The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, November 1st, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below after the episode airs.

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast, where we attempt to create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture. Today we are sharing a conversation with Misha Angrist, an associate professor of the Practice in the Social Science Research Institute and Senior fellow in the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, to talk about responses to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lenses of genomics and bioethics, including their strengths and shortcomings.

Guest Bio:

Misha Angrist is Associate Professor of the Practice at SSRI, a Senior Fellow in Science & Society, and Visiting Associate Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy as part of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He directs the undergraduate Science & Society Certificate Program and the First-year FOCUS cluster on Science and the Public. He teaches and mentors students in the MA in Bioethics & Science Policy. He teaches science writing and scholarly writing to both undergraduate and graduate students. In his work, he explores the intersection of biology and society, especially as it relates to the governance of human participation in research and medicine. As the fourth participant in the Personal Genome Project, he was among the first to have his entire genome sequenced and made public. He chronicled this experience in his book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics. Angrist has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, an MS in genetic counseling from the University of Cincinnati, and a PhD in genetics from Case Western Reserve University.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on Sunday, October 25th,

6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below (after the episode airs).

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast, where we attempt to create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture. Today we will be talking with Joan Donovan about state sponsored misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. What role does technology play in spreading or curbing disinformation? How can private media companies be held accountable and what can we as individuals do to respond to misinformation? Stay tuned to the Pandemicene podcast as we search for answers to these questions.

Guest Bio:

Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Dr. Donovan leads The Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC). TaSC explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.

Works Cited in Interview:

Donovan, Joan. “Don’t Panic: Care, Trust, and Mutual Aid During an Infodemic” Webinar. March 27, 2020.

Glaser, April. “Communities rally around one another — and Google Docs — to bring coronavirus aid.” March 20, 2010.

Gray, Mary L. and Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

Pandemicene Podcast Episode 1: Isa Ansari with Kim TallBear and Jessica Kolopenuk

Airing on KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM, on two Sundays, October 11th and 18th, 6:30 – 7 pm PST.

Link to the live stream, or listen below.

Welcome to the Pandemicene podcast! Today we welcome you to a conversation with Kim TallBear and Jessica Kolopenuk, two Indigenous scholars at the University of Alberta, Canada. We talk about their Indigenous STS research training program, their upcoming open access class on Indigenous peoples and pandemics, what a “productive embrace of crisis” looks like, and how understanding our relations as kin on earth might help us learn how to live better together on stolen land. 

Guest Bios:

Kim TallBear and Jessica Kolopenuk are both scholars in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. They are the co-founders and principal investigators of Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (STS), a research training program based out of the University of Alberta that seeks to “promote Indigenous self-determination” by supporting Indigenous led techno-scientific innovation and ways of inquiring and producing knowledge that supports Native people and their communities (https://indigenoussts.com/). 

Works Cited in Interview:

TallBear, Kim. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019. doi: https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v6i1.228

Innes, Robert Alexander. Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation. University of Manitoba Press, 2013.

Additional Pandemicene Project Information

Find more information on the COVID-19 Pandemicene’s project page.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

How do we create knowledge that orients us towards justice at this critical historical juncture, in the middle of a viral pandemic, and a pandemic of social inequality and racial discrimination that has sparked global unrest? The Pandemicene Project begins from the premise that creating trust-worthy knowledge that can foster a more just world requires attending to both COVID-19 pandemic and the deep inequalities and fissures in the polity that this pandemic has laid bare. It also requires attending both to what is going on locally (e.g., from the shelter-in-place locations of our students), while drawing on the power and insights of global networks. In this project, UCSC faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduates students have worked together to interview members of their communities and the Science & Justice network about scholarly and activist responses to this critical historical moment.  The project has produced a podcast series for our local radio station (KZSC 88.1 FM), and expanded the blog series on the SJRC website. Ultimately, through engaging our communities—both locally and globally—we aim to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.

The SJRC has a robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners leading the way with collecting resources for teaching about COVID-19, writing open response letters, developing news items, and calls to action, and organizing and participating in online events.

The SJRC will focus current research projects on the following emerging areas in the context of COVID-19:

• Re-Worlding: Living and Learning Alone Together in the Pandemicene
• Community, Civil Society and Social Justice Responses to COVID-19
• Just Biomedicine in an Age of COVID-19:  How Can Researchers (Public Health, Genomics, Virologists, Bioethicists) Collaborate in New Ways?
• The Challenges of Knowing and Responding in the Age of No Data and Mis-information
• The Crisis of Public Health in Infrastructures of Care and Incarceration

Read more on these developing areas of concern in the campus news article, “Discrimination, governance, and trust in the age of COVID-19”, featuring SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon; in the special issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers featuring S&J Advisor and Politics Professor Matt Sparke’s article, “Contextualizing Coronavirus Geographically,” provides additional articles and perspectives on the pandemic; and in the Daily Beast Interview, featuring James Doucet-Battle, assistant professor of sociology and interim director of SJRC on the glaring race problems COVID-19 vaccine trials have.

If you would like to take part in or contribute to this project, email Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) and/or Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).

Faculty

Jenny Reardon (Sociology)

Graduate Researchers

Dennis Browe (Sociology)

Paloma Medina (Biomolecular Engineering)

Dorothy Santos (Film & Digital Media)

Lucia Vitale (Politics)

Undergraduate Researchers

Kathia Damian (Literature, Talk and News Director KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM)

Gina Barba (Community Studies)

Isa Ansari (Sociology)

Maryam Nazir (Philosophy)

Teresa (Tee) Wicks