October 23, 2024 | SJRC Meet & Greet

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + Zoom Registration

Please join us for a beginning of quarter social hour. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company, we will welcome new members to our community, and welcome back others.

This will be a great chance for everyone to meet and foster emerging collaborations! Attendees are highly encouraged to bring and share their objects of study as it is a fun and helpful way to find intersecting areas of interest. Some previous objects shared have been: soil samples, a piece of the Berlin wall, bamboo, newly launched books, a stick, sugar, human blood, a human liver, and food.

Faculty or students interested in science and justice who want to learn more about SJRC collaborative projects, the Training Program, or would like to affiliate with Science & Justice are highly encouraged to join us in person or over Zoom.

October 22, 2024 | Engaging Digital Democracy: Tools for Addressing Political Dis- and Misinformation

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

7:00-8:30 PM

Online via Zoom or in-person at the UCSC Cultural Center at Merrill (recording)

As part of the UC Santa Cruz U.S. Elections Forum Series events provide a platform for deep conversations about our quickly changing and polarized democracy, and consider how to participate in and help shape our futures. We are questioning: How do power, politics, and the media landscape interact, disrupt, and reinforce one another? Join the conversations with our scholars and national thought leaders to learn more about how to think critically about our political processes and the nature of our democracy. All events are offered online via Zoom, while some have an in-person option. Events are free and open to the public. More information is available on the Institute for Social Transformation’s website.

The series is co-sponsored by: Institute for Social Transformation, Merrill College, The Humanities Institute, Science and Justice Research Center, Politics Department Democratic Discourse and Engagement Initiative, Kresge College, John R. Lewis College, and College Nine.

Engaging Digital Democracy: Tools for Addressing Political Dis- and Misinformation

Learn to decipher credible online information with Sylvanna Falcón from the UCSC Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas who will be in conversation with Sally Lehrman from the Trust Project. Their research helps to address concerns about online information integrity, including fake news, voter suppression, and how to effectively determine useful standards for lawyers, journalists, and the public to participate in judicious and healthy democratic discourse. The Trust Project is an international consortium of news organizations implementing transparency standards and working with technology platforms to affirm and amplify journalism’s commitment to transparency, accuracy, inclusion and fairness so that the public can make informed news choices.

Moderator:

  • Jenny Reardon, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center (UCSC)

Speakers:

  • Sylvanna Falcón, Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies and Founder/Director of UC Santa Cruz’s Human Rights Investigations Lab (UCSC)
  • Sally Lehrman, Chief Executive (The Trust Project)

May 29, 2024 (POSTPONED) | Book Celebration The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

Wednesday, May 29, 2024 – POSTPONED

Join Science & Justice scholars together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and The Black Geographies Lab, in Rachel Carson College Red Room, to celebrate the The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).

About The Black Geographic

The Black Geographic
Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023)

Co-edited by S&J affiliate Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.

The Black Geographic  is available at Duke University Press.

Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne

October 21, 2024 | Book Celebrations: Toxic City & A People’s History of SFO

Monday, October 21, 2024

3:00-5:00 PM

Humanities 1-210

Join the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies to celebrate the release of two important new books by UCSC faculty exploring power, historical development, and environmental justice in the Bay Area: Lindsey Dillon’s Toxic City and Eric Porter’s A People’s History of SFO (both published by University of California Press). The authors will be in conversation with graduate students from the departments of History and Sociology.

A limited number of both books are available for graduate students – please contact kgalinde@ucsc.edu to receive a copy. Books are available for sale via the UC Press website for 30% off using the code UCPSAVE30.

About the Authors and Books

Book Cover for Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco (University of California Press, 2024).

Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco explores the impact of green gentrification in Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. Lindsey examines how revitalization efforts often threaten to displace long-time residents who have fought for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment as a means of reparative justice. She links these struggles to broader issues of environmental racism and the legacy of slavery, arguing for a vision of environmental justice within the context of reparations. Lindsey Dillon is author of Toxic City and a critical human geographer and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

 

 

 

A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport (University of California Press, 2024).A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport examines the history of San Francisco International Airport to uncover a rich narrative of development and power in the Bay Area from the eighteenth century to today. Eric highlights SFO’s pivotal role in the region’s evolution as a hub of commerce, innovation, and influence. By examining the airport’s colonial roots and its impact on trade, social dynamics, and environmental change, Porter reveals how individual actions intersect with larger systems of power. The book concludes by confronting the climate crisis and the challenges it poses to SFO and the surrounding community. Eric Porter is Professor of History and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where he also holds appointments in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Music Departments. His research and teaching interests include Black cultural and intellectual history, US urban and cultural history, and jazz and improvisation studies. Porter is author of A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport (University of California Press, 2024).

