Past Events

April 05, 2017 | Post Conflict Battlefield Landscape Recovery – or Not?

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Wednesday, April 5, 2017
4:00-6:00 PMLIDAR Digital Elevation Model of Fort Douamont and Surrounding Landscape
Engineering 2, room 599

 

The multiple forms of disturbances rendered by conflict upon landscapes around the world demonstrate that this anthropogenic agent is an incredible force that is capable of exerting an influence on the environment in a wide variety of ways, yet the bridge between geomorphology and environmental histories of battlefields is rarely made. This research associated with this presentation examines two case study battlefields, and how post-conflict land-use patterns are tied into what we see on the contemporary landscape of today. Also emphasized in the presentation are how various geospatial data collection tools and methods can be utilized with geospatial software to model the changes rendered to landscapes due to conflict, and to link these disturbances with modern land-use patterns.

Joe Hupy (Associate Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire)
Joseph Hupy earned his PhD in geography from Michigan State University using soils as a proxy indicator for landscape stability following disturbances rendered by explosive munitions in World War One. Out of that research he coined the term ‘bombturbation’, which describes how soils are disturbed from explosive munitions, one of many forms of anthropogeomorphology where humans shape the landscape. The research surrounding World War One bombturbation led towards examination of other battlefields around the world, including research forays on the Viet Nam battlefield of Khe Sanh in 2007 and 2009. Research on all these battlefields relied upon a myriad of geospatial equipment and Geographic Information System modeling techniques. Out of that research and most recently, Joe has begun to use Unmanned Aerial Systems as a tool to gather data, and hopes to revisit other world battlefields in collaboration with other researchers in different disciplines using this technology as a tool.

In discussion with Science & Justice Graduate Fellow Jeff Sherman (Politics).
Co-Sponsored by the Anthropology department and the Center for Creative Ecologies.

April 04, 2017 | Telling the Truth: Objectivity and Justice

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Illustration of the world meltingTuesday April 4, 2017
4:00-6:00 PM
SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

The terms “post-fact”, “post-truth”, and “post-reality” are now being used to label the new era we have entered. We are already seeing the erasure of climate data from servers and websites, and purveyors of the truth, including climate scientists, journalists, and academics are being put on warning. (The Climate Scientists witch-hunt and the Professor Watchlist are just two of many indicators). Data refuge efforts are underway amid concerns that the incoming administration will wage a war on scientific expertise.At the same time that it is of upmost importance that facts, truth, and reality be asserted to counter the normalization of lies and fake news used to obscure the truth and manipulate the public, there is a large body of scholarship showing the non-innocent and often times harmful use of these terms in ways that collude with the forces of power, including colonialism, racism, militarism, etc.

We have created this research cluster to help us think through these issues during these extraordinary times.

Convened by Karen Barad, our first three meetings on Objectivity & Justice proved to be a generative. During our first meeting we talked about what the terms ‘fact’, ‘truth’, and ‘reality’ signal to each of us. At our second meeting we had a wonderful discussion of the last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and we came up with some different approaches we might useful take in moving forward. For our third meeting we read and discussed Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. For our fourth meeting we have agreed to watch the film classic “Inherit the Wind,” and to continue our discussion of possible interventions.

Science & Justice invites you to our fourth meeting Tuesday April 4th 4-6pm. We will begin with a discussion of “Inherit the Wind” (available on Youtube). Even if you don’t have time to watch the film you are welcome to join us. And as always there will be snacks!

March 01, 2017 | Telling the Truth: Objectivity and Justice

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Illustration of the world melting4:00-6:00 PM
SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

The terms “post-fact”, “post-truth”, and “post-reality” are now being used to label the new era we have entered. We are already seeing the erasure of climate data from servers and websites, and purveyors of the truth, including climate scientists, journalists, and academics are being put on warning. (The Climate Scientists witch-hunt and the Professor Watchlist are just two of many indicators). Data refuge efforts are underway amid concerns that the incoming administration will wage a war on scientific expertise.

At the same time that it is of upmost importance that facts, truth, and reality be asserted to counter the normalization of lies and fake news used to obscure the truth and manipulate the public, there is a large body of scholarship showing the non-innocent and often times harmful use of these terms in ways that collude with the forces of power, including colonialism, racism, militarism, etc.

We are creating this cluster to help us think through these issues during these extraordinary times.

