Prisons and Poetics: Reginald Dwayne Betts and Craig Haney
2021-01-26 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
The Institute of the Arts and Sciences and The Humanities Institute are pleased to present a poetry reading and conversation with award-winning American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and renowned social psychologist Craig Haney, moderated by Professor Gina Dent. The event is part of the IAS Visualizing Abolition Series and The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is an American poet, memoirist, and teacher. His work in public defense, his years of advocacy, and Betts’s own experiences as a teenager in maximum security prisons uniquely positions him to speak to the failures of the current criminal justice system and present encouraging ideas for change. Betts often gives talks about his own experience, detailing his journey from incarceration to Yale Law School and the role that perseverance and literature played in his success. In addition, he has given lectures on topics ranging from mass incarceration to contemporary poetry and the intersection of literature and advocacy.
Craig Haney is a social psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, noted for his work on the study of capital punishment and the psychological impact of imprisonment and prison isolation. Haney has published five books, numerous research articles, entries in law reviews, and articles for the Huffington Post about the psychological impacts of incarceration, advocating for prison reform. He has served as an expert witness in several influential United States Federal Court cases related to the prison environment and punishment. Moreover, Haney’s work was influential in the United States Supreme Court 5-4 ruling of Brown v. Plata (2011), which upheld a lower court ruling that the California prison population be reduced.

This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Aomar Boum: Seeing as Memory - Graphic Memoir as Historical Ethnography
2021-01-26 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Aomar Boum (UCLA) will speak in HIS 185O about his upcoming graphic novel collaboration recounting the story of European Jewish refugees in Morocco during the Second World War. In the last decade, graphic memoirs and novels have emerged as a significant form of historical (re)writing of past narratives and events. The medium of comics and its use of chronologically ordered panels allows the reader to create meanings through the combination of image and text. I argue for the use of graphic memoirs to reconstruct the history of Saharan Vichy camps. I contend that in the larger context of an anthropology of genocide and the Holocaust, graphic memoirs could be seen retroactive ethnographic accounts where witnessing takes place through seeing guided by the archive. In this talk I present a collaborative graphic narrative based on a unique style of art highlighting the impact of WWII outside of Europe through the story of a German refugee in North Africa. Hans, the main character, is a composite representing the experiences of several historical figures. I note that the use of images as a form of Holocaust writing, starting with Maus, is a call to seeing and therefore remembering through witnessing the trauma of detainees of labor and internment Vichy camps in the Sahara between 1940 and 1945.
Aomar Boum is associate professor in the Department of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Memories of Absence: How
Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco and co-editor of The Holocaust and North Africa.

HIS 185O “The Holocaust And The Arab World” examines World War II in North Africa and the Middle East. Through primary and secondary sources, films, and novels, students consider WWII and the Holocaust as they intersect with colonial and Jewish histories in the Arab world.
This course is supported by the Humanities Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and The Neufeld Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan – The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop and Gendered Aspirations in Urban India
2021-01-27 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
In the last decade, access to digital communication technologies has created opportunities for young people on the margins of the national imaginary in India to take part in transnational media worlds. In his recently published book, Dattatreyan uses the ‘globally familiar’ as an analytic to engage with the recursive effects of online media consumption, production, and circulation amongst young migrant men in Delhi who invest their energies in the Black aesthetics of hip hop. In this talk, he reflects on how, eight years after he first started fieldwork with these young men, the social and economic opportunities that have emerged for them as a result of their online/offline hip hop play continue to shape their gendered aspirations in and through circuits of late capitalism.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research engages with the ways in which digital media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi, was published by Duke University Press in 2020.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, January 27th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

C. Nadia Seremetakis: The Senses Still
2021-01-28 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
The THI Sense Memory Cluster presents on Thursday, January 28, 10-12, Professor C. Nadia Seremetakis, author of The Last Word, The Senses Still, and Sensing the Everyday. She will discuss her practice of sensory ethnography, her theory of sense memory, and “the third stream of anamnesis” in the contemporary spread of little memorials in Greek urban space.

Professor C. Nadia Seremetakis is a cultural anthropologist and author of several books in both English and Greek, including poetry. She is best known for The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Univ. of Chicago Press), The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination (Univ. of Chicago Press), and Sensing the Everyday (Routledge). She has lived and taught in New York for more than two decades, conducted fieldwork in various parts of the world, served as advisor at the Hellenic Ministry of Health and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and taught at the University of the Peloponnese, in her native area, for the past ten years. Full bio: www.seremetakis.com

Living Writers: K-Ming Chang
2021-01-28 17:20 | Virtual Event
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020). More of her writing can be found online at kmingchang.com.

“Coded Bias” Film Screening and Panel Discussion
2021-01-28 17:30 | Virtual Event
The award winning documentary Coded Bias explores how machine-learning algorithms can perpetuate society’s existing class-, race-, and gender-based inequities.
While working on an assignment involving facial-recognition software, the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini found that the algorithm couldn’t detect her face — until she put on a white mask. As she recounts in the documentary “Coded Bias,” Buolamwini soon discovered that most such artificial-intelligence programs are trained to identify patterns based on data sets that skew light-skinned and male. “When you think of A.I., it’s forward-looking,” she says. “But A.I. is based on data, and data is a reflection of our history.” “Coded Bias” tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs.
“Coded Bias” examines algorithmic bias as a modern civil rights issue, and sheds light on privacy and equity issues related to increasing reliance on artificial intelligence.

Registration required. A link to view the film will be sent out starting 1/25 which will be available to view anytime until 1/28.
Panelists Bios:
Professor Neda Atanasoski of the Humanities Institute Center for Racial Justice
Professor A.M. Darke of Digital Arts and New Media (DANM)
Professor Jody Greene of Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL)
Watch the trailer: https://www.codedbias.com/about
Film screening (1h 30m) and panel discussion sponsored by UCSC’s Privacy Office and Office for Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Surveillance and Cinematics: American Artist, Simone Browne, and Ruha Benjamin
2021-02-02 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Next in the Visualizing Abolition series is Surveillance and Cinematics with American Artist, Simone Browne, and Ruha Benjamin. Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Dr. Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

American Artist (b. 1989 Altadena, CA, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose work considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing. Artist is a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of EYEBEAM and completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. They have exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Koenig & Clinton, New York. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and Art21. Artist is a part-time faculty at Parsons The New School and teaches at the School for Poetic Computation.
Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, was awarded the 2016 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize by the American Studies Association, the 2016 Surveillance Studies Book Prize by the Surveillance Studies Network, and the 2015 Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Technology Research. Simone is also a member of Deep Lab, a feminist collaborative composed of artists, engineers, hackers, writers, and theorists.
Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), among numerous other publications. Benjamin writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

HIS 185O with Edith Kulstein
2021-02-02 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Edith Kulstein, a French Jewish refugee who spent the WWII years in Algeria, will speaks in HIS 185O about her experiences.

