May 09, 2018 | Timescales, Memory, and Nuclear Geographies: A Conversation with Gabrielle Hecht and Julie Salverson

Wednesday, May 09, 2018

4:00-6:00 PM

Louden Nelson Center, Room 1

301 Center St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060

Source: Michael Brill, Site Design to Mark the Dangers of Nuclear Waste for 10,000 Years. Buffalo: The Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation Inc. (BOSTI). 1991, pl 15.

Source: Michael Brill, Site Design to Mark the Dangers of Nuclear Waste for 10,000 Years. Buffalo: The Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation Inc. (BOSTI). 1991, pl 15.

Writers and activists researching nuclear things face “the challenge of rendering visible occluded, sprawling webs of interconnectedness” (Nixon 2011, 13). This discussion features two writers whose work traces the sprawling webs of nuclear geographies, binding uranium mining and its dispersed radioactive legacies. Julie Salverson (Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies, Queen’s University) links the mines of Northern Canada with the U.S.’s use of nuclear weapons in Japan, and the later disaster at Fukushima, while Gabrielle Hecht (Professor of History and Nuclear Security, Stanford) examines the afterlives of neocolonial uranium mining by French companies in Gabon. Salverson and Hecht experiment with different conceptual and writerly methods to trace the geographies of these extractive economies and their uneven effects.

This discussion with Salverson and Hecht is moderated by UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center. We invite event attendees to read a representative article from each author, email Lindsey Dillon at lidillon@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.

  • Salverson, Julie and Peter C. van Wyck. “Through the Lens of Fukushima.” Forthcoming in Through Post Atomic Eyes, edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
  • Hecht, Gabrielle. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109-141.

References

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

May 02, 2018 | “Sons and Daughters of Soil?” reflections on Life Sciences and Decoloniality in South Africa

Wednesday, May 02, 2018, 3:30-5:30 PM, Humanities 1, Room 210

Responding, as researchers, to Earth Mastery that includes not only violent machines, but a violation of evidence and epistemes including the scientific episteme, requires accumulating and presenting evidence for existences that do not exist — at least, not in neoliberal discourses. In trying to research and support specific situations of Black environmental struggle in South Africa, I find myself standing with that which has no existence in conventional discourses: for a cliff that no longer exists; for molecules that have no existence in local knowledge; for people who have no existence in the mining companies, for the assassinated Bazooka Radebe, whose existence is now with the Ancestors, and with the soil he died to conserve. Environmental Humanities South had begun by asking a question about how to generate evidence in the geological Anthropocene. By the time our first three years had ticked by and we had encountered the Capitalocene, I had learned that a far more fundamental struggle has to be the focus of our work. What exists? Who exists? In what registers and modes? How do we take on the new conquistadors with their machines called Earth Masters, given that it is their owners’ logic that has come to define who exists and what exists and what can be ground to dust? How can scholarship contribute to the building of a broad-based environmental public? Presented as a dilemma tale, this talk sketches six moves toward an ecopolitics in South Africa, with the question: what else could be in this discussion?

Lesley Green | Fulbright Fellow, Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town; Director of Environmental Humanities South, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town

Hosted by the IHR Race, Violence, Inequality and the Anthropocene Cluster.

Co-Sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center and the Anthropology Department.

May 01, 2018 | Reading Group with Lesley Green

Tuesday, May 01, 2018, 11:30-1:30 PM, Humanities 1, Room 408

Reading Seminar on #ScienceMustFall and ABC of Plant Medicine: On Posing Cosmopolitical Questions

Email Kristina Lyons (krlyons@ucsc.edu) for the readings.

Lesley Green | Fulbright Fellow, Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town; Director of Environmental Humanities South, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town

Hosted by the IHR Race, Violence, Inequality and the Anthropocene Cluster.

Co-Sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center

April 11, 2018 | Visiting Scholars Roundtable

Wednesday, April 11, 2018 | 4:00-5:30pm | SJRC’s Common Room (Oakes 231)

S&J welcomes Katharine Legun, (Sociology Lecturer and Researcher at the Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago NZ) to the Science & Justice community.

At this roundtable, we’ll hear from Katharine who will share an overview on her work in plants and aesthetic politics, farmers and intellectual property, and the ever shifting power structures in agri-food systems. More on Katharine’s fascinating work on how the vibrant botany of apples shapes orchard culture and market institutions can be found here and here.

Katharine Legun holds a PhD in Sociology from UW-Madison and has worked in New Zealand since 2013. ​She has published in Economy and SocietyGeoforum, and Environment and Planning A, and is currently co-editing the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Her work considers more-than-human approaches to understanding economic and environmental practice, focusing particularly on the role of plants in shaping human agency within agriculture.

This will be a great chance for everyone to connect with the visitors of the Center, learn about their work and foster emerging collaborations! Interested in visiting Science & Justice? Visit our website for more information on the SJRC Visiting Scholar Program.

Spring 2018 | Science and Justice Writing Together

Tuesday 9:00-11:30am | SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Wanting to establish a regular writing routine exploring science and justice? Join SJRC scholars in the SJRC Common Room for open writing sessions! Engage in six 25-minute writing sessions (with a 5 minute break in between).

Open to all students, faculty and visiting scholars. We will continue to schedule quarterly writing sessions based on interest and availability, please be in touch if you are interested in participating in the future.

For more information, please contact Lindsey Dillon (Assistant Professor of Sociology).

Mar 15, 2018 | Making Worlds with Crows: A Multispecies Ethics Workshop with Thom van Dooren

Thursday, March 15, 2018 | 3:15-5:15 PM | Humanities 1, Room 202

Thom van Dooren will present an overview of his new book, Making Worlds With Crows; we will then discuss its final chapter, “Provisioning Crows: Cultivating Ecologies of Hope. Please email mfernan3@ucsc.edu for the chapter.