Convened by Karen Barad, our first two meetings on Objectivity & Justice proved to be generative. During our first meeting we talked about what the terms ‘fact’, ‘truth’, and ‘reality’ signal to each of us. At our second meeting we had a wonderful discussion of the last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and we came up with some different approaches we might useful take in moving forward. Science & Justice invites you to our third meeting Wednesday March 1st 4-6pm. We will begin with a discussion of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Even if you don’t have time to do the reading you are welcome to join us.

Here is a pdf of the novel, which is also available for less than a dollar on Kindle.

Feb 22, 2017 | Rick Prelinger, “Silence, Cacophony, Crosstalk: Archival Talking Points”

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The Center for Cultural Studies hosts Rick Prelinger, an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC, as well as Founder of the Prelinger Archives and a board member at the Internet Archive.

Prelinger currently researches the political economy and aesthetics of archives. He produces live urban history film events made for participatory audiences and is in the early stages of a film counterposing the lived experience of city dwellers as shown in home movies with the pronouncements of urban theorists and historians.

More event information.

February 22, 2017 | 12:00 -1:00 PM | Humanities Building 1, Room 210

Feb 17/18, 2017 | Democratizing the Green City: Sustainability and the Affordable Housing Crisis

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democratizing-green-city

This two day conference examines a paradox: urban sustainability initiatives that are so vital in countering climate change can, through their improvements, contribute to driving up rents and driving out residents, and in the process, exacerbate sprawl, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change itself. Our speakers examine this growing link between environmental improvement and social displacement and ask: How is it possible to break this link? What would it mean to include affordable housing and equity within sustainability efforts? And what are the consequences—socially and ecologically—if we don’t?

 

February 17, 2017 5:00pm-7pm | Digital Arts Research Center 108
February 18, 2017 9:30am-6pm | Red Room, Rachel Carson College

We begin with a focus on the housing crisis that is transforming our own state and region. Renowned for greening and sustainability initiatives—from transit-oriented development to locavore food sheds to green building—California is also home to the most unaffordable housing markets in the country, including Santa Cruz. Thus greening interacts with gentrification and increased consumption, declining diversity and rising inequality, displacement and longer commutes, and multiple environmental health and ecosystem impacts, including habitat fragmentation, loss of groundwater, and increased carbon footprints. Our region, however, is not alone. We bring together a new generation of scholars, planners, and activists addressing ‘the housing question’ and green affordability crises across the Americas —in Mexico City and New York, Seattle and Medellin, Sao Paulo and Oakland— as well as emerging strategies for democratizing the green city.

For more information on the schedule, locations and registrations visit: https://democratizing-the-green-city.sites.ucsc.edu/

Organizers: Miriam Greenberg and Hillary Angelo, UCSC Sociology, Urban Democracy Lab/Democratizing the Green City NYC (NYU), Critical Sustainabilities Project (UCSC)

Sponsors: Urban Democracy Lab, The UCSC Sustainability Office, Rachel Carson College, UCSC Sociology Department, The Science and Justice Research Center

April 20, 2017 | Data Under Threat: Rescuing Environmental Data in the Trump Era

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Thursday, April 20, Noon-1pm
2nd Floor Instruction & Outreach Alcove
McHenry Library

In recognition of Endangered Data Week, Dr. Lindsey Dillon will discuss her recent experience as a coordinator of a network of academics and non-profits monitoring potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy data at the onset of the Trump administration.

Discussion will follow the presentation. Bring your lunch, questions, observations and experiences. Learn about data rescue efforts such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), the End of Term Web Archive, #DataRescue, DataRefuge, DataLumos, and Open Access Week.

Dr. Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSC where she is affiliated with the Environmental Studies Department and the Science & Justice Research Center. She is also chair of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), “an international network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce.”

Endangered Data Week (April 17-21, 2017) is a new, nationwide effort to raise awareness of threats to publicly available data.

April 25, 2017 | Online Film Screening: The State of Eugenics

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Tuesday, April 25 at 3:30 PST
What is the legacy of government sponsored eugenics programs? Learn more and join the discussion following a special screening of THE STATE OF EUGENICS on Tuesday, April 25 at 3:30pm PT presented by Facing History and Ourselves and Reel South.

Between 1933 and 1974, the state of North Carolina ran one of the most aggressive eugenics programs, sterilizing more than 7,600 men, women and children. This film follows the journey of survivors, legislators and journalists who insist the state confront its role in the tragic, forced sterilization of thousands of Americans thought to have “undesirable” genetics.