HIS 185O “The Holocaust And The Arab World” examines World War II in North Africa and the Middle East. Through primary and secondary sources, films, and novels, students consider WWII and the Holocaust as they intersect with colonial and Jewish histories in the Arab world.
This course is supported by the Humanities Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and The Neufeld Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Michael Allan — World Pictures/Global Visions
2021-02-03 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This talk addresses a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company between 1896-1903. Not only did these camera operators record films at sites from Algiers to Berlin to Tokyo, they also pictured the world anew, whether framing a street scene in Alexandria or offering a close up on a passing face in Jerusalem. The Lumière Brothers’ broader vision was to bring the world to the world, and they imagined a global network of films easily circulable beyond the constraints of language and literacy. Engaging the implications of cinematic versus literary capture, Allan’s talk explores the stakes of world literature in the age of the world picture.
Michael Allan is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon and editor of the journal Comparative Literature. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Co-Winner of the MLA First Book Prize). His current research focuses on the travels of the Lumière Brothers film company across North Africa and the Middle East.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, February 3rd; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Radhika Govindrajan - Labors of Love: On the Ethics and Politics of Attachment in India’s Central Himalayas
2021-02-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Radhika Govindrajan is Associate Professor Anthropology at University of Washington, Seattle. She is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Her award-winning book Animal Intimacies is an ethnography of multispecies relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India.

Part of the 2020-21 Center For South Asian Studies Lecture Series.

Living Writers: Lauren Groff
2021-02-04 17:20 | Virtual Event
Lauren Groff is the author of five books, most recently Fates and Furies, a novel, and Florida, a short story collection. She has twice been shortlisted for the National Book Award, has won the Story Prize and France’s Grand Prix de L’héroïne, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her next novel, Matrix, is slated for publication by Riverhead in September 2021.

Yasmeen Daifallah: Legal Studies workshop
2021-02-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
On Friday, February 5th, 12-1 pm, Faculty Associate Yasmeen Daifallah (Politics) will present a paper at the Legal Studies workshop entitled “‘Preparing Revolutionaries and Reforming Reformers:’ Abdallah Laroui’s Critique of Colonized Subjectivity.” Professor Megan Thomas (Politics) will serve as the discussant. Please email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for the paper. Click To join.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and North Africa.

Material and Memory: Sanford Biggers and Leigh Raiford
2021-02-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Sandord Biggers is a Harlem-based artist whose work speaks to current social, political and economic happenings. For this Visualizing Abolition event, Biggers will be joined by visual culutre theorist Leigh Raiford for a conversation about art, materiality, violence, and possibility.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings and the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Biggers’ has exhibited work in galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Leigh Raiford is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches and researches about race, gender, justice and visuality. She also serves as affiliate faculty in the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Raiford received her PhD from Yale University’s joint program in African American Studies and American Studies in 2003. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize and her work has appeared in numerous academic journals, including American Quarterly, Small Axe, Qui Parle, History and Theory, English Language Notes and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art; as well as popular venues including Artforum, Aperture, Ms. Magazine, Atlantic.com and Al- Jazeera.com.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Naya Jones — Conjure Geographies, Covid-19, and Healing Futures
2021-02-10 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Reimagining cultural healing ways is central to healing justice, Black Lives Matter, and other contemporary movements. However, “moving from race to culture to creation,” as Resmaa Menakem puts it, takes work. This talk engages in this work by centering epistemologies of Black/African-American traditional medicine, often reclaimed as “conjure.” Drawing on short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and interviews, Jones will consider how Black “knowings” of health, healing, and biomedicine continue to be both racialized and mobilized – and the urgency of taking other(ed) knowledge seriously in this pandemic moment (and beyond).

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, February 10th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Naya Jones (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Core Faculty in the Global and Community Health Program at UCSC. As a geographer and cultural worker, she especially studies Black geographies of community health and healing in North and Latin America (African-American and Afro-Latinx). Often in partnership with community-rooted organizations, she engages a range of storytelling, embodied, and arts-based methods. She is a former Culture of Health Leader (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2017-2020) and a recent recipient of the Anne S. Chatham Fellowship for Medicinal Botany (Garden Club of America).
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Daniella Farah: Jews in post-WWII Iran - Patriotism, national belonging, integration, and identity
2021-02-11 11:40 - 13:15 | Virtual Event
Daniella Farah (Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University) will speak in HIS 74B about the effects of the Second World War on Jews in Iran and how this period shaped their political subjectivities. Jews have lived in Iran for over 2,500 years, with a population of 100,000 at their height in 1945. Today, Iran contains the largest number of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel. During the twentieth century, Iranian Jews experienced rapid upward mobility, migrated within the country and abroad, and participated in Iran’s major political and social movements. Yet, despite this rich history, it is only in the last ten years that scholars have started giving Iranian Jewish History serious academic attention. In this talk, Daniella will offer a broad survey of Iranian Jewish history from the mid-1940s to the early 1980s. She will focus on these themes: the socioeconomic mobility of Iranian Jews, identity formation, proclamations of loyalty and belonging to the nation, Jewish-Muslim interactions, and the intersection of education and integration.

Daniella Farah is a PhD Candidate in Jewish History at Stanford University and is the daughter of Iranian Jewish emigres. She specializes in the sociocultural histories of the Jews of the modern Middle East, with a specific geographic focus on Iran and Turkey. Her work is situated at the intersection of Modern Jewish History, Middle Eastern History, Education History, and Transnational Studies. Her article, “‘The school is the link between the Jewish community and the surrounding milieu’: Education and the Jews of Iran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s,” is forthcoming with the journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
HIS 74B “Introduction to Middle Eastern and North African Jewish History, 1500-2000” surveys modern Jewish history from Morocco to Iran, 1500-2000. Studying these populations through original documents, scholarly works, and literature imparts a unique perspective on both modern Jewish history and that of the region, challenging and complementing standard narratives of each.
This course is supported by the Humanities Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and The Neufeld Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Living Writers: Valeria Luiselli
2021-02-11 17:20 | Virtual Event
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize.

PhD+ Workshop – Podcasting and the Humanities
2021-02-12 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Interested in podcasting and the different ways you can engage this medium as a scholar? This session will focus on how podcasting might fit into your academic and career goals, including approaches for developing your own podcasting project, building scholarly and community networks with podcast interviews, preparing to be interviewed on a podcast, and the intersection of podcasting with public humanities work writ large.

Daniel Story is a historian and digital humanist. He works as a Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC Santa Cruz, supporting and collaborating with students and faculty who seek to engage digital methods in their teaching, research, or learning. He is the lead producer of the ten-part documentary podcast Stories from the Epicenter, which explores the experience and memory of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake in Santa Cruz County, California. He also currently serves as a consulting editor for The American Historical Review and produces the journal’s podcast, AHR Interview. Daniel received his PhD in History from Indiana University, Bloomington.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more. *Note that all 2020-2021 PhD+ workshops are open to University of California faculty, staff, and students, and will be held virtually until further notice.