 

Hosted by the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES).

Co-Sponsored by the departments of History of Consciousness and Sociology, the Division of Social Sciences, the Institute for Social Transformation, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Tuesday, May 21 (POSTPONED )| Informational Meeting: Developing a Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network

Tuesday, May 21, 2024 (POSTPONED)

Are you interested in centering support for Indigenous peoples’ right to govern health research? The UCSC American Indian Resource Center and the Science & Justice Research Center invite you to attend an Informational Meeting!

ABOUT CIHSN

Supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the leadership teams of the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research and Training Program (Indigenous STS) at the University of Alberta (UofA) and the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) are working to address increasing calls to support Indigenous peoples’ right to govern health research by developing the Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network (CIHSN). CIHSN supports the RWJF’s aligned goal to decolonize health systems. In line with leading Indigenous Studies scholars (and in the University of Alberta Indigenous Strategic Plan), CIHSN defines decolonization as the restoration of Indigenous land, life, and relations appropriated or disrupted by colonialism. While no single project can undo the massive upheavals of colonialism, our project uses decolonial thinking and practice to build and restore Indigenous expertise and leadership in, and governance of, health research.

How to Get Involved in CIHSN

The leadership teams at UofA Indigenous STS and UCSC SJRC are recruiting a graduate student who is interested in strengthening partnerships with the University of Alberta, Edmonton and UCSC, and developing a network for critical Indigenous health studies. Around the theme of problems of the extraction of power, not theorizing colonial violence, topics include but are not limited to: medical genomics, ecological health perspectives (fire, water, food), and Indigenous health systems (botanical knowledge, sport/culture).

The graduate student researcher will: 1) assist in developing and organizing a weeklong visit to the University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada including a Symposium; 2) help implement activities during the visit; 3) assist in developing a literature review on critical Indigenous health research, sovereignty, and governance; 4) and work with the team to produce a final end-of visit report on activities including plans of future in-person gatherings.

Team meetings are conducted remotely. Over the course of the three year grant, research teams will come together in-person at both UofA and UCSC. Students participating in Summer 2024 should be available to be in-person in Edmonton, Canada from August 19-23, 2024. Students participating in Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 should be available to be in-person in Santa Clara, California from February 24-28, 2025. Travel and lodging expenses will be covered.

To apply: review the Call for Graduate Student Researcher.

For more information: visit the project website at https://indigenoussts.com/cihsn/

For questions, contact scijust@ucsc.edu.

CIHSN LEADERSHIP

Jessica Kolopenuk (Cree, Peguis First Nation) is an Assistant Professor and Alberta Health Services Research Chair in Indigenous Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society in the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta.

James Doucet-Battle is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 15, 2024 (POSTPONED) | Walking in the Ecotone with Jim Clifford

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 – POSTPONED

A not to miss opportunity to explore of the UC Santa Cruz Campus, on and off the footpaths with Jim Clifford! We ‘ll wander among the trees, down in the ravines, out in the meadows. Pooling our different knowledges of environmental, social, cultural, technological and architectural history, we will try to disentangle the overlapping layers that constitute a unique environment. Walking in the Ecotone with Jim Clifford will start in front of Humanities 1 at 2.30pm.
 
Jim Clifford is Emeritus Professor in the History of Consciousness Department . Since his retirement he has photographed the campus, co-curated an exhibition about its history https://exhibits.library.ucsc.edu/exhibits/show/an-uncommon-place and published a book of Images and texts, In the Ecotone , that evokes the site’s “poetics of space,” its planning/design history, and its utopian potential (in pdf here: https://people.ucsc.edu/~jcliff/books.html)
Co-sponsored by Geoecologies and Technoscience Conversations, History of Consciousness and the Science and Justice Research Center

May 1, 2024 (cancelled) | TechnoScience Improv

Wednesday, May 01, 2024 – CANCELLED DUE to the STRIKE.

12:15-2:00 PM

Humanities 1, Room 210

Join SJRC scholars in Humanities 1-210 for an improv discussion!

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations, Global and Community Health, and the Science & Justice Research Center

This two-hour roundtable improv (12.15-2.00pm) brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations. Rather than structured around formal talks, each conversation will start with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology. With: Dimitris Papadopoulos (convener), Karen Barad, James Doucet-Battle, Kat Gutierrez, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Jenny Reardon, Warren Sack, Kriti Sharma, Matt Sparke, Zac Zimmer

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.

James Doucet-Battle  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor in the History Department.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Warren Sack is Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.

Kriti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Matt Sparke is Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

April 24, 2024 | Precision Public Health After Covid-19

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room Oakes 231 + Zoom (registration)

Join SJRC scholars in Oakes 231 (or on Zoom) for an open discussion! 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 Martha Kenney (Department Chair, Women & Gender Studies, San Francisco State University) and Laura Mamo (Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health, San Francisco State University) on precision public health after Covid-19.

