Book

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

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About the Book

From the first dog to the first beefalo, from farming to CRISPR, the human history of remaking nature

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

When the 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, it underlined our amazing and apparently novel powers to alter nature. But as biologist Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, she claims, reshaping nature—resetting the course of evolution, ours and others’—is the essence of what our species does.

In exploring our evolutionary and cultural history, Shapiro finds a course for the future. If we have always been changing nature to help us survive and thrive, then we need to avoid naive arguments about how we might destroy it with our meddling, and instead ask how we can meddle better.

Brilliant and insightful, Life as We Made It is an essential book for the decades to come.

Learn more in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

Beth Shapiro is a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, PI of the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab, and an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center.

October 05, 2021 | Assuming the Ecosexual Position Book Celebration with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens

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On Tuesday, October 5, 2021, we gathered for a book launch celebration for Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover with Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle w/ special guest appearances from:

Linda M. Montano—Performance artist, author
Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Allison Lovejoy—Artist-Poet & Musician.
Jennie Klein—Beth & Annie’s collaborator on Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Art history professor at Ohio University.
K-HAW & Alias the Ass—Rural Alchemy Workshop artists
Courtney Desiree Morris—artist, professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.
Joy Brooke Fairfield—Theater director.
Evelyna Jarosz, Justyna Górowska and a.r. brine shrimp—Artist-scholars from Poland and brine shrimp brides.
Dragonfly Diva—Storyteller, culture warrior, ecosexual.
Paul Corbit Brown—Director of Mountain Keepers Foundation, environmental activist.
Emma McNairy & Emily Casey—Opera singer & heavy metal rocker.
Butch—Beth & Annie’s dog.

A recording of the celebration is forthcoming and will be made available.

In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, setting them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, their seven-year art and exhibition project with performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young.

Throughout the pages of the book, Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, celebrating their vows to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth. The collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, and art and environmentalism to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

As written in CNN, Stephens and Sprinkle’s “collaborative projects bring joy amid injustice and hardship… make saving the planet a bit sexier.” The book launch is planned as another joyful project in the struggle against climate change.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position is available for purchase here with a 40% discount through December 1, 2021, as part of the National Women’s Studies Association conference sale. Discount code: MN88300​

This event is collaboratively produced by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Arts Research Institute, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been life partners and collaborators on multimedia projects since 2002. They are authors of the Ecosex Manifesto and producers of the award-winning film Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Water Makes Us Wet. Sprinkle is a former sex worker with a PhD in human sexuality. Stephens holds a PhD in performance studies and is founding director of E.A.R.T.H. Lab at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Book release! Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth

In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory.

What’s sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely—or, perhaps, broadly—what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment. Ever since, they have been not just pushing but obliterating the boundaries circumscribing biology and ecology, creating ecosexual art in their performance of an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, posthuman, materialist, exuberant, and steeped in humor.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality—for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles; for Beth, savoring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents’ Appalachian farm. The book describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, which involved influential performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, including the Chemo Fashion Show, Cuddle, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, and Ecosex Walking Tours. Over the years, they celebrated many more weddings to various nature entities, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. To create these weddings, they collaborated with hundreds of people and invited thousands of guests as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth.

As entertaining as it is deeply serious, and arriving at a perilous time of sharp differences and constricting categories, the story of this artistic collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, art and environmentalism, to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position is available for purchase here with a 40% discount (using code MN88300) through December 1, 2021, as part of the National Women’s Studies Association conference sale.

Select Reviews

Tuned to the more than human, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have married widely and well, mating with the airs, waters, and places of Earth, inviting their companions into profligate kinning for earthly survival. They have taken me on their ecosexual journeys, rolling around with them on their theoretical and performative ground to get sufficiently soiled to be brave enough to join the old whore and the hillbilly in their radical practices of joy, love, and rage. Read this book, revel in its wacky seriousness, risk its call to transformative art and life.

— Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

In Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens dance with diverse thinkers across theoretical, artistic, and planetary ground in their polyamorous love of the natural world. Sex can heal, and ecosexuality—taking the Earth as lover—is curative. Ecosexual art, activism, and other intimacies help quell society’s anthropocentric hierarchy so we might better nurture all of our relatives, both human and more-than-human.

— Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

About the Authors

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been life partners and 50/50 collaborators on multimedia projects since 2002. They are authors of the Ecosex Manifesto and producers of the award-winning film Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary feature that premiered at documenta 14 and screened at MoMA in New York. Sprinkle is a former sex worker with a PhD in human sexuality. Stephens holds a PhD in performance studies and is founding director of E.A.R.T.H. Lab at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Jennie Klein is professor of art history at Ohio University. She is editor of Letters from Linda M. Montano and coeditor of Histories and Practices of Live Art and The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art.

Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and professor of English, drama, and environmental studies at New York University. She is coeditor of Animal Acts: Performing Species Today and coauthor of Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher and curator. His books include Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era and Countersexual Manifesto.

