic History, COVID-19, and the Future of Health. | Sponsored by the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) with support from Princeton University, Department of History (recording)

May 6, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz COVID-19 Team | Guy Kawaski’s Fireside Chat With UCSC Coronavirus Team | Presented by Guy Kawasaki, David Haussler, Rebecca DuBois, John MacMillan, Jeremy Sanford | Supported by UCSC’s Genomics Institute (podcast recording)

May 6, 2020 | UCSC Right Livelihood College | Water Justice in the Age of Coronavirus and Beyond | Presented by Maude Barlow (Canada), Robert Bilott (USA), and Andy Szasz (USA, moderator) (recording)

April 29, 2020 | UCSC Right Livelihood College | Women in Global Health – COVID spotlight on major challenges with Laureates Monika Hauser (Germany), Sima Samar (Afghanistan), Evan Zillén (Sweden). Moderated by Professor Nancy Chen (UCSC, Anthropology) (recording)

April 28, 2020 | UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series | Viruses & Vaccines with Rebecca DuBois (recording)

April 28, 2020 | Duke University | COVID-19 Seminar #1 with Professor Priscilla Wald on the Outbreak Narrative and Why We Need to Change the Story | Co-hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institue for Citizenship & Globalisation (ADI) and the Science and Society Network (SSN)

April 24, 2020 | Virginia Tech STS Program | STS Approaches to COVID-19: A Roundtable Discussion | (recording)

April 24, 2020 | UC Berkeley | Straight Talk: A Conversation about Racism, Health Inequities, and COVID-19 (recording)

April 20, 2020 | UNESCO | Inclusion in the time of COVID-19: International webinar addressing racism, discrimination and exclusion [we will look for a link to the recording]

April 16, 2020 | UC Davis DHI | The Geopolitics of COVID-19: Mike Davis in Conversation with Joshua Clover (recording)

April 15, 2020 | Hutchins Center for African & African American Research Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine, Harvard | Epidemics and African American Communities Series: from 1792 to the Present | recordings: April 15 part 1, April 21 part 2, April 23 part 3, May 6 part 4

April 7, 2020 | Global Views on COVID 19: Lessons from the 1918 Flu Pandemic in India and Indonesia | (registration)

April 1, 2020 | Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw |  Age Against the Machine: The Fatal Intersection of Racism & Ageism In the Time of Coronavirus (recording)

April 1, 2020 | The National Academy of Medicine and the American Public Health Association| The Science of Social Distancing, Part 2 (recording)

March 25, 2020 | Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw | Under The Blacklight: The Intersectional Failures that COVID Lays Bare, Part 1 (recording)

March 25, 2020 | The National Academy of Medicine and the American Public Health Association | The Science of Social Distancing: Part 1 (recording)

C-Span | State and Federal Covid-19 Briefings and Legislative Deliberation | (recordings)