Thursday, May 15, 2025
10:00-11:30 am
Humanities 1, Room 210
Science & Justice colleagues are invited gather on May 15th from 10:00-11:30 am in Humanities 1, Room 210 for a talk with Erin McElroy on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.
Thursday, May 15, 2025
1:00-3:00pm
Humanities 1, Room 210 + Zoom
Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).
Science & Justice colleagues are invited gather on May 15th from 1:00-3:00pm in Humanities 1, Room 210 (or over Zoom) for a talk by Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UC Press, 2025).
The book is available at UC Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/predatory-data/paper
The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes.
Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century’s anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.
While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
5:00-6:30pm
Humanities 1, Room 202
In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy examines how Silicon Valley’s technocapitalist model has expanded globally, focusing on its manifestation in postsocialist Romania. McElroy reveals how this expansion perpetuates gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic inequality both in the San Francisco Bay Area and Romania. The book also highlights Romanian resistance movements that draw on socialist legacies to envision more equitable social alternatives, ultimately arguing that technocapitalism represents an unsustainable model of economic growth.
Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
3:30-5:00pm
Namaste Lounge
Hosted by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department
Friday, May 09, 2025
1:20 – 2:25 pm
J. Baskin Aud 101 (flyer)
On Friday, May 09 at 1:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Associate Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Stephanie Malia Fullerton.
Much biomedical research, including genetic research, relies on easily accessible, individual level data on hundreds or thousands of research participants. As the need for larger and larger sample sizes grows and where prospective data collection is challenging, the norm is for investigators to draw on in silico genomic data derived from previous studies, available open-access or via various controlled-access data sharing mechanisms. One such open-access resource, the Human Genome Diversity Project collection, includes cell lines from 1063 anonymous individuals sampled from 52 populations around the world. The cell lines were developed from specimens collected decades prior to the collection being made available in 2002, and in partial response to controversy about prospective collection in Indigenous and marginalized communities. There is no extant record of what biospecimen donors were told about the ways that their samples would be used and very few of those involved in collecting the original samples are still living. Nevertheless, the cell line collection and extensive genetic data derived from the cell lines, including whole genome sequence information, continue to be widely used in many kinds of human genetic research. While evidence of individual harm is lacking, Dr. Fullerton will argue that ongoing open-access use of data of unclear provenance poses numerous risks for the broader genomics research community.
Malia Fullerton, DPhil, is Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She received a doctorate in Human Population Genetics from the University of Oxford and later re-trained in Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) research with a fellowship from the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute. Dr. Fullerton contributes to a range of empirical projects focused on clinical translational genomics including in collaboration with the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, the Polygenic Risk Methods in Diverse Populations (PRIMED) Consortium, and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC).
Co-hosted by the UCSC Department of Biomolecular Engineering, the Genomics Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.
Friday, May 09, 2025
11:00am-1:00pm
Humanities 1, Room 210 (registration) + Zoom (Registration)
Join Jason Weidemann, Editorial Director at the University of Minnesota Press, for a “bootcamp” workshop, geared toward graduate students, post docs, and early career scholars working on their first books. Together we’ll discuss information on the editorial process – how to talk to editors, revising the dissertation, and proposals.
Time will be left for sharing current works and what presses attendees might look into. Jason’s afternoon itinerary allows for additional one-on-one consultations to practice pitching works, etc. To schedule a time, contact: colleen@ucsc.edu.
Please register in advance.
A Zoom option is also available, please register.
Jason Weidemann, Editorial Director
Jason Weidemann seeks manuscripts that make field-defining interventions in their core disciplines, contribute to interdisciplinary conversations, and communicate to readers beyond the academy, including activists, policymakers, community members, and general readers. His broad interests in Native and indigenous studies includes literary studies, the social sciences, legal studies, and education. He also acquires works in cultural and human geography, science and technology studies, anthropology, and sociology. Special interests include environmental politics, multispecies ethnography, urban studies, global flows of labor and capital, and Asian studies. Of specific interest are manuscripts that examine the social and racial dimensions of medicine and science. Proposals for translations from Japanese are welcomed, specifically science fiction and critical theory. He is also interested in manuscripts on the social aspects of video games and digital communication.
Subject areas: anthropology, Asian studies, media studies, geography, Native and Indigenous studies, sociology, science and technology
Series: Indigenous Americas, Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds, Muslim International
Co-hosted by the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center, the Humanities Institute, and the Division of Graduate Studies.
Thursday, May 08, 2025
6:00 – 7:30 pm
Humanities 1, Room 210 (This month’s meeting has been cancelled).
Join the newly-created Public Research Action Network!
