Past Events

February 21, 2023 | “Why Is Publishing So White?” An Evening with Richard Jean So

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Tuesday, February 21, 2023

5:00-6:30 PM

Humanities 1, 210

On Tuesday, February 21 at 5:00pm, Kresge’s Media & Society Series speaker, Richard Jean So, will present on “Why is Publishing so White?” (RJS flier PDF)

More on Kresge’s Media & Society Series can be found on the series website.

Richard Jean So is associate professor of English and Digital Humanities at McGill University. He uses computational and data-driven methods to study contemporary culture, from the novel to Netflix to social media. He has published academic articles in PMLA and Critical Inquiry and public-facing pieces in The New York Times and Atlantic. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP, 2021) and he is currently working on Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Race and Writing in the Digital Age.

Co-sponsored by Computational Media, Literature, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Science & Justice Research Center, and the Center for Cultural Studies.

January 27, 2023 | Sawyer Seminar: Kaushik Sunder Rajan on Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research

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Friday, January 27, 2023

12:15 pm – 1:30 pm

Humanities 1, 210

 

Wednesday, February 01, 2023

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Humanities 1, 210

SAVE-the-DATEs! On Friday, January 27 at 12:15pm, we will host a reading group with Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, in Humanities 1, 210. Then, on Wednesday, February 1, Rajan will present a talk titled, “Ethnographic Trans-formations: Cases, Life Histories, and Other Entanglements of Emergent Research,” at 4:00pm.

This talk is the presentation of an emergent research trajectory. Drawing upon an imaginary of “multisituated” research design and practice, I elaborate the (often contingent and serendipitous) development of my recent work in South Africa, which includes a research project on health and constitutionalism and a teaching- and performance-based collaboration on the politics of breath. I am still wrestling with how to structure both, how they come together and diverge, their different conceptual modalities and political stakes. This includes a consideration of the stakes of legal archival research and life-history interviews in the context of contemporary and emergent research and political situations, as well as of thinking questions of ethnographic form in concert with others who are invested in considerations of literary or musical form. How to think about transformations of research practice in the context of unsettled and unresolved macro-political transformations in uncertain and fragile times? Why might it matter?

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at University of Chicago.

The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.

Canceled – November 28, 2022 | Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

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Monday, November 28, 2022 – CANCELED DUE to the STRIKE.

2:00-4:00 PM

Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom

On November 28th 2022, you are invited to a book launch celebration for Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne’s new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Hawthorne will be in conversation with Savannah Shange (Anthropology) and Steve McKay (Sociology).

Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. In Contesting Race and Citizenship, I focus on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. This book opens discussions of the so-called migrant “crisis” by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. I trace not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.

The open-access ebook version can be downloaded at: https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9781501762307.pdf

Learn more in the campus news article: New book explores citizenship rights and Black anti-racist politics in Italy

Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of the 2021 volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and author of  Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 “Women of the Year” for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy, and she was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Society Humanities Award in 2021.

Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, History of Art and Visual Culture, Sociology, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Canceled – November 17, 2022 | Book Launch! Unsettled Borders: Militarized Border Technologies and Indigenous Sacred Science

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Thursday, November 17, 2022 – CANCELED DUE to the STRIKE.

3:00 PM

Humanities 1, room 210 + Zoom

On November 17th, join the book launch celebration for Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2022) by SJRC faculty affiliate Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Shaeffer will be in conversation with Jennifer Gonzalez (History of Art and Visual Culture) and Kat Gutierrez (History).

In Unsettled Borders, Prof. Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of the Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land, tracing the scientific and technological development of militarized border surveillance across time and space: from Spanish colonial lookout points in Arizona and Mexico; to the Indian wars when the US cavalry hired Native scouts to track Apache fleeing into Mexico; to the occupation of the Tohono O’odham reservation; and the recent launch of robotic bee swarms. Labeled “Optics Valley,” Arizona builds on a global history of violent dispossession and containment of Native peoples and migrants by branding itself as a profitable hub for surveillance. Schaeffer reverses the logic of borders by turning to indigenous sacred sciences and ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.

Learn more in this campus news article: New book traces the scientific and technological development of militarized border.

The book is available at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/unsettled-borders.

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of the Feminist Studies Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department as well as an Affiliate Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies. Her first book, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas (New York University Press, 2013), follows Internet-mediated marriages across the United States, Colombia, and Mexico alongside neo-colonial fantasies of racial and gendered difference across borders. Her second book, Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2021) re-maps the virtual border war alongside the ongoing settler colonial war with Indigenous peoples. She was also one of the editors of the Anthology, Precarity & Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers 2021) and has published articles in a variety of international journals in Mexico, France, and Brazil, and U.S. journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; American Quarterly; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Sexualities Journal.

Co-Sponsored by the Feminist Studies Department and the Science & Justice Research Center.