Ubiquitous in their global presence, crows are now found almost everywhere that people are: from critically endangered island crows living in disappearing forests to abundant urban species finding new ways to exploit changing cities. In this way, crows offer a broad range of instructive sites for exploring the challenges and possibilities of multispecies life in the context of escalating processes of globalisation, urbanisation, climate change, and extinction. This talk offers an overview of a recently completed monograph that focuses on changing human/crow relationships in five key sites in an effort to develop approaches and practices for a situated, attentive, multispecies, ethics.

Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017-2021) in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press). His research and writing focuses on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), Making Worlds With Crows: A Multispecies Ethics (2018), and co-editor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), all published by Columbia University Press. www.thomvandooren.org

Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Emerging Worlds, and the Science and Justice Research Center.

Mar 14, 2018 | Reflexivity Isn’t Enough: (Re)Making ‘Place’ in Ethnographic Practices

Wednesday, March 14, 2018 | 4:00-5:30 PM | SJRC Common Room

This presentation consists of two parts. First, Hernández will present a talk that draws on their forthcoming journal publication which narrates an embodied and experiential ethnographic approach, one that reimagines ethnography and ethnographic practices, and works to contribute to healing and Indigenous survivance.

Second, Hernández, who is a Society for Visual Anthropology awardee, will conduct a reading of their ethnographic poetry while inviting bees into the space with the help of photo-ethnography. Hernández’s dissertation work is a relational collaboration with bees, among many more-than-human beings, in and with the borderlands of California and Arizona. Thus, bees and the Indigenous lands from where they live and from which they come will be present and honored through both visual and poetic engagements.

Krisha J. Hernández (Mexica/Aztec, Yaqui (Yoeme), & Bisayan), is an Indígena Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Hernández is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, UCSC Graduate Division, UCSC Science and Justice Research Center, and is a Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar. She is a researcher in the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (Indigenous STS) international research and teaching hub lab chaired by Canada’s Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Environment, Dr. Kim TallBear. Her forthcoming dissertation, “Agents of Pollination: Indigenous Bodies & Lives, and U.S. Agriculture Technosciences,” is concerned with Indigeneity and materialisms, (de)colonization and settler colonialism, and collaboration (with more-than-(but including)-human beings) as healing. Hernández researches human-insect relations in food and agricultural systems, more-than-human socialites, foodways, and environmental change in which they employ a critical Indigenous feminist lens toward more-than-human personhood.  Hernández has had the privilege of working as an invited guest on Kānaka Maoli land, and currently works and thinks with desert lands and pollinators in the southern ‘borderlands’ of California and Arizona— primarily in relational collaboration with bees and moths.

 

Feb 28, 2018 | Giving Day

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

ALL DAY – ONLINE

Join SJRC on February 28th for the third annual UC Santa Cruz Giving Day!

Giving Day is a 24-hour online fundraising campaign where we will raise funds for undergraduate researchers.

Your support creates a vibrant future for science and justice researchers. With your help, we can offer summer support for student research, allowing both undergraduate and graduate students interested in questions of science and justice to extend their projects beyond the normal confines of the academic year. This will both bolster their training and research experience and grow SJRC’s ability to make a difference in these crucial social issues of health, science, and justice.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

Visit our Giving Day project campaign to learn more!

Feb 15, 2018 | Can We Build a Trustworthy and Trusted Press: News from The Trust Project

We all think we can tell the difference between opinion, advertising and accurate news. But how do we really know? Join Sally Lehrman in a discussion of this critical question of our times. Lehrman, an award-winning journalist and Visiting Science & Justice Professor, directs  the The Trust Project, a consortium of top news companies that are developing publically-accessible standards for assessing the quality and credibility of journalism. In her presentation, Lehrman will present the Project, and ask for our feedback on how to maximize the impact of the project.

Read all about The Trust Protocol and The Trust Project and its partners (the The Economist, The Globe and Mail, the Independent Journal Review, Mic, Italy’s La Repubblica and La Stampa, and The Washington Post) at the following links:

The Verge: Facebook adds trust indicators to news articles in an effort to identify real journalism

CNN Tech: Facebook, Google, Twitter to fight fake news with ‘trust indicators’

Sally Lehrman is an award-winning reporter and writer specializing in medicine and science policy with an emphasis on genetics, race, and sexuality. Lehrman is director of the journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, leads its signature Trust Project, a complex international collaboration that she began building in 2015 to strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability and transparency. Lehrman has written for some of the most respected names in national print and broadcast media including Scientific American, Nature, Health, Salon.com, and The DNA Files, distributed by NPR.

 

Hosted by the Sociology Department.

Co-Sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Science and Justice Research Center

 

Thursday, February 15, 2018 | 11:40 – 1:15 PM | Rachel Carson College 301

Feb 07, 2018 | Graduate Training Program Informational Meeting

 NOTE: As of Feb 23: the course time has been revised to Tuesday 4:00-7:00pm.

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

Wednesday, February 07, 2018

12:30 – 2:00PM

Graduate Student Commons Room 204 (flyer)

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.

Spring 2018 Course:
Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration
SOCY/BME/FMST 268A & ANTH 267A
Assistant Professor Kristina Lyons (Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Science and Justice)
Time: Tuesday 4:00-7:00pm, Location: Rachel Carson College 301

Students from all disciplines are encouraged to attend
Prior graduate fellows have come from every campus Division.

13 Represented Departments:
Anthropology, Biomolecular Engineering, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Environmental Studies, Film and Digital Arts, Digital Arts and New Media, History of Consciousness, Literature, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, and Sociology

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 your research, mentorship, opportunities for research funding and training in conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and society.

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