Past Events

Oct 05, 2016 | Cocktail Hour: Meet & Greet

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Please join us for a beginning of quarter cocktail hour. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company over nice food and drink, we will be welcoming new members of our community, and welcoming back others. We will also officially welcome the Center’s recently hired Assistant Director of Research and Academic Programs, Katherine (Kate) Weatherford Darling and the 2016-2017 Science and Justice Fellows!
This will be a great chance for everyone to meet the new faces in the Center and foster emerging collaborations!
Graduate students interested in the Science & Justice Training Program, please visit: Science & Justice Training Program. Faculty interested in supporting the Science & Justice Training Program or for more information on our Broader Impacts Initiative, please read: Broader Impacts.
October 5 | 4:00-5:30 PM | SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Sept 28, 2016 | TJ Demos on Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

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The Center for Emerging Worlds, The Center for Cultural Studies and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences present a book talk with TJ Demos.

HAVC professor and influential art and visual culture historian critic TJ Demos will present from his new book, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.

DEMOS poster

September 28 | 5:30 pm | Humanities 1, RM 210

Oct 22, 2016 | Superfest | International Film Festival

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Oct 22 – 23 | Multiple times and locations

superfest2016 marks 30 years of disability and cinema. Superfest, the world’s longest running disability film festival, celebrates disability as a creative force in cinema and culture. It features films with fresh ideas and images that inspire thought and meaningful conversation.  Times and locations for the 2016 film selections can be found here.

 

Sept 13, 2016 | Blum Center | SEEDS, SOILS and POLITICS: An Anthropology Roundtable

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Blum Seeds and Soils

Twenty anthropologists and ethnographers from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America will discuss new forms of public and private governance over seeds and soils, how these influence farmers engagement, and how do citizens mobilize to regain control over the seeds and soils on which their daily sustenance, their health and well-being depend.

By considering the relationship of farmers with the living things of soil and seeds together with their relationship to different forms of national and international policy-making, anthropologists engage this comprehensive approach to examine how environmental change is co-created through policies and practices. They will share the outcome of their recent discussions in this roundtable.

Contemporary ways of cultivating and agricultural development strategies are framed by the marketplace: typically today such measures are privatized, corporate, and profit driven, and thus they frequently neglect or even devalue local survival strategies among the world’s poorest. Please join in this public panel that will address the ways in which states and corporations govern living objects that shape peoples’ sustenance, determine the survival of mankind, and the quality of life which have fueled the mobilization of citizens worldwide. Anthropologists have started to analyze the discourses and strategies of farmers, foodies and environmentalists who try to shed the status of consumer, stakeholder or expert and reclaim the status of citizens and of food sovereignty instead of food security. How is the issue of citizenship, the right to food, the claim to be protected from fake food and seeds reformulated? How do these notions impact on decision-making, and the notion/perception of economic democracy?

 

Co-sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, UCSC Blum Center, Science and Justice Research Center, and UCSC Dept. of Anthropology.

 

September 13 | 2:00-4:30pm | Louden Nelson Community Center, room 1

Sept 11, 2016 | Paul Edwards

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12PM-1:30PM | Humanities 1, rm 210

Paul N. Edwards (Professor, School of Information and Department of History, University of Michigan) will present ‘Afterworld: Technosphere, Anthropocene, Geostory’. Edwards’ current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, the history of climate science, and other large-scale information infrastructures. Edwards is the author most recently of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010). See more.

Oct 19, 2016 | SFSU Women’s and Gender Studies

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12:35PM-1:50PM SFSU, Humanities 119

On October 19th S&J Assistant Director, Katherine Weatherford Darling, will present on “Chronic Crisis: Managing HIV as a Chronic Condition in Biomedicalized Bureaucracies”. And on November 2nd S&J Faculty Affiliate and Feminist Science Studies Assistant Professor, Kristina Lyons will present on “Evidentiary Ecologies and Variations of Justice: Science & Nature in Times of War and Peace”.

SFSU Lecture Series Poster

May 24, 2016 | Reading Group: Eben Kirksey on Emergent Ecologies

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Tuesday, May 24, 2016 | 4:00-6:00PM | Oakes College Mural Room

In an eEmergent Ecologies - book coverra of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, contemporary writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.

Selected Readings: Emergent Ecologies: Chapters 5 6 7

Eben Kirksey is a permanent faculty member in Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and a Visiting Research Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon and the author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power, both also published by Duke University Press.