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#StopCVE: Challenging State Surveillance of Muslims in the Biden/Harris Era, with Fatema Ahmad
2021-02-16 09:00 - 10:00 | Virtual Event
In 2014, the Obama administration launched Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a grant program that funneled federal money to police, universities, and nonprofit organizations in the name of combating terrorism. Although CVE and other “anti-radicalization” programs target Muslims and political activists, they have enjoyed support from some liberals who view anti-radicalization as a softer, more humane form of policing. Revised and expanded during the Trump years under the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program, such surveillance initiatives are embedded in at least nineteen municipal police departments across the United States. In this conversation with Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, we will discuss the history and impacts of CVE and consider the prospects for such programs under the Biden/Harris administration.

Fatema Ahmad (she/hers) is the Executive Director at Muslim Justice League, where she leads MJL’s efforts to dismantle the criminalization and policing of marginalized communities under national security pretexts. She joined as Deputy Director in 2017 and increased MJL’s focus on organizing within and collaborating across impacted communities to resist and subvert surveillance. That included growing the Building Muslim Power collective, a group that shifts power through creative actions. Fatema also leads the national StopCVE network, spearheads MJL’s research, and is a leader in the Donor Advised Funds campaign of the Public Good Coalition.
In conversation with Neel Ahuja, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Presented by the Center for Racial Justice and co-sponsored by UCSC Department of Feminist Studies and the Humanities Institute Memory of Forgotten Wars Cluster

Neferti Tadiar — A Physics Lesson: Notes on a Cultural Genealogy of Human Mediatic Forms
2021-02-17 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This talk proposes a cultural genealogy of contemporary human mediatic forms – that is, the use of humans as the media of other humans. Beginning with a reading of José Rizal’s 1891 novel, El Filibusterismo, and its encapsulation of a political moment of transformation of natives (naturales) into nationals, indios into free citizen-subjects, Tadiar explores practices and relations of humans as media in Philippine cultures and the transformation of such persistent forms of life into vital components of today’s global capitalist platform economy.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her current book, Remaindered Life, a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, February 17th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

The Helen Diller Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies, a Conversation with Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein
2021-02-17 17:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Join us for a conversation with Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Alma Heckman as they discuss Professor Stein’s book Family Papers: a Conversation about a Sephardi Jewish Family, Lived History, and Personal Letters.

Stein will discuss her recent, award winning book, Family Papers, which traces the story of the Levy family of Salonica through the arc of the 20th century and the breadth of the globe. Through this one family, across multiple generations, Stein offers a glimpse into the global history of Sephardic Jews marked by the end of empire, the Holocaust, and diaspora.
The Levys wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers. With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys’ letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.
This event is a part of The Humanities Insitute’s yearlong exploration of the theme Memory, we’ll ask: What can a family’s letters, photographs, and fragments tell us about the history of nations that don’t exist and families that have migrated to many continents? What is the relationship between individual memory, collective memory, and history?
Please join us for a thought-provoking conversation about lived history, memory, and family.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History, Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA, and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. A former Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she is the author or editor of nine books, many of them award-winning. Stein’s most recent book, Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), was named a Best Book of 2019 by The Economist and Mosaic Magazine, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, and was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist.

Alma Rachel Heckman is the Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies and an Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in modern Jewish history of North Africa and the Middle East with an interest in citizenship, political transformations, transnationalism, and empire. Her first book is The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2021).

Presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and made possible by the Helen and Sanford Diller Family Endowment for Jewish Studies.

Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, of MTL / Decolonize This Place: Beyond the End of the World Sawyer Seminar Series
2021-02-18 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies present Beyond the End of the World Lecture Series.

Natasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, are MTL, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, organizing and action in practice. Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain are co-founders of Anemones and Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, both movement-generated theory magazines; Global Ultra Luxury Faction, known as the direct-action wing of Gulf Labor Coalition; Direct Action Front for Palestine; and, most recently, Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement and decolonial formation in New York City and beyond. MTL has published in Alternet, Creative Time Reports, eflux, Hyperallergic, Jadaliyya, and October Magazine. Currently they are directing and producing Unsettling, an experimental documentary film about land, life and liberation in occupied Palestine.
Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of UCSC’s Center for Creative Ecologies. The project brings leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz to discuss what lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, and asks how we can cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture and administered by The Humanities Institute. For more information visit BEYOND.UCSC.EDU.

The Annual Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture with Tanya Marie Luhrmann
2021-02-18 17:00 | Virtual Event
Merrill College Presents The Noel Q King Memorial Lecture: Voices of God, Voices of Madness
Following Prof. Luhrmann’s talk, she will be joined in conversation by award-winning author Laurie R. King.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. Using both ethnographic and experimental methods, she has done fieldwork on the streets of Chicago, in Chennai, Accra, and the South Bay; with evangelical Christians, Zoroastrians, and people who practice magic. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007; she served as a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures, was published by the University of California Press in 2016.
Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of 27 novels and other works, including the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes stories (from The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, named one of the 20th century’s best crime novels by the IMBA, to 2018’s Island of the Mad). She has won an alphabet of prizes from Agatha to Wolfe, been chosen as guest of honor at several crime conventions, and is probably the only writer to have both an Edgar and an honorary doctorate in theology. She was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2010, as “The Red Circle.”

Noel Q. King was a “founding father” of Merrill College. Born in India and educated in England, he spent 14 years in Africa heading departments of religious studies before being hired to do the same at UC Santa Cruz, where he was a prominent and beloved figure until his death in 2009. The Noel Q. King Memorial Lectures help keep religious studies, and Noel King’s idiosyncratic spirit, alive at UCSC.

Sponsored by The family of Noel Q. King and by Dennis (Oakes ’77) and Barbara Diessner and Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Institute

Ethan Katz: Jews and Antisemites - The Unlikely Alliance That Paved the Way for Operation Torch
2021-02-18 17:20 - 18:30 | Virtual Event
Ethan Katz, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, will speak in HIS 185O on “Jews and Antisemites – The Unlikely Alliance That Paved the Way for Operation Torch.” Among Jewish resistance movements in World War II, none had the strategic impact of the Algiers underground. This talk will explore the forces and factors that shaped this brief but consequential cooperation between Jewish shock troops and arch-conservative businessmen and military brass. Together, they played a crucial role in the Allied landing in North Africa. As an historical event, their story forces us to re-center the history of Jewish resistance in World War II and to interrogate the meaning of resistance itself.