November 2-7, 2022 | Sawyer Seminar: Alberto Ortiz-Diaz

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Wednesday, November 02, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM 

Zoom only (Registrations: 11/02 Presentation, 11/07 Reading Group)

On Wednesday, November 02 at 4:00pm, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Alberto Ortiz-Diaz, will present online over Zoom (register). Then, on Monday, November 07, we will host a reading group at 4:00pm over Zoom (register).

More on the seminar can be found in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the project website.

“Carceral Care: Health Professionals and the Living Dead in Colonial Puerto Rico’s Sanitary City, 1920s-1940s”

Using an array of primary sources, this talk explores the early history of the Río Piedras sanitary city or medical corridor, a transnationally and imperially inspired built environment and complex of welfare institutions (a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum, and a penitentiary) constructed and consolidated on the margins of San Juan by Puerto Rico’s colonial-populist state between the 1920s and 40s. Within and across these institutional spaces, health professionals contributed to the production of medicalized scientific knowledge and cared for and socially regulated racialized, pathologized Puerto Ricans. Penitentiary “living dead” (incarcerated people), in particular, were subjected to research and received treatment, but also provided health labor that put them at risk while powering the sanitary city and nurturing its inhabitants. Crucially, however, some prisoners managed to exploit the unthinkable openness of the complex, revealing in the process that the living dead could only be buried alive for so long.

Alberto Ortiz Díaz is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, Arlington, and currently a Larson Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress. His first book, Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in March 2023.

November 02, 2022 | Giving Day

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Wednesday, November 2, 2022

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022 for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help support the next cohort of Science & Justice student researchers by giving through one of the two below Science & Justice campaigns.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 2nd.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

Help support the next cohort of Science & Justice student researchers by giving through our Science & Justice campaigns. Your donation goes directly to supporting students and providing opportunities for them to gain valuable professional development experiences working with scholars, researchers, mentors and community members on meaningful projects.

ABOUT the SJRC

Scientific and technological discoveries increasingly shape societies, which today are simultaneously being roiled by rising inequality and injustice. The Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz opens doors for dialogue across disciplines to address the resulting challenge of creating science and technology that serves a more diverse range of lives in the midst of these inequities. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists, and artists all come together in SJRC projects to actively and urgently seek a way forward. We learn to work effectively with one another in order to create positive social change within the context of scientific and technological discovery.

Our mission is distinctive. The center’s broad systemic emphasis goes well beyond conventional bioethics and consent. We’re reimagining how justice perspectives can reshape all aspects of the scientific enterprise—from funding and agenda setting, to relationships with the corporate sector, to reward structures and scientific hierarchies to the ways in which we respond to crisis and critique.

Visit and share SJRC’s campaign page

ABOUT SJRC’s LEED Initiative

Through our Leadership in the Ethical and Equitable Design (LEED) of STEM Research initiative, it is our hope to facilitate the creation of a cross-sector, cross-national effort to reformulate the meaning of good science in a manner that creates sustained organizational culture and policy changes that advance equity and justice.

The project proceeds in three phases: background research; drafting of LEED Principles and Practices; and International Discussion and Write-Up of LEED Principles and Practices. Help us realize support a graduate student work with us and to realize LEED Principles and Practices!

Visit and share the LEED campaign page

Why Support S&J

As a Hispanic-Serving Research Institution, we’re engaging with an increasing number of young underrepresented scientists and engineers eager to integrate social justice challenges into their work.

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on Science & Justice projects during the academic and summer terms. With your help, we can offer fellowships that support this critical dimension of the training of future leaders in the emerging field of Science and Justice.

With your support we can also:

  • Support students in integrating social justice perspectives into scientific inquiry as they gain experience in critical cross-disciplinary collaborative projects and take these experiences into their professional lives.
  • Bring scientists, activists, and other thought leaders to UC Santa Cruz to expand the range of research projects, teach and work with students, and enrich campus discussion.
  • Support projects that connect community groups and agencies with the sophisticated science and data analytics capabilities of UCSC faculty and students, integrating a wider range of social perspectives into research models to address urgent local and national issues.

Share our Campaigns for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 2.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

October 26, 2022 | Works-in-Progress: Locating the Cloud

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + 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 Science & Justice Training Program Fellows Carrie Hamilton (Environmental Studies) and Kellie Petersen (Sociology) who are undertaking research on the system of servers and associated technologies that underpin the global shared network of computers, computing power, and data storage, commonly referred to as “the Cloud” or cloud computing. They are interested in exploring how the material dimensions of the Cloud–and the sense of amorphousness that it conjures–exacerbate social and environmental injustices by investigating the physical infrastructures, natural resources, and human labor that underpin large data centers.

Carrie Hamilton is a PhD student in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her work draws on political ecology and critical resource geographies to examine the social and environmental dilemmas posed by the expanding U.S. energy transition mineral frontier. Prior to coming to UCSC, she worked as a program associate at the Social Science Research Council, the administrative coordinator of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, and a research technician at the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience at Duke University. She earned her bachelor’s in environmental science and geography from UNC Chapel Hill.