May 18, 2016 | Just Data? Justice, Knowledge and Care in an Age of Precision Medicine

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The “Just Data?” meeting at UCSC aims to broaden the public discussion about big data and health from ethical and legal questions about privacy and informed consent to more fundamental questions about the right and just constitution of care, trust, and knowledge in an age of biomedical data. This agenda-setting workshop will gather international leaders in genomics, health and informatics, civil rights, bioethics, indigenous rights, science policy and the social study of health and medicine. The meeting will be broken into two phases: 1) Discussion of critical challenges, problems and promises; 2) Collaborative work to set the science and justice agenda of big biodata and precision medicine.

For full event and registration information, please visit: https://justdataucsc.wordpress.com/

Co-Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the NHGRI program of the NIH, the UC North Bioethics Collaboratory, and the UCSC Genomics Institute.

May 18-19 | Alumni Room, University Center, UC Santa Cruz

May 04, 2016 | A Book Talk with Donna Haraway

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Manifestly Haraway

The Center for Emerging Worlds and the Center for Cultural Studies together with the Science and Justice Research Center will host a conversation with Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe on the recently released Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press).

A reception will follow.

Manifestly Haraway brings together Donna Haraway’s seminal “Cyborg Manifesto” and “Companion Species Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway also includes a wide-ranging conversation between Haraway and Cary Wolfe on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of, among other works, Primate Visions, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, and When Species Meet.

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is also founding director of 3CT (Center for Critical and Cultural Theory). He is the author of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, The Other Emerson (with Branka Arsic), and What Is Posthumanism?

 

Wednesday, May 4, 2016 | 6:00-8:00PM | Humanities 1, room 210

Apr 20, 2016 | Digital Dreams and Their Discontents: Where do we go from here?

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Wednesday, April 20, 2016 | 4:00 – 5:30PM | SJRC Common Room (Oakes 231)

A conversation with Erin McElroy (PhD Candidate, Feminist Studies, UCSC) and Sara Tocchetti (SJRC Visiting Scholar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris, France).

Erin McElroy on the Digital Nomad

With the emergence of Silicon Valley’s “Tech Boom 2.0,” so too has emerged the figure of the “digital nomad”—a type of transient technologic worker tethered to Silicon Valley corporations yet able to embody new mobilities vis-à-vis the globalization of high-speed fiber-optics and sharing economy infrastructure. From San Francisco to new global outposts such as Romania, which boasts the world’s fifth fastest internet speed due to postsocialist technologic economization, the arrival of the digital nomad often incites contexts of gentrification, manifesting as increased rental prices, eviction rates, and forced homelessness/nomadism. Critical of this correlation as well as formative histories of nomadic racial fantasy, I also question what other uses of digital technology, such as that of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, emerge not just to critique technologies of displacement, but also to fight for other futures of the digital?

Erin McElroy is a Doctoral Student in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz and cofounder/director of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a digital cartography and oral history collective documenting the ecology of “Tech Boom” induced gentrification. McElroy brings a spatial analysis and collective ethos to their research, which studies materializations and histories of dispossessive technologies in Romania, employing ethnography, literary/cultural analysis, and archival work, and utilizing postsocialist analytics and feminist science and technology studies. McElroy holds a MA in Cultural Anthropology from CIIS and a BA in Cultural Studies from Hampshire College, and is an active anti-eviction organizer with Eviction Free San Francisco.

Sara Tocchetti on DIYbio and the Possibility of Critical Life Sciences

Drawing from the analogy with the personal computer and other personalized technologies, DIYbio members envision biology and biotechnology as a creative and personal technology to be made available to everyone. Such ideology of a ‘personal biology’ can be understood as a variation of ‘digital utopianism’ and seems especially attractive for young and/or disenfranchised students and researchers. Working through several case studies of DIYbio initiatives and engaging with a general sense of enthusiasm for such practices expressed in the STS literature, this presentation questions what type of critical space does digital utopianism occupies in the life sciences and STS and what forms of alternative practices we might need to recollect and/or imagine.

Sara Tocchetti recently received her PhD from the London School of Economics working on the DIYbio network, socio-technical utopias, theories of technology driven social change, and her own professional identity. Feeling stuck as an ex-biologist-not-yet turned into a science and technology studies scholar, she has moved on to study the history and present of radical science movements and is currently based at the Centre Alexandre Koyré in Paris on an Early Post-doc Scholarship from the Swiss National Fund. Her recent publications includes Is an FBI Agent a DIY Biologist Like Any Other? A Cultural Analysis of a Biosecurity Risk (Tocchetti and Aguiton, 2015) and Quelles tactiques critiques sur le terrain des promesses scientifiques [Which critical tactics in the field of scientific promises] (Aguiton, Bovet and Tocchetti, 2015).