Ethan Katz was educated at Amherst College (B.A., History & French, 2002) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A., History, 2005; PhD, History, 2009). He is currently Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, where he has taught since the fall of 2018.
As a scholar, Dr. Katz’s work has focused on the Jewish experience in modern Europe and the Middle East, especially in France and the Francophone world. Much of his scholarship examines Jewish belonging and exclusion, Jewish-Muslim relations, the Holocaust, Islamophobia, and colonialism and its legacies. His book The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015) received five prizes, including a National Jewish Book Award and two awards for the best book of the year in French history. In addition, Katz has published co-edited volumes on Antisemitism and Islamophobia in France, Colonialism and Jewish History, and Secularism and Jewish life. Katz’s work has been supported by a number of prestigious fellowships, including a year-long fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at UPenn, and a Lady Davis visiting professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently at work on a book about the Algiers underground of 1940-1943 and the meaning of resistance, entitled Freeing the Empire: The Uprising of Jews and Antisemites That Helped Win World War II.
Dr. Katz speaks regularly in universities and Jewish community spaces across the U.S., Europe, and Israel. In addition to scholarly publications, he writes and speaks about contemporary questions in historical context and has authored or co-authored pieces in venues like the Atlantic, CNN, Marginalia Review of Books, and Jewish Review of Books.
HIS 185O “The Holocaust And The Arab World” examines World War II in North Africa and the Middle East. Through primary and secondary sources, films, and novels, students consider WWII and the Holocaust as they intersect with colonial and Jewish histories in the Arab world.
This course is supported by the Humanities Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and The Neufeld Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Deep Read Salon: The Writing Craft of There There
2021-02-18 17:20 - 18:30 | CA
Creative Writing professors Micah Perks and Jennifer Tseng will lead a conversation about the techniques at play in Tommy Orange’s novel, There There.
This salon is for Deep Read Community members and will be held over Zoom. RSVP to get the Zoom link:
RSVP
About The Deep Read
This salon is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities
2021-02-19 - 2021-02-20 | CA
Writing for Living:
Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities
February 19-20, 2021
Please register for Zoom connections
Friday, 3:30-5 PST:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJApcO2upzkrHNXJIpeessjoejEbdjqIQ3UF
Saturday, 11:00-12:30 and 12:50-2:20 PST:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrceyhrz0jGNPQA9pd9-MXOQhZ205ABiK3
Emphasizing her relationship to writing as a practice that makes living possible, this conference honors the work of Distinguished Professor Emerita Helene Moglen (1936-2018). She contributed richly to feminist and psychoanalytic theory in literature, feminist institution building, teaching and mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, and teaching writing in and out of the university. Her generative vitality and creative critical thinking touched everyone who knew her.
Writing grounded Helene’s deep optimism and vitality. She wrote every morning—by hand, in notebooks. She encouraged writers, whether in poetry, scholarship, cultural and political analysis, or fiction; and she responded in detail and with immense generosity to the drafts of her colleagues, whether they were in her field or not, into her last summer.
Professor Moglen’s academic home was the Literature Department. Her monographs include The Trauma of Gender (2001), Sexual and Gender Harassment in the Academy (1981), The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (1976), and Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (1975). She also co-edited five collections that explored the intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, race, and feminism, including (with Elizabeth Abel and Barbara Christian), Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997) and (with Nancy Chen and in conjunction with the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research) Bodies in the Making (2006).
At the time of her death, Helene Moglen was working on the effects of social media on the formation of subjects and the possibilities for face-to-face democracy. She probed the intimate and public consequences of personal data harvesting, surveillance practices, business models, and the allure of screens over embodied presence. She would have appreciated the irony of holding this conference on Zoom!
Full conference schedule and more information at: https://humanities.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/helene-moglen-conference.html
Sponsored by the Humanities Division and the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment

Book Talk: Kwaito Bodies by Xavier Livermon
2021-02-19 13:00 - 14:30 | Virtual Event
Join us on February 19 for a Feminist Studies Book Talk celebrating the publication of Associate Professor Xavier Livermon’s new book: Kwaito Bodies. Xavier will be joined by respondents Marcia Ochoa, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies and Savannah Shange, Assistant Professor, Anthropology.

Kwaito Bodies, Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg’s nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.

Book Talk: Elaine Sullivan, Constructing the Sacred
2021-02-22 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Elaine Sullivan will discuss her recently published “born-digital” monograph, Constructing the Sacred: Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara (Stanford University Press, 2020). Using 3D models of the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara, the online, interactive monograph addresses ancient ritual landscape from a unique perspective. Sullivan focuses on how changes in the built and natural environment affected burial rituals at the cemetery due to changes in visibility. Flipping the top-down view prevalent in archeology to a more human-centered perspective puts the focus on the dynamic evolution of an ancient site that is typically viewed as static. This innovative publication was recently awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig prize for innovation in digital history.

Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. in Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials.
Her archaeological work in Egypt includes five seasons of excavation with Johns Hopkins University at the temple of the goddess Mut (Luxor), as well as four seasons in the field with a joint UCLA-Rijksuniversiteit Groningen project in the Egyptian Fayum at the Greco-Roman town of Karanis. She has also excavated at sites in Syria, Italy, and Israel. Sullivan has published extensively on the use of digital technologies for research and scholarship, including recent articles in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Bulletin for the Institute of Classical Studies.
Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Queering the Undocumented Archive: A Conversation with Yosimar Reyes and Julio Salgado
2021-02-22 14:30 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
The Program in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and the Center for Racial Justice is proud to present: Queering the Undocumented Archive – A Conversation with Yosimar Reyes and Julio Salgado. Click here to learn more about Dreamers Adrift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eSpVOw3nBo&t=5s

Free and open to all.
Julio Salgado is the co-founder of Dreamers Adrift and the Migrant Storytelling Manager for the Center for Cultural Power. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depict key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and the migrant rights movement.
Yosimar Reyes is a nationally acclaimed poet and public speaker. Born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in Eastside San Jose, Reyes explores themes of migration and sexuality in his work. The Advocate named Reyes one of “13 LGBT Latinos Changing the World” and Remezcla included Reyes on their list of “10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know.”
For more information, please contact undocustudies.ucsc@gmail.com

Abolitionist Feminisms: Beth Ritchie, Erica Meiners, and Sonya Clark
2021-02-23 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Beth Richie, University of Illinois, Chicago, Erica Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University, and Soyna Clark, Amherst College, Western Massachusetts, join us for a conversation on feminist―queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color— organizing and abolition for the next Visualizing Abolition event.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Beth Richie is the Head of Department of Criminology, Law and Justice; Professor of African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies and the University of Illinois and Chicago. The emphasis of Beth Richie’s scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women’s experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors. Beth is the author of ​Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012) which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States.
Writer, educator and organizer, Erica R. Meiners’ current work includes a co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (Haymarket Press 2018) and For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016). A Distinguished Visiting Scholar at a range of universities and centers – including University of Pittsburgh, Trent University, CUNY Graduate Center, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum, her work has been supported by the Illinois Humanities Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and a Soros Justice Fellowship. The Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, Erica is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and she teaches classes in justice studies, education, and gender and sexuality studies. Most importantly, Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, including people during and after incarceration, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, the Prison Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network, she is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.
Born in Washington DC to a psychiatrist from Trinidad and a nurse from Jamaica, Sonya Clark’s work draws from the legacy of crafted objects and the embodiment of skill. As an African American artist, craft is a means to honor her lineage and expand notions of both American-ness and art. She uses materials as wide ranging as textiles, hair, beads, combs, and sound to address issues of nationhood, identity, and racial constructs. Clark is a full professor in the Department of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College in Western Massachusetts. Clark’s work is exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, and she is the recipient of several awards including an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Abou Farman — Terminality as Performance
2021-02-24 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Over the last eight months, the lines separating private from public domains of grief, protest from mourning, dying from being killed, the dead from the living, the fleshly from the pixellated, have been blurred. Through sound, theory, image, and affect, Farman and his collaborators explore some practices of daily resurrection and critical mourning.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, February 24th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