Building on the momentum from the highly successful Stand up for Science UCSC rallies held in March 2025, faculty have formed a group that will meet regularly with the slogan “Stand Up for Science; Stand Up for Knowledge”. The goal is to keep up with the changing landscape regarding publicly-based research across all disciplines. The format is collaborative, with a plan for ~30-45 minutes of sharing some current events and updates, and ~45 minutes of action—oriented outreach plans including possibly letter and op-ed writing, working on communications to the UCSC Academic Senate and/or administrators, connecting with state and federal leaders, or other ideas to be crafted together. Meetings will take place once/month on the 2nd Thursday alternating between main campus and the Coast Science Campus.
Parking at the Coastal Science Campus is available with no permits after 5pm.
Thursday, May 08, 2025
5:00-7:00pm (registration)
Seymour Center, La Feliz Room
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the Professor of Insects and Worms at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Living through the storms of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period, he founded biology, coining the term to name a new science devoted to all and only living things, and authored the first theory of evolution. Lamarck’s science was foundational to modern biology, yet its radicalism – he usurped God’s monopoly on Creation and re-assigned it to mortal, living beings – brought him and his ideas plenty of trouble. During Lamarck’s lifetime, Napoleon and his scientific inner circle hated him and did what they could to undermine him. Charles Darwin then adopted central elements of Lamarck’s theory, but after Darwin’s death, his most influential followers re-interpreted his theory to eradicate all traces of Lamarckism, rendering organisms once again the passive objects of outside forces, allowing room for an omnipotent God working behind the scenes. This conception of living organisms as passive in the evolutionary process has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast, in Lamarck’s theory, living beings were active, creative, self-making and world-making. Elements of this very different conception of living organisms have recently, gradually been returning to mainstream biology in fields such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance. The lecture will present Lamarck’s radical, embattled, and perhaps re-emerging approach to living things, their evolutionary and ecological agency, and the science that studies them.
Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. Her work examines the changing nature of scientific explanation, the relations of science, culture and politics, and the history of theories of life and mind. Her books include The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick\ (2016), which was awarded the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society, and Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), which received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is a regular contributor to various publications including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
Thursday, May 08, 2025
11:40am – 1:15 pm
Rachel Carson College 301 + Zoom (registration)
On Thursday, May 08 at 11:40 am, you are invited to gather in Rachel Carson College 301 or on Zoom for a talk with UC Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellow Shazeda Ahmed on Artificial Intelligence (Re)Invents Itself: AI Safety and the Rise of Epistemic Monoculture.
Co-hosted by the Sociology Department, the Science & Justice Research Center, and the UCSC Data + Ethics Working Group.
Shazeda Ahmed is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program) fellow at UCLA’s Center on Race and Digital Justice. She completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Shazeda has been a research fellow at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute, and NYU’s AI Now Institute.
Shazeda’s research investigates relationships between the state, the firm, and society in the US-China geopolitical rivalry over AI, with implications for information technology policy and human rights. Her work draws from science and technology studies, ranging from her dissertation on the state-firm co-production of China’s social credit system, to her research on the epistemic culture and knowledge production practices in the emerging field of AI safety.
Wednesday, May 07, 2025
3:00-4:30pm
Humanities 1, Room 210
On Wednesday May 7th, join Science & Justice Visiting Scholar Jaco de Swart for a talk, “Dark Matter, Dirty Xenon, and the Limits of Laboratory Experiments.”
Laboratory sciences crucially depend on experiments being clean. But what is clean? In this talk, I open up versions of clean relating to different ontological registers, and trace the material practices of cleaning as they are attuned to experimental specificities. My case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy which is meant to detect dark matter in the form the hypothetical WIMP – the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. This experiment is clean when it is ‘free from signals that mimic dark matter’. In practice, such cleanliness has been difficult to achieve – soaps may be radioactive, steel may spread electronegativity, and humans are altogether dangerously filthy. And because, at least thus far, dark matter remains elusive, it is impossible to tell whether the meticulously cleaned detector is adequately clean. Additional cleaning efforts will make the detector sensitive to neutrino particles: a background that cannot be cleaned away. As the experimenters dread the possibility that this means their experiment will end in limbo, other physicists are now trying to detect other hypothetical dark matter particles with other kinds of experiments, requiring other kinds of cleanliness. The XENONnT experiment itself, meanwhile, has had to ensure that it does not interfere with environmental
This work is done in collaboration with Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam).
Jaco de Swart is an AIP Helleman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Program in STS and Department of Physics, and a visitor at UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center. He received his PhD at the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, and has held visiting positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. His research focuses on historical and anthropological studies of open problems in cosmology and he is currently writing a book on the history of dark matter under contract with MIT Press. De Swart is also a member of several physics collaborations to help develop social and environmental responsible research practices. He has a passion for science communication—appearing in PBS NOVA’s Decoding the Universe—and is bassist in the band X Raiders.