Events
Humanities 1, Room 210
Giuseppe Longo – From the Alphabet to AI: Discretizing the World
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesThe History of Consciousness department, in collaboration with the Humanities in the Age of AI Cluster, is pleased to present "From the Alphabet to AI: Discretizing the World" delivered by Giuseppe Longo. The talk will take place April 21st at 1pm in Humanities 1 Room 210, with a virtual attendance option available. To attend virtually, […]
TechnoScience Improv
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesThis 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 […]
Carolyn Fornoff – Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesIn this talk, Carolyn Fornoff will discuss her recent book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt Press, 2024). Her book assesses contemporary trends in […]
Akum Longchari – Reimagining Humanization, Just Peace, and Healing through an Indigenous Lens
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesJoin the Center for South Asian Studies for a presentation by Aküm Longchari, the Center’s Scholar in Residence. From an Indigenous perspective, peace processes in the first quarter of the 21st century have been focused on State-building, where questions of justice and peace remained a matter of privilege and power rather than a right of […]
Murad Idris – Dialogue for Hate: A Global Genealogy
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesThis lecture posits hate, dialogue, and their conjunction as fundamental for the contemporary moralization of violence and hierarchy. It analyzes how the two terms operate through a series of disavowals, displacements, and transubstantiations, tracking their place in the history of political thought, structures of minoritization, and contemporary formations where they became rhetorical vehicles and conceptual […]
Nick Kawa and Alisa Keesey – Microbes at Work: The Vital Role of Bacteria and other Microbial Life in Sanitation Systems in the US and Uganda
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesWastewater treatment operators in the American Midwest wryly describe their job as “bacteria farming,” but they also insist that microbes are the ones who “do all the work” at treatment plants. Meanwhile, slum activists in Uganda suggest that they “work with microbes” to provide essential sanitation services where the state has failed to provide safe […]
When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesThe Humanities Institute Research cluster, Humanities in the Age of AI, presents "When Human-Centered AI Encountered Digital Humanities: A Dialogue between Magy Seif El-Nasr and Minghui Hu." What happens when the ethical and interpretive frameworks of the humanities meet the algorithmic and interactive architectures of artificial intelligence? This dialogue brings together two leading voices from […]
Soraya Murray – Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesSoraya Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its […]