Abou Farman is an anthropologist, writer and artist. He is the author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and Clerks of the Passage (2012, Linda Leith Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of New York. As part of the artist duo caraballo-farman, he has exhibited internationally. He is producer and co-writer on several feature films, most recently Icaros: A Vision.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us
2021-02-24 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Bookshop Santa Cruz, in partnership with The Humanities Institute, Marcus Books, and the NAACP Santa Cruz County Branch, present author Heather McGhee in conversation with Alicia Garza, Principal at Black Futures Lab and co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter. McGhee’s new book, The Sum of Us, is a powerful exploration about the self-destructive bargain of white supremacy and its rising cost to all of us—including white people—from one of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers.

The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, still the richest country in the world, but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. At the heart of the book are the humble stories of Americans yearning to be a part of a better America, including white supremacy’s collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a vision for the future of our country—one whose population has ties to every place on the globe—where we finally realize that life can be so much more than zero-sum.
“Racism is not merely destructive to people of color. It is self-destructive to many white people. Racism is anti-American and anti-human as Heather McGhee expertly and judiciously proves in The Sum of Us. This is the book I’ve been waiting for. The Sum of Us can help us come together to build a nation for us all, with policies that benefit us all.” —Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy. The former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos, McGhee has drafted legislation, testified before Congress and contributed regularly to news shows including NBC’s Meet the Press. She now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. McGhee holds a BA in American studies from Yale University and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Alicia Garza believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve — to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An author, political strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, Alicia founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics. She is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and is a co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism. Alicia has become a powerful voice in the media and frequently contributes thoughtful opinion pieces and expert commentary on politics, race and more to outlets such as MSNBC and The New York Times. She has received numerous accolades and recognitions, including being on the cover of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World issue and being named to Bloomberg’s 50 and Politico’s 50 lists. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World Penguin Random House), and she warns you — hashtags don’t start movements. People do.

Deep Read Salon: Going Deep with There There
2021-02-24 17:30 - 18:30 | CA
Professors Mayanthi Fernando (Anthropology), Katie Keliiaa (Feminist Studies & Indigenous Studies), and Renya Ramirez (Anthropology) will participate in a salon-style conversation about the novel, sharing their intelelctual approaches to the work and answering questions from the Deep Read community.
This salon is for Deep Read Community members and will be held over Zoom. RSVP to get the Zoom link:
RSVP
About The Deep Read
This salon is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Bryan K. Roby: Blackness in Israel
2021-02-25 11:40 - 13:15 | Virtual Event
Bryan K. Roby (University of Michigan) will speak in HIS 74B on his book titled The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle 1948-1966 (Syracuse University Press, 2015) and about his ongoing research regarding Blackness and Mizrahi history in Israel. This talk explores the works of poet activists, artists, and slam poets of Yemenite and Ethiopian Jewish Israelis who identify with Global Blackness in order to examine what constitutes Blackness for Jews in Israel as well as how Blackness acts as a tool of empowerment for marginalized communities. How do we understand Blackness in Israel, not as a color, but a social construct built around inequality and fixed notions that racialized symbols of identity correlate to social mobility? How do Black feminism and queer of color critiques translate in a Hebrew/Israeli context?

Bryan K. Roby is an Assistant Professor of Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. His expertise is on 20th century Israeli and North African Jewish history. His research and teaching interests include Jewish racial constructs; policing and civil rights globally; and 19th and 20th century North African history. He has written on social justice protests in Israel and is currently working on a second book, Israel through a Colored Lens: Racial Constructs in the Israeli Jewish Imagination, that explores the shifting boundaries of racial constructs in Israel/Palestine as well as African-American intellectual contributions to Israeli sociology and theories on race and ethnicity.
HIS 74B “Introduction to Middle Eastern and North African Jewish History, 1500-2000” surveys modern Jewish history from Morocco to Iran, 1500-2000. Studying these populations through original documents, scholarly works, and literature imparts a unique perspective on both modern Jewish history and that of the region, challenging and complementing standard narratives of each.
This course is supported by the Humanities Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and The Neufeld Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Dr. Nitana Hicks Greendeer: Indigenous Feminism and Language Reclamation
2021-02-25 15:20 - 16:55 | Virtual Event
Dr. Nitana Hicks Greendeer joins us to speak about the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, profiled in the documentary, “We Still Live Here.” The film tells the story of the cultural revival of the Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts and the return of the Wôpanâak language, silenced for more than a century.
It is recommended that attendees view “We Still Live Here” in advance of the talk at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3h1myn
Founded in 1993 by Jessie Little Doe, WLRP did something never done before – resurrect a native language. Wôpanâak was the first American Indian language to use an alphabetic writing system, developed by English missionaries in the early 1600s to convert the Wampanoag to Christianity. The first complete bible printed in the “New World” was published in 1663 in Wôpanâak.
Since the film’s release in 2010, WLRP has worked to bring the Wôpanâak language to more formalized educational settings, both public and private. Dr. Greendeer will talk about what this journey has been like for her personally, and how it has transformed the Wampanoag community.

This event is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department.

Living Writers: Danusha Lemeris and Tess Taylor
2021-02-25 17:20 | Virtual Event
Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.

Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The Forage House, called “stunning” by The San Francisco Chronicle. Work & Days was named one of The New York Times best books of poetry of 2016. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as a part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, hailed as “brilliant” in the LA Times.

Deep Read Salon: A Discussion with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band
2021-02-25 17:30 - 18:30 | Virtual Event
Discuss the Tommy Orange’s There There with members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, the Indigenous tribe native to the Santa Cruz region.
This salon is for Deep Read Community members and will be held over Zoom. RSVP to get the Zoom link:
RSVP
About The Deep Read
This salon is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Latinos Modelos Conferencia Virtual 2021 - Latino Roles Models 2021 Virtual Conference
2021-02-27 09:30 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
Un evento anual gratuito para estudiantes del condado de Santa Cruz desde el sexto grado a la universidad y sus familias, con profesionales latinos, estudiantes universitarios y talleres de información. Esta conferencia será en español con interpretación al inglés. Asistentes elegibles para premios.
A free annual event for Santa Cruz County students grades 6 to college and their families, featuring Latino professionals, college students, and information workshops. Presented in Spanish with English translation. Attendees eligible for prizes.

