May 22, 2023 | Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

Monday, May 22, 2023

1:00 – 3:00pm

Humanities 1, 210 +  Zoom (Registration)

Book Cover for Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Celebrate the launch of Associate Professor of Sociology Camilla Hawthorne’s new book, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)! Contesting Race and Citizenship explores the politics of Blackness and citizenship in Italy. It examines the ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency. The book represents one of the first ever in-depth studies of Black Italian political mobilizations in Italy. Associate Professor Marisol LeBrón (feminist studies) will provide a welcome, Graduate Student Theresa Hice-Fromille (sociology) will provide introductions, and Associate Professors Debbie Gould (sociology) and Savannah Shange (anthropology) will serve as discussants.

More information can be found at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501762291/contesting-race-and-citizenship/.

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

Camilla Hawthorne (she/they) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center, the Legal Studies Program, and the new Visualizing Abolition Certificate Program, and co-founded the UCSC Black Geographies Lab. Camilla also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the volumes The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Co-Sponsored by the departments of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, the History of Art of Visual Cultures’ Visual Media Cultures Colloquium series, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

May 03, 2023 | Book Launch! Unsettled Borders: Militarized Border Technologies and Indigenous Sacred Science

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

4:00-5:30pm

Humanities 1, 210

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2022)

You are invited to celebrate the launch of 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 and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

We will gather on Wednesday, May 3rd at 4:00pm in Humanities 1, room 210. Kathleen Gutierrez (Assistant Professor of History) and Jennifer Gonzalez (Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture) will serve as discussants.

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

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.

April 05, 2023 | BME80G Series: Joseph Graves on “Racism, Not Race: Answers to the most critical questions”

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

5:20 – 7:00 pm 

Zoom (registration)

Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions by Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman (Columbia University Press, 2023)

On Wednesday, April 05 at 5:20 pm, you are invited to join S&J affiliate and Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga’s BME 80G Bioethics course for a talk by Dr. Joseph Graves on “Racism, Not Race: Answers to the most critical questions” – a panel discussion will follow.

Order a copy of Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions!

In advance of Grave’s lecture, the UCSC Genomics Institute’s Racial Justice Learning and Action Group will read Grave’s most recent book, Racism Not Race, Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Anyone affiliated with UC Santa Cruz is welcome to attend. Click here to add the first meeting to your calendar (must be logged into your UCSC gmail account). The reading schedule is:

  • Wednesday, March 15: Discuss Preface, Introduction, and Chapters 1-3
  • Wednesday, March 22: Discuss Chapters 4-7
  • Wednesday, March 29: Discuss Chapters 8-11 and Conclusions

Contact Mary Goldman about the reading group.

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is a professor of biological science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and a former associate dean for research at the Joint School for Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. He has written extensively on genetics and race including Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia University Press, 2023).

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

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

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.

Book Cover for Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Book release! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

About the Book

Book Cover for Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022)

Contesting Race and Citizenship is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. 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. Camilla Hawthorne focuses 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.

Contesting Race and Citizenship 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. Hawthorne traces 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.

About the Author

Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coeditor of The Black Mediterranean.

Book cover for Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (2022)

Book Release! Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (Oxford University Press, 2022)

About the Book

Can precision medicine be personal; can personalized medicine be precise? (2022)

People have always sought medical care that is tailored to every individual patient. Alongside with the historical development of institutions of care, the vision of personal and ‘holistic’ care persisted. Patient-centred medicine, interpersonal communication and shared decision making have become central to medical practice and services.

This evolving vision of ‘personalized medicine’ is in the forefront of medicine, creating debates among ethicists, philosophers and sociologists of medicine about the nature of disease and the definition of wellness, the impact on the daily life of patients, as well as its implications on low-income countries. Is increased ‘precision’ also an improvement on the personal aspects of care or erosion of privacy? Do ‘precise’ and ‘personalized’ approach marginalize public health, and can this care be personalized without attention to culture, economy and society?

The book provides a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary discussion of the ethos and ethics of precision/personal medicine, involving scientists who have shaped the field, in dialogue with ethicists, social scientists and philosophers of science. The contributing scholars come from all over the world and from different cultural backgrounds providing reflective perspectives of history of ideas, critical theory and technology assessment, together with the actual work done by pioneers in the field. It explores issues such as global justice, gender, public health, pharmaceutical industry, international law and religion, and explores themes discussed in relation to personalized medicine such as new-born screening and disorders of consciousness.

This book will be of interest to academicians in bioethics, history of medicine, social sciences of medicine as well as general educated readers.

About the Authors

Edited by Y. Michael Barilan, Margherita Brusa, and Aaron Ciechanover with contribution by Professor of Sociology and SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon from their participation in the workshop, “The Revolution of Personalized Medicine: Are We Going to Cure All Diseases and at What Price?,” that took place April 8-9, 2019 in Vatican City.

Read more in this campus news article: Jenny Reardon participates in Vatican workshop on personalized medicine.

Book launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

About the Book

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University
Press, 2021)

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano’s holographic art, Esdras Parra’s and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry, Mattie Brice’s digital games, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations

About the Author

micha cárdenas is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as coauthor of Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs and The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities.

February 07, 2022 | Book Launch! Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media by micha cárdenas

Monday, February 07, 2022

5:00 PM

To celebrate the launch of micha cárdenas’ new book, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, forthcoming from Duke University Press, the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies along with Performance, Play and Design will host a book launch event on Monday, February 7th at the Cowell Provost house at 5:00PM with Gerald Casel and Nick Mitchell as respondents!

The book is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon. Other formats available soon at https://www.dukeupress.edu/poetic-operations.

More about the book can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2022/01/03/book-poetic-operations-cardenas/

November 10, 2021 | Book Launch! Life As We Made It + SJTP Fellow Presentation

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)

On Wednesday, November 10, 2021 from 4:00-5:30 PM we joined in celebrating the launch of SJRC affiliate faculty Beth Shapiro’s new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)! (poster – PDF)

Science & Justice Training Program Fellows, Jonas Oppenheimer and Jenny Pensky presented findings from their collaborative research project exploring the relationships between “invasive” plants, botanical gardens, and colonialism – as well as – put their work into conversation with Shapiro’s Life as We Made It.

A link to the research and a rapporteur report will be posted once available.

Learn more about Life as We Made It in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

Beth Shapiro is a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and PI of the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab.

Jonas Oppenheimer is a member of the paleogenomics lab with Beth Shapiro in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics. Jonas works to understand the evolutionary dynamics of Beringian megafauna through ancient DNA, investigating the consequences of climate, population history, and hybridization on these species. Jonas is also a Fellow with CITL (Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning) learning pedagogical techniques to make an education in science accessible to all.

Jenny Pensky is a member of Professor Andrew Fisher’s hydrogeology lab in Earth & Planetary Sciences. Jenny focuses on how managed aquifer recharge (MAR) can be used to improve both water supply and quality.