Book Release! Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley culture expert and SJRC affiliated faculty Fred Turner join forces to give us an unseen view of the heart of the tech world in their new book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.

The book is available from the University of Chicago Press at: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo90479007.html

About the Author and Photographer

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered around questions of representation, visibility, and social equity in the United States. She lives in New England, where she has lectured at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University.

May 26, 2021 | Book Launch! Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice

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On Wednesday, May 26, 2021 from 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM SJRC scholars joined in celebration of Harlan Weaver’s book launch! Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021).

A recording of the presentation is available here.

Bad Dog Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice

Bad Dog examines pit bulls and animal shelter politics through the lens of what I term “interspecies intersectionality” in order to identify how relationships between humans and non-human animals shape and are shaped by experiences of gender, race, colonialism, nation, and sexuality. Traversing themes ranging from contemporary claims to “rescue,” the history of the human, the ontological emergences/becomings of human/pit bull relationships, and the queer possibilities for challenging normative kinship inherent in pit bull politics, Bad Dog provides a compelling interdisciplinary argument for a justice that engages the needs, desires, and imaginings of marginalized humans and non-human animals together. 

Harlan Weaver is assistant professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at Kansas State University.

May 4, 2021 | Book launch! Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021)

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On Tuesday, May 4, 2021 at 5:30pm–7:00pm, there was a University Forum to celebrate the launch of Counterpoints featuring original research from multiple campus contributors including SJRC’s Just Biomedicine research cluster and the No Place Like Home initiative.
A recording can be found on YouTube.
Grid with plant roots

Book cover for Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press)

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, forthcoming) brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism.

Learn More about Counterpoints.

About the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia storytelling collective that documents displacement and resistance struggles on gentrifying landscapes. With chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Los Angeles, the collective works with numerous community partners and housing justice networks in order to provide data, maps, stories, and tools for resisting displacement. AEMP has produced hundreds of maps, oral histories, and multimedia pieces, as well as dozens of community events and reports, and numerous academic and public facing articles, book chapters, and murals. AEMP’s work has been presented in a variety of venues, from art galleries and collectives to neighborhood block parties, from academic colloquia and conferences to community workshops and book fairs.

Erin McElroy is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute, researching the digital platforms and technologies used by landlords in order to surveil, evict, and racialize tenants. Erin is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and coeditor of its forthcoming atlas, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. Having earned a doctoral degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a focus on the politics of space, race, and technology in and between postsocialist Romania and post-Cold War Silicon Valley, Erin is invested in transnational analyses and international solidarity organizing for housing, racial, and technological justice. To this end, Erin is a founding editor of the Radical Housing Journal, an open access transdisciplinary journal supporting the work of housing justice globally.

Adrienne Hall is a PhD student in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her master’s degree in public health at San Francisco State University. Adrienne has been with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project since 2016, and she is a co-editor of the Health and Environmental Justice chapter of the Atlas.

Campus Contributors:

The Science & Justice Research Center’s Just Biomedicine research cluster, overseen by Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon with Katherine Weatherford Darling (University of Maine), contributed a chapter titled: ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in San Francisco’s Biotech Hub.’ This chapter examines the different visions for health and healthcare that have been imagined and practiced along the Third Street corridor. At the north end stands Mission Bay, a newly revitalized neighborhood centered around UCSF’s biomedical campus and a biotechnology ecosystem. Just three miles south along Third Street, however, stands Bayview-Hunters Point, which remains one of the city’s most marginalized communities, home to a disproportionate disease burden and struggling public health clinics. This project brings into view for public discussion the effects of the resulting financial and ideological investments in an imagined “future of medicine,” and how they are changing the political landscapes, built environments, and health of Bay Area residents right now.

Undergraduate and Graduate Student Researchers and Alumni: Wessede Barrett (Politics), Dennis Browe (Sociology), Emily Caramelli (Sociology Politics), Amy Coffin (Neuroscience, Philosophy), Hannah Finegold (Biology, Law & Society), Laura Lopez, Emma Mitchell-Sparke (Tufts University), Andy Murray (Sociology), Nikobi Petronelli (Feminist Studies).

The Transportation, Infrastructure, and Economy contribution by Kristin Miller (Sociology). 

Kristin Miller is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Digital Media, and has an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU. Her research concerns the role of Silicon Valley futurism in reshaping the Bay Area, and she studies cities, environmentalism, and technology, with interests in science-fiction film and TV, and Utopian Studies.

The No Place Like Home project overseen by Sociology Professors Steve McKay and Miriam Greenberg contributed a visual summary and map from their large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants. The map helps amplify how the uneven geography and demography of the county is reflected in (and by) inequalities on critical issues such as rent burden, over-crowding, and forced moves and evictions. The survey results also provide a springboard for the study’s wider discussion of local and regional policy options in addressing the housing crisis, particularly for renters.

Hosted by:

University Relations

Co-Sponsored by:

The Science & Justice Research Center, The UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, The Humanities Institute, the Genomics Institute, and departments of Sociology and Feminist Studies.