Se require inscribirse • Pre-registration is required
Dr. Manuel Pastor, Orador Principal, Keynote Speaker:
-Distinguido profesor de Sociología y Estudios Estadounidenses y Etnia en la Universidad del Sur de California (USC), donde dirige el Instituto de Investigación de Equidad de la USC.
-Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC) where he directs the USC Equity Research Institute.
PRESENTADO POR • PRESENTED BY: Cabrillo College; Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County; Consulado General de México en San José; Greater Opportunities for Adult Learning (GOAL); Live Oak School District, Pajaro Valley Unified School District; Santa Cruz City Schools; Santa Cruz County Office of Education; Santa Cruz County College Commitment; Senderos; Soquel Union Elementary School District; UC Santa Cruz: The Humanities Institute / Institute for Social Transformation.
More information: (831) 854-7740 · info@SCSenderos.org · SCSenderos.org

Art, Abolition, and the University: Ashley Hunt and the Underground Scholars
2021-03-02 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Visualizing Abolition presents artist Ashley Hunt in conversation with MJ Hart, Joshua Solis, Alberto Lule, Ryan Flaco Rising, and Rodrigo Vazquez of the Underground Scholars Initiative. The Underground Scholars Initiative supports formerly incarcerated students at UC Santa Cruz and system impacted students in the transition experience and beyond. For Art, Abolition, and the University, Hunt and the Underground Scholars will talk about their collaboration of a broadsheet for the Barring Freedom exhibition, available here. They will also discuss the roles of the university in struggles for abolition and what they call the prison to school pipeline.
Featured Music Performance – Orrin Evans and Eric Revis
Underground Scholars is a statewide initiative that supports formerly incarcerated and system impacted students in the transition experience and beyond. With a focus on recruitment, retention, advocacy and policy. We aim to bridge the popular academic theoretical discourse of mass incarceration with one that is grounded in the lived experiences of UCSC students and students from surrounding communities. Together we are building the prison to school pipeline.

Ashley Hunt uses images, objects, maps, writing and performance to engage social ideas and actions. He approaches art and activism as complimentary spheres of practice — drawing upon the ideas and aesthetics of social movements, cultural theory and art alike. Hunt has exhibited work in galleries internationally and correctional institutions, such as the 2012 Made in L.A. Biennial of the Hammer Museum, the Tate Modern in London and the Putnamville Correctional Institution in Indiana.
Missy “MJ” Hart is an artist, abolitionist, and gang member turned activist after surviving the horrors of the criminal injustice system. MJ is a Workshop Facilitator and Creator of “Rozes Among Thorns” with the org The Beat Within. MJ is helping to establish the Underground Scholars Initiative at UCSC while completing their BA in Psychology with a minor in History of Consciousness. MJ strives to put their knowledge into action organizing with grassroots movements in their hometown and beyond.
Joshua Solis is a first generation formerly incarcerated alumnus from UCSC. After spending over 11 years incarcerated he is now a leader and advocate for formerly incarcerated and system impacted students in California. He earned a BA in Sociology at UCSC, and is currently pursuing his Masters. Joshua is now the Program Coordinator for the Underground Scholars Initiative at UC Santa Cruz. Through comprehensive collaboration, program coordination, and outreach his efforts serve to continue the prison to school pipeline.
Alberto Lule became an artist while serving a thirteen year prison sentence. Art made the prison walls disappear, allowing Alberto to overcome both a physical and mental prison. Using mixed media installation, Lule critiques mass incarceration and particularly the California prison system. Alberto connects the similarities between institutions, from institutions of higher learning to correctional institutions, to expose and learn from a scientific and sociological perspective, but even more thoroughly through art and activism.
Ryan Flaco Rising has experienced drug addiction, gang banging, physical and mental abuse, incarceration as a juvenile, seven years in prison, and brutal prison riots which almost cost their life. While in prison, education became an outlet to address past trauma and writing helped Ryan grow a passion for learning. Through the Underground Scholars Initiative Ryan developed leadership skills and is engaged in finding solutions to end mass incarceration through collective first-hand experiences while thriving at UC Santa Barbara.
Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-April 25, 2021 and Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Dard Neuman — Hindustani Music and the Politics of Creativity
2021-03-03 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This talk discusses music and the politics of creativity in the context of South Asia more broadly and Hindustani music more specifically (what is today called “Indian classical music”). Neuman traces how elite Muslim (sharif) culture became radically disrupted after British rule was formalized in 1857, and court musicians were dispersed throughout India, with many lineages and traditions quickly fading to obscurity, while a new class of hereditary musicians emerged. These new musicians came from predominantly low-class Muslim bardic communities, and their socio-musical innovations can be better understood in relation to their forceful critiques of feudal hierarchies and caste exclusions. Through oral histories, family genealogies and analysis of music performance, Neuman traces how musicians from “outsider” lineages integrated aesthetic and ideological knowledge systems to forge a fundamentally new socio-musical aesthetic, one that broke from established traditions to widen access to non-elite lineages, but did so in ways determined by heterodox and populist Sufi/Bhakti ideologies and socio-musical translations of classical sources.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, March 3rd; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Dard Neuman is the Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music and Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as Co-Director of the Center of South Asian Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2004 and joined the Music faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2005. He has studied the sitar for almost four decades. His research interests concern the musical cultivation, transmission and performance of Hindustani music in twentieth century North India as well as the role of music in social action. He has published articles for SEM and Asian Music and his book, Hindustani Music, Heterodoxy and the Politics of Creativity is forthcoming with Wesleyan University Press.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

The Deep Read: A Conversation with Tommy Orange
2021-03-03 18:30 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
The 2021 Deep Read Program will explore Tommy Orange’s novel There There. The novel depicts a variety of urban Native American characters living in Oakland, CA. We think this novel meets the need to think deeply about Native American life in our contemporary moment, helping us rethink Native experience and representation. It was also hailed by last year’s Deep Read author, Margaret Atwood, as “an astonishing literary debut.”
Our month-long exploration of the novel will culminate in a free, live, online event with Tommy Orange in conversation with UCSC Creative Writing Professor Micah Perks. Registration details to follow.

Register

About The Deep Read
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s Deep Read Program that invites curious minds to think deeply about literature, art, and the most pressing issues of our day. We read books from a wide range of genres, exploring their implications on our politics, inner lives, and communities.