Kellie Petersen (she/her) is a PhD student in the Sociology department. Her research interests broadly concern future-focused themes such as climate change and the Anthropocene, technology, and urbanization. She has a BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Northern Iowa and an MA in Sociology from the University of South Florida.

October 19, 2022 | Sawyer Seminar Inauguration: Tahir Amin on Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health

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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

12:15-1:30 PM 

Humanities 1, Room 210 (in person only)

On Tuesday, October 18, the Inaugural Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Tahir Amin, will present at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center (320 Cedar St) in downtown Santa Cruz (tickets, map) on Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines. Then, on Wednesday, October 19, the Center for Cultural Studies will host Amin from 12:15-1:30pm in Humanities 1, room 210 on Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health.

More on the seminar can be found in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the project website.

Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health

With billions of people in low-income countries still without Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, this pandemic has exposed the neo-colonial structures of the political economy of intellectual property system and the World Trade Organization (WTO). This talk will delve into an often overlooked history of  how the WTO TRIPS Agreement came into existence and the impact it has had on the global South over the 27 years it has been in force – and how it will impact future pandemic preparedness and climate change.

Tahir Amin, LL.B., Dip. LP., is a founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organisation working to address structural inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. He has over 25 years of experience in intellectual property (IP) law, during which he has practised with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work focuses on re-shaping IP laws and the related global political economy to better serve the public interest, by changing the structural power dynamics that allow health and economic inequities to persist.

Amin and I-MAK have also put out a 10 point plan for the Biden-Harris administration to bring equity into the patent system, and their work is highlighted in the New York Times Editorial Board’s recent endorsement of patent reform. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and TED Fellow. Amin has served as legal advisor/consultant to many international groups, including the European Patent Office and World Health Organization, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on intellectual property and unsustainable drug price.

November 09, 2022 | Monica Barra on Alternative Restorations

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Wednesday, November 09, 2022

4:00-5:30 PM

Earth & Marine Sciences A340 or Zoom Registration

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion with Monica Barra on alternative restorations. Special thanks to S&J affiliate faculty Tamara Pico (Earth & Planetary Sciences) for hosting.

Environmental restoration is typically understood as a means of returning a damaged ecosystem to a previously healthy, sustainable state. Yet the extent to which we consider restoration as an ecological and socio-cultural process connected to human politics and desires is largely underexplored across disciplines. Drawing from ethnographic research among scientists and frontline communities of color confronting large scale wetlands restoration in coastal Louisiana, this work-in-progress seminar explores ways of thinking about restoration as an ongoing process of reparation and repair that centers the needs and desires of Black and Indigenous coastal communities. Grounded in Black feminist science studies, Indigenous ecologies, and critical geographies of restoration, it asks: What does it mean to approach ecological restoration as a practice tied to cultivating self-determination for frontline communities? How can science and the restoration of natural geologic processes become an ally—as opposed to an obstacle—in securing the empowerment for these groups? What can we learn about the meaning of restoration from Black and Indigneous ecological practices?

Monica Patrice Barra is a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary background in the social sciences and humanities. Broadly, her work examines the relationship between race, inequality, and environmental change in the United States. Her first book, Good Sediment: Race, Science, and the Politics of Coastal Restoration examines the relationship between racial histories, science, and environmental change from the perspectives of Black coastal communities and scientists confronting Louisiana’s unprecedented wetland loss crisis. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of the Earth, Ocean & Environment at the University of South Carolina.

October 18, 2022 | Sawyer Seminar Inauguration: Tahir Amin on Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022

7:00-8:30 PM (tickets)

Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St, Santa Cruz (map)

On Tuesday, October 18, the Inaugural Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Tahir Amin, will present at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center (320 Cedar St) in downtown Santa Cruz on Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines. Then, on Wednesday, October 19, the Center for Cultural Studies will host an in person reading group from 12:15-1:30pm in Humanities 1, room 210 on Technological Colonialism: The Political Economy of Innovation and Global Health.

More on the seminar can be found in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the project website.

Intellectual Property Wars: The Battle for Access to Medicines

The globalization of intellectual property in the 80s has coincided with some of the deadliest pandemics, epidemics and outbreaks, from HIV, hepatitis C, SARS, and recently COVID -19. Tahir Amin will take us through his and his organization’s journey over two decades fighting the ever growing intellectual property systems being pushed by the US, EU and their pharmaceutical companies that are blocking affordable access to medicines for billions of low income populations around the world.

Tahir Amin, LL.B., Dip. LP., is a founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organisation working to address structural inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. He has over 25 years of experience in intellectual property (IP) law, during which he has practised with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work focuses on re-shaping IP laws and the related global political economy to better serve the public interest, by changing the structural power dynamics that allow health and economic inequities to persist.

Amin and I-MAK have also put out a 10 point plan for the Biden-Harris administration to bring equity into the patent system, and their work is highlighted in the New York Times Editorial Board’s recent endorsement of patent reform. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and TED Fellow. Amin has served as legal advisor/consultant to many international groups, including the European Patent Office and World Health Organization, and has testified before the U.S. Congress on intellectual property and unsustainable drug price.