Wednesday, January 15, 2024
4:00-6:00pm
TBD Location (sign-up to bring a dish to share)
SJRC invites you to gather over food and drink and to catch up more with everyone, and to hear from folks where their cares lie at the moment—this moment, with so many challenges—old and new. How do we support each other, inspire each other, create anew out of the rubble of what has been and now is unfolding?
Wednesday, January 23, 2025
4:00-6:00 PM
Rachel Carson College, Red Room
Join Science & Justice scholars together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the Black Geographies Lab, and Sociology Department to celebrate the The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).
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
The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at Seoul National University (https://oia.snu.ac.kr/snu-world-program-swp) is a university-led and government-funded initiative to train undergraduate students to be globally engaged scholars and leaders. The SNU in the World Program with the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at UC Santa Cruz is coordinated through the Science & Justice Research Center’s Visiting Scholar Program with Doogab Yi, Associate Professor of Science Studies at Seoul National University (https://bit.ly/2P9b7Wi). The SNU in the World Program at UC Santa Cruz is one of five other programs selected for funding and focuses on Innovation, Science and Justice. Other SNU Programs include visits to Washington DC (public policy), Japan (sustainable development), and Australia (climate crisis).
From January 27 through February 07, 2025, the SJRC will host Professor Doogab Yi, graduate students and undergraduate students for two weeks.
Select in-person lectures and activities will allow for a few additional guests to join. People will be encouraged to express interest by selecting which activities they are interested in attending by marking any that apply in this Google Form. Refer to the Winter 2025 Schedule and Participant Biographies.
For additional information or to get involved, contact Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu) and Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu).
Doogab Yi currently works on several projects related to the development of science and technology within the context of capitalism, such as the history of biotechnology, the relationship between science and the law, and the emergence of the technologies of the 24/7 self. He teaches courses in the history of modern science, science and the law, and environmental history.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
4:00-6:00pm
Online
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 watch a portion of a new documentary, Give it a Shot, by filmmaker Vaishali Sinha. Madhavi Murty (Associate Professor of Sociology) will provide comments.
Vaishali Sinha produced and directed the award-winning feature documentaries, MADE IN INDIA (PBS, Kanopy) and ASK THE SEXPERT (PBS World, Netflix India, Amazon Prime).
TO BE SCHEDULED
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.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
12:15-2:00
Humanities 1, Room 210
Join Science & Justice scholars for a conversation with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness).
More information TBD.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies.
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
12:15-2:00pm
Humanities 1, Room 210
This roundtable improv 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.
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.
This talk is part of the earth ecologies x technoscience series in co-sponsorship with the History of Consciousness Department.