Mir Suhail - Speaking Satire to Power: A View from Kashmir
2021-03-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Mir Suhail is a political cartoonist and illustrator based in New York City. He is from Indian-occupied Kashmir, where he grew up and started his political cartooning career drawing for a local daily at the age of fourteen. He has since drawn cartoons for leading print and digital news media, magazines, publishers and non-profit organizations in the Indian sub-continent and internationally including for CNN-News 18, The Caravan Magazine, Amnesty International, Action Aid and Save the Children. His work has been profiled in the Raiot, BBC and Al-Jazeera English amongst other publications.
Find Mir’s work at: https://mirsuhailportfolio.wordpress.com/
Mir Suhail will be in conversation with Deepti Misri, Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, and a member of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective.
This event is a part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong exploration of the theme Memory.

Part of the 2020-21 Center For South Asian Studies Lecture Series.

PhD+ Workshop – Public Fellowship Information Session
2021-03-05 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Curious about becoming a THI Public Fellow? Not sure how to find the right partner organization? If you’re thinking about applying your expertise in the public sphere or exploring career opportunities beyond academia, then you may be interested in THI’s Public Fellowship program.
Public fellowships provide opportunities for doctoral students in the Humanities to contribute to research, programming, communications, and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study.
Please join us for an information session about the Public Fellows program on March 5th at 11am. We will discuss Summer and Year-Long opportunities and describe some new partner organizations.
All Public Fellowship applicants are required to attend an Info Session or meet with THI Staff by March 19th. Final applications are due on April 5, 2021.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more. *Note that all 2020-2021 PhD+ workshops are open to University of California faculty, staff, and students, and will be held virtually until further notice.
RSVP here:
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Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing
2021-03-05 14:00 - 15:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Writing Program in celebrating UC Santa Cruz’s eleventh annual Don Rothman Endowed Award in First-Year Writing ceremony on Friday, March 5 from 2:00-3:00pm. This will be a remote and virtual event. Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder, Writing Program Chair Tanner WouldGo, and Writing Program faculty members will be attending the ceremony along with this year’s four winners and their families.

Please RSVP by February 15
The Rothman Award ceremony virtual event link will be emailed to guests who have RSVP’d prior to the March 5 event.

White Supremacy in the Golden State: Sikh Targets, Responses, and Solidarities
2021-03-09 14:00 - 15:15 | Virtual Event
On August 25, 2019, Paramjit Singh was murdered while going for his evening stroll in an affluent area of Tracy, CA. The case against the alleged perpetrator, who had affiliations with white supremacist groups, was quickly dropped by the judge and the Singh family has been left shocked.
While specific political economic contingencies increase formations of white supremacist groups, their presence, power, and assertions of paramountcy in California has dated back to its admittance in the Union in 1850. Anti-Asian violence then and now has a particular trajectory in California, and in this discussion we look at how power is asserted locally and which white supremacist groups are most active in various regions of California. Using Sikh-Americans as a specific example, we examine how communities respond, react, and seek to build their own power and solidarities.

Naindeep Singh Chann
Join Naindeep Singh Chann (Executive Director of the Jakara Movement) with Christine Hong (CRES Director & Associate Professor, LIT/CRES ) & Talib Jabbar (Graduate Student, History of Consciousness/CRES Designated Emphasis) as they discuss white supremacy & it’s impact on the Sikh-American community, & how that translates more broadly into anti-Asian violence in California. Based in California’s Central Valley, Jakara is the nation’s largest Punjabi Sikh youth organizing & base-building organization, dedicated to educational justice, immigrant rights, resident empowerment & civic engagement. Naindeep also currently serves as a School Board Trustee member for Central Unified in Fresno County.
Presented by the Center for Racial Justice.

Corrina Gould: Rematriation and the Land Back Movement
2021-03-09 15:20 - 16:55 | Virtual Event
The UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Department invites you to join Professor Katie Keliiaa and her Indigenous Feminisms class for a public webinar. Guest speaker Corrina Gould is Co-Founder/Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led organization that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. Sogorea Te’ is centered in Huchuin, the ancestral homeland of Chochenyo-speaking Lisjan Ohlone people, now known as the East Bay of San Francisco. Through the practices of rematriation, cultural revitalization, and land restoration, Sogorea Te’ calls on native and non-native peoples to heal and transform the legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchy.

Corrina Gould is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Born and raised in her ancestral homeland, the Ohlone territory of Huchiun, she is the Tribal Chair and Traditional Spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone

Popular Culture and the Radical Imaginary: Patrisse Cullors and Maxwell Addae
2021-03-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Visualizing Abolition is pleased to present “Popular Culture and the Radical Imaginary,” a discussion with Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and artist and activist Maxwell Addae. Their conversation will focus on their collaborative project researching the media portrayals of Black women and incarceration as well the real-world impact of the narratives told about crime and punishment in the United States.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-April 25, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Artist, organizer, educator, and popular public speaker, Patrisse Cullors is a Los Angeles native and Co-Founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and Founder of grassroots Los Angeles based organization Dignity and Power Now. Cullors’ work for Black Lives Matter recently received recognition in TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020 list and TIME Magazine’s 2020 ‘100 Women of the Year’. Cullors is a New York Times bestselling author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018). She is also the Faculty Director at Arizona’s Prescott College of a new Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA program that she has developed. Cullors is a former staff writer at Freeform’s Good Trouble series as well as an actress on the show. For the last 20 years, Cullors has been on the frontlines of criminal justice reform and led Reform LA Jails’ “Yes on R” campaign, a ballot initiative that passed by a 73% landslide victory in March 2020.
With a love of cinema’s more idiosyncratic directing auteurs, Maxwell Addae has strived to express himself as purely as possible. Most notable merging the vulnerably personal with genre flourishes. Following a small stint touring as a performance artist, which changed how he envisioned movement within film, he is now eager to utilize all of the new tools he’s acquired over the years. He has also been a semi-finalist or finalist in the following programs over the past year: Sundance Creative Producing Lab, Nicholls Fellowship, TIFF Talent Filmmaker Lab, and the Austin Screenwriting Competition. His American Film Institute thesis short and most personal work to date is called Outdooring which has screened at over 20 international festivals. Most notably the 2019 South by Southwest, Outfest, shortlisted for the Iris Prize, screened in the 2020 Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival and was acquired in a three-year deal with Revolt TV.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Feminism and Resistance: Afghan Women Moving Forward
2021-03-09 18:30 - 20:30 | Virtual Event
A discussion with Afghan scholars and activists about women’s rights, feminism, and resistance in Afghanistan. Moderated by Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, Teaching Fellow for FMST 188 – Women and War. Presented by the Feminist Studies Department and supported by the Baskin Endowed Chair in Feminist Studies.

Panelists:
Lima Ahmad – PhD candidate in International Security and Human Security at Tufts University. Founder of Paywand Afghanan Association, which focuses on research regarding women’s issues.
Samira Ahmadi – Regional campaigner for Amnesty International South Asia Regional Office and Board Member of the Afghan Women’s Network.
Jamila Afghani – president of WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom) Afghanistan Section, and Islamic scholar on women’s rights.