In the mi-2010s, a new paradigm called precision public health has emerged—part genomics, part informatics, part public health, and part biomedicine, touted as a data-driven public health revolution. This presentation reflects on the promises of precision public health in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, looking at how the “precision imaginary” has shifted when confronted with a global health crisis that exacerbated health inequities worldwide.

Martha Kenney (Ph.D. History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) is a feminist science studies scholar whose research explores the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. Her current project examines and intervenes in the narratives emerging from the new field of environmental epigenetics, which studies how signals from the environment affect gene expression. Specifically, she looks at how assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality influence the design of epigenetic experiments on model organisms and how we understand the relationship between bodies and environments. She has recent and forthcoming articles in Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, Biosocieties and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Dr. Kenney teaches courses on the politics of science, technology, medicine and the environment.

Laura Mamo is the Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health. Her work lies at the intersection of medical sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. Her research and teaching focus on sexuality and its politics in medicine, science, and health discourse, practice, and resistance. Mamo is the author of the forthcoming book, Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Gendered Politics of Cancer Prevention (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007); co-author of Living Green: Communities that Sustain (New Society Press, 2010); and co-editor of Biomedicalization Studies: Technoscience and Transformations of Health, Illness and U.S. Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2010). Mamo is the co-founder of The Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia school-based queer sexuality and gender project with Jessica Fields, Jen Gilbert and Nancy Lesko. Mamo’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others. Mamo earned her PhD in 2002 from UCSF and BA from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She joined the faculty at SFSU as Health Equity Professor of Public Health in 2010 following appointments as Assistant Professor and Associated Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

April 17, 2024 (POSTPONED) | Refiguring Worlds Through Local Voices? Epistemic Vulnerability in a Time of Climate Change in Kerala, India

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 – POSTPONED

Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress, next January 2025! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work! At this session, next year, we will hear from visiting postdoctoral fellow Anna Bridel.

As climate change impacts intensify there are growing calls for alternative life-worlds to be imagined and brought in to being through the inclusion of local voices in environmental policymaking. At the same time, research has shown that platforming local environmental knowledge can often lead to an unexpected continuation of pre-existing relations of knowledge, politics and climate vulnerability. In this work in progress, Bridel will discuss ethnographic fieldwork from Kerala, India, where Cyclone Ockhi led to the death of over 200 fishers in 2017 but local fishing communities have been unable to influence dominant approaches to governing storm risk. In doing so Bridel will seek to develop the concept of ‘epistemic vulnerability’ as interactions between processes of making authoritative knowledge about the environment and vulnerabilization, to understand how fisher needs become silenced. Bridel gratefully welcomes any comments or feedback, especially on this analysis and the utility of epistemic vulnerability as a conceptual device.

Anna Bridel is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

April 10, 2024 | Sensing Landscapes, Hidden violence, and Atmospheres of Control

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

4:00-5:30 PM

Humanities 1, Room 210

Join Science & Justice Affiliate Lindsey Dillon (Sociology), for a roundtable discussion with Visiting Scholar Katherine Chandler and UC Davis faculty guests Caren Kaplan (American Studies) and Javier Arbona (American Studies, Design). We will gather in Humanities 1 Room, 210. Due to the sensitive nature of the discussion, Zoom will not be available.

Katherine Chandler, Caren Kaplan, and Javier Arbona discuss current research, examining how wartime, colonial and police violence seeps into everyday life by studying data, drone aircraft, explosions, airpower and traffic regulations. Their work grounds and situates discussions of the global public sphere and geopolitical control in specific landscapes and relationships, including connections to the Bay Area.

Lindsey Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

Kate Chandler is associate professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research studies how technology and media create infrastructures that reinforce, challenge and transform the nation state and a global public. She is the author of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers, 2023). Her second book, Drone Publics, examines the international networks that promote drone innovation in Africa, asking how the militaristic origins of drone aircraft are refashioned through commercial projects, humanitarianism and development.

Javier Arbona is an Assistant Professor with a dual appointment in American Studies and Design at UC Davis, and affiliations with Graduate Groups in Cultural Studies, Geography, and Community Development. At Davis he coordinates the Critical Military, Security, and Policing Studies research cluster. Explosivity: Following the Remains Across Landscapes is forthcoming (Minnesota, 2025). The book is an experimental archive of racialized exposures to explosive risks as found throughout landscapes of the San Francisco Bay Area since the arrival of nitroglycerin in 1866. Arbona co-founded Demilit, an experimental landscape collective that produces sound, fiction, and critical essays for arts and culture venues.

Caren Kaplan is Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Her recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).