Duration: 90 minutes

More details are at http://bit.ly/tsoe2017
Promotional Video: https://vimeo.com/195666167
RSVP: http://bit.ly/tsoe2017

Further Reading:

2017 Los Angeles Times Editorial: California needs to do more than apologize to people it sterilized

2016 PBS: Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States

2014 Center for Investigative Reporting: Female prison inmates sterilized illegally, California audit confirms

2014 Press Enterprise: Female inmates, some in Chino, unlawfully sterilized

2014 California State AUDIT: Sterilization of Female Inmates Some Inmates Were Sterilized Unlawfully, and Safeguards Designed to Limit Occurrences of the Procedure Failed

2013 Center for Investigative Reporting: Female inmates sterilized in California prisons without approval

2013 Center for Investigative Reporting Video: Sterilized Behind Bars

 

Feb 07, 2017 | TELLING THE TRUTH: OBJECTIVITY & JUSTICE

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Illustration of the world meltingFeb 7 | 4:00-6:00 PM | SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

 

The terms “post-fact”, “post-truth”, and “post-reality” are now being used to label the new era we have entered. We are already seeing the erasure of climate data from servers and websites, and purveyors of the truth, including climate scientists, journalists, and academics are being put on warning. (The Climate Scientists witch-hunt and the Professor Watchlist are just two of many indicators). Data refuge efforts are underway amid concerns that the incoming administration will wage a war on scientific expertise.

At the same time that it is of upmost importance that facts, truth, and reality be asserted to counter the normalization of lies and fake news used to obscure the truth and manipulate the public, there is a large body of scholarship showing the non-innocent and often times harmful use of these terms in ways that collude with the forces of power, including colonialism, racism, militarism, etc.

We are creating this cluster to help us think through these issues during these extraordinary times.

Convened by Karen Barad, our first meeting on Objectivity & Justice provided to be a generative conversation on what the terms ‘fact’, ‘truth’, and ‘reality’ signal to each of us in relations to our own research. Science & Justice invites you to our second meeting Tuesday Feb 7th 4-6pm. Our second meeting will be dedicated forming different task groups while continuing to work together as a research cluster. Come get involved and come learn more about the structuring of our cluster at our meeting. We will begin with a discussion of Ch.13 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (pp. 460-479). Even if you don’t have time to do the reading you are welcome to join us.

Food provided. Please join us.

 

Feb 01, 2017 | Cleo Woelfle-Erskine on Fish Culture

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4:00-5:30 PM | SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Science & Justice visiting scholar Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Feminist Studies Department will present new work on fish culture – considered broadly as human interventions into fish reproduction – as practiced in indigenous and settler communities in California and the Pacific Northwest. Beginning from archival photographs and texts from the first US salmon hatchery on Winnemem Wintu territory near Mt. Shasta, he traces indigenous roots of western fisheries science and explores how different ethics of human-salmon relation persist in contemporary tribal and settler salmon science.

Fish hatcheries became a central part of western river engineering during the 20th century, based on fisheries scientists’ belief that they could improve on natural fish production by intervening in fishes’ reproductive lives and genetic makeup. Hatcheries were one manifestation of Manifest Destiny, the settler philosophies that asserted settler logics’ and technologies’ superiority over indigenous philosophies and sciences. Eventually, salmon ecologists questioned hatcheries’ efficacy as salmon populations crashed. Yet hatcheries continue to be a powerful site of encounter between scientists, fish technicians, fishers, and the public, where relations between fish, people, and rivers are made and remade. In conversations with key interlocutors in indigenous, queer, transgender, settler colonial, and critical animal studies, Cleo explored three inter-related questions:

  1. How has ecological science been brought inside indigenous ontologies, and transformed through tribal science and fisheries management in the Pacific Northwest?
  2. Where are indigenous theories of relation transforming (non-indigenous) ecological science?
  3. How might queer notions of kinship and more-than-human affective entanglements provide a different challenge to normative logics of control and productivity in contemporary settler salmon recovery projects?

Woelfle-Erskine is an ecologist, hydrologist, writer, and scholar of water, working with mentor Karen Barad to explore queer, transgender, and decolonial possibilities for ecological science. Cleo will join the faculty of the School of Marie and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle as an Assistant Professor of Equity and Environmental Justice.

Jan 25, 2017 | Against Purity

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Wednesday, January 25, 2017
4:00-6:00 PM
Engineering 2, Room 599

Science and Justice Visiting Scholar and UCSC alum Alexis Shotwell, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, will be in conversation with Jess Neasbitt (History of Consciousness, UCSC) about politics, movements and ethics in her new book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Against Purity proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems.