A not to miss opportunity to explore the UC Santa Cruz Campus, on and off the footpaths with A. Laurie Palmer!

As a conceptual frame to slow and redirect attention, The Lichen Museum invites you to zero in on inhabitants of slowed, horizontal, colorful and complex worlds while imagining radical possibilities for human being and relating. This walk invites participants to bend down and look closely at inhabitants of the planet who are already doing things differently as part of the process of imagining alternate futures for the rest of us.

A. Laurie Palmer writes, makes art, and teaches art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research-based work focuses on undoing and re-crafting human practices of relating with the material world towards building just, livable, and joyful social and environmental relations. Her most recent book, The Lichen Museum, explores lichens’ role as an anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor. Palmer also works in collaboration with activist groups in solidarity across socioeconomic and racial difference in campaigns that employ imagination and art to resist and interrupt social and environmental injustice. Palmer collaborated with the art collective Haha for twenty years on site-based installation projects, and was a founding member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project (CTJM) from 2010 to 2015 . The work of CTJM contributed to a broad-based campaign that won the first municipal Reparations for police violence in the US. After being based in Chicago for 30 years, Palmer moved to Santa Cruz in 2015 where she helped start the new Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program at UCSC, an innovative, student-centered, graduate program focusing on environmental and social
justice.

This walk is part of the earth ecologies x technoscience series in co-sponsorship with the History of Consciousness Department.

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.

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