April 7, 2021 | Book launch! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (U. Minn Press)

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Clear blood vile with red cap against yellow background

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes. U Minn Press, March 2021.

On Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 5:30pm–7:00pm, there was a University Forum to celebrate the launch of Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (U. Minn Press) by Assistant Professor of Sociology and Interim SJRC Director (fall 2020) James Doucet-Battle’s new book that challenges assumptions about race within diabetes research and delves into the issue through the lens of African American experience.

Learn more in this campus news article, “Uncovering the social factors lurking within diabetes risk.”

With opening remarks and general welcome by Science & Justice Research Center Founding Director and Professor of Sociology Jenny Reardon and introductions and moderation by Nancy Chen (Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society), we aim to gather in the spirit of celebrating Sweetness in the Blood’s launch, broadening the discussion of race and risk, and supporting the work of the UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center.

Nancy Chen is Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean for Health, Wellbeing and Society at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

James Doucet-Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. He applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities.

Edward T. Hawthorne founder and managing partner of CE3 Solutions, LLC, serves as Chief Administrative Officer.  Prior to CE3 Solutions, Hawthorne had a 33 year career with Bank of America holding various senior executive positions covering technology, operational risk, and customer servicing worldwide. He is currently Vice Chairman of the board for the Diabetes Leadership Council, and serves on the Emeritus Council for the American Diabetes Association, and the board of directors for Children with Diabetes. He is also past Chairman of the National Board of Directors for the American Diabetes Association.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.

Co-Sponsored by University Relations, the Science & Justice Research Center, the Institute for Social Transformation, and the Sociology Department.
Clear blood vile with red cap against yellow background

Forthcoming Book release! Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Clear blood vile with red cap against yellow background

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes. U Minn Press, March 2021.

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

The book will be available in March 2021 at: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sweetness-in-the-blood

Learn more in this campus news article, Uncovering the social factors lurking within diabetes risk.

About the Author

James Doucet-Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Fall 2020 Interim Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley/University San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of science, technology and society studies, development studies and anthropological approaches to health and medicine. He applies these interests to study the political economy of genomic discourses about race, risk, and health disparities.

Grid with plant roots

Forthcoming Book release! Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (PM Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Grid with plant roots

Book cover for Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press)

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, forthcoming) brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Compiled by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, including: evictions and root shock, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures.

By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present. Understanding the tech boom and its effects means looking beyond San Francisco’s borders to consider the region as a socially, economically, and politically interconnected whole and reckoning with the area’s deep history of displacement, going back to its first moments of settler colonialism.

Counterpoints combines work from within the project with contributions from community partners, from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures. In this way, Counterpoints is a collaborative, co-created atlas aimed at expanding knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.

Counterpoints includes a chapter from the SJRC Just Biomedicine research cluster on “Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in SF’s Biotech Hub” as well as a visual summary and map from a large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants by the No Place Like Home initiative.

The book is available for preorder at PM Press.

About the campus contributors:

The Science & Justice Research Center’s Just Biomedicine research cluster, overseen by Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon, contributed a chapter titled: ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in San Francisco’s Biotech Hub.’ This chapter examines the different visions for health and healthcare that have been imagined and practiced along the Third Street corridor. At the north end stands Mission Bay, a newly revitalized neighborhood centered around UCSF’s biomedical campus and a biotechnology ecosystem. Just three miles south along Third Street, however, stands Bayview-Hunters Point, which remains one of the city’s most marginalized communities, home to a disproportionate disease burden and struggling public health clinics. This project brings into view for public discussion the effects of the resulting financial and ideological investments in an imagined “future of medicine,” and how they are changing the political landscapes, built environments, and health of Bay Area residents right now. 

The No Place Like Home project overseen by Sociology Professors Steve McKay and Miriam Greenberg contributed a visual summary and map from their large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants. The map helps amplify how the uneven geography and demography of the county is reflected in (and by) inequalities on critical issues such as rent burden, over-crowding, and forced moves and evictions. The survey results also provide a springboard for the study’s wider discussion of local and regional policy options in addressing the housing crisis, particularly for renters.

About the editorial collective behind Counterpoints:

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia storytelling collective that documents displacement and resistance struggles on gentrifying landscapes. With chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Los Angeles, the collective works with numerous community partners and housing justice networks in order to provide data, maps, stories, and tools for resisting displacement. AEMP has produced hundreds of maps, oral histories, and multimedia pieces, as well as dozens of community events and reports, and numerous academic and public facing articles, book chapters, and murals. AEMP’s work has been presented in a variety of venues, from art galleries and collectives to neighborhood block parties, from academic colloquia and conferences to community workshops and book fairs.

Abstract greens

Forthcoming Book release! Hillary Angelo on How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

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About the Book

Abstract greens

Book Cover for Hillary Angelo’s How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2021)

As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts. 

Hillary Angelo is Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated with the SJRC at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The book is available at: The University of Chicago Press (use discount code UCPSOC for 20% off)