Mistruth and Consequences: Feminist Scholars on "Comfort Women" Denialism and Grassroots Movements for Justice
2021-03-10 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
In the three decades since Kim Hak-sun of South Korea first publicly identified herself as a former “comfort woman” of the Japanese Imperial Army, a global movement for long overdue justice has emerged, based on substantial survivor testimony and extant historical documents, of the existence of a regionally far-reaching imperial system of military sexual slavery. This discussion focuses on the recent firestorm around Harvard legal professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s denialist “research” as well as the remarkable transnational grassroots activism, including feminist scholarly and pedagogical initiatives, for reparative justice. Presented by the UCSC Center for Racial Justice with co-sponsorship from the Korea Policy Institute.

Panelists:
Sung Sohn – Co-founder and executive director, Education for Social Justice Foundation. A former bilingual resource and classroom teacher, she authored teacher and student resource guides on “Comfort Women” History and Issues (2018).
Alexis Dudden – Professor of History, University of Connecticut. Her books include Trouble Apologies (Columbia University Press, 2014), which interrogates the interplay between political apology and apologetic history among Japan, Korea, and the U.S, and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (University of Hawai‘i, 2006).
Jinah Kim – Associate Professor of Communication Studies and faculty affiliate in Asian Studies, California State University, Northridge. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019) and is a member of the Ending the Korean War Collective.
Kei Fischer – Chair of Ethnic Studies, Chabot College, Hayward, CA. She co-founded Eclipse Rising, a Bay Area-based community group dedicated to promoting the radical history of decolonization and transnational political engagement by Zainichi Koreans.

LASER Talks with Deans Jasmine Alinder & Katharyne Mitchell
2021-03-11 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual Event
Join the Institute of the Arts and Sciences for live, online LASER Talks with UC Santa Cruz Dean of the Humanities Jasmine Alinder, historian of photography, and Dean of the Social Sciences Katharyne Mitchell, geographer and migration specialist. Touching on far-reaching subjects including the role of imagery in anti-Asian racism in the United States and the mobilization of church congregations responding to the migration crisis in Europe, the event will begin with presentations by the scholars, followed by a Q&A .
Jasmine Alinder: “Representing Japanese American Incarceration”
Katharyne Mitchell: “Sanctuary Space and Insurgent Memory”

LASER Talks (Leonardo Art & Science Evening Rendezvous) is an international program bringing together artists, scientists, and scholars for presentations and conversations.
Jasmine Alinder is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alinder is an interdisciplinary, community-engaged scholar and teacher of public history, the history of photography, and the history of Japanese-Americans during World War II. As a historian of photography, her research investigates what she characterizes as “the presumptive right to the camera.” She earned her doctorate in the history of art at the University of Michigan, with an emphasis on the history of photography, her M.A. in art history at the University of New Mexico, and an A.B. in art history from Princeton University. She joined UC Santa Cruz from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was a professor of history and associate dean of the humanities in the College of Letters and Science.
Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses on the ethics, practices, and politics of church sanctuary in the protection of refugees in Europe. Her recent books include Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (2018), and the co-edited Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (2019). She is working on a monograph entitled Sanctuary Space: Memories of Insurgency, and an edited volume on philanthropy and humanitarianism. Mitchell is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters, as well as the recipient of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Spencer Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, and National Science Foundation. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.

Sansei and Sensibility with Karen Tei Yamashita
2021-03-27 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel (National Book Award finalist), Tropic of Orange, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Letters to Memory. Recipient of numerous awards, including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (2018), she is professor emerita of creative writing and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sansei and Sensibility is described by Kirkus as “An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience. … Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny — as on target as the movie Clueless.” In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance — familial, cultural, emotional, artistic — really means. In a California of the ’60s and ’70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives’ freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community’s gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.
Read a Q&A with the author in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ora Matushansky Linguistics Colloquium
2021-04-02 13:20 | Virtual Event
For more information, please see the Linguistics Department Colloquia page.

Okinawa Memories Initiative Graduate Student Roundtable
2021-04-02 16:30 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Mark your calendars for the Okinawa Memories Initiative’s “Graduate Student Talk” featuring a round-table discussion with graduate student team members. Join us at 4:30PM on April 2nd, for a conversation centering around their work with OMI, graduate research in History, and working in the humanities. The panel will feature OMI team members: Alexyss “Lex” Mclellan, Drew Richardson, Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Nirupama Chandrasekhar, and Wyatt Young.

How to Live Like Shakespeare
2021-04-05 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-04-12 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-04-19 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-04-26 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-03 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-10 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
This series of noontime conversations will feature key passages by Shakespeare, selected for what they reveal about life and living. What are the virtues or capacities that Shakespeare took to be essential to social, spiritual, and civic happiness? How do Shakespeare’s speakers think out loud about values and ends, and how does Shakespeare think in and through his characters about matters of meaning? What images did Shakespeare offer and what words did he choose to make these themes tangible to his actors and audiences and worthy of sharing with others?

Co-hosted by Julia Lupton (UC Irvine) and Sean Keilen (UC Santa Cruz)
Mondays at noon, April 5, 12, 19, 26, May 3, 10, 17, 24
Themes addressed will include Imagination, Friendship, Fortitude, Empathy, Justice, Forgiveness, Hope, and Courage.
Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English at UC Irvine and the co-director of the New Swan Shakespeare Center. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare and the editor or co-editor of many volumes and journal issues. Recent works include Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life and Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama, co-edited with Matthew Smith. Professor Lupton is a Guggenheim laureate and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her current projects address Shakespeare, virtue, and wisdom literature. She is an award-winning teacher and community educator.
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz and the Director of UCSC Shakespeare Workshop. He is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and an editor of many volumes of criticism, most recently The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (with Nick Moschovakis). He is writing a book about scholars in Shakespeare’s plays and what the modern humanities might learn from them. Professor Keilen is a Guggenheim laureate and an award-winning teacher and community educator. Since 2013, he has worked closely with Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a professional theater company in Northern California.
For information, contact Julia Lupton, jrlupton@uci.edu.
Co-sponsored by UCI’s New Swan Shakespeare Center and THI’s Shakespeare Workshop.

Abolition Beyond the State w/ Sadie Barnette, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Zoé Samudzi, and Eric Stanley
2021-04-06 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
What role can the arts take in the movement to abolish prisons in addition to abolishing the society that upholds them? How can art and culture elevate other ways of living together, without relying on the fences, walls, and cages, which are both imagined and already practiced? Visualizing Abolition continues with Sadie Barnette, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Zoé Samudzi, and Eric Stanley discussing Abolition Beyond the State.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies and Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-April 25, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Eric A. Stanley is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of Atmospheres of Vioelnce: Trans/ Queer Antagnoism and the Ungovernable (forthcoming Duke UP) and the coeditor of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.
Zoé Samudzi’s research work engages the colonization of South West Africa (now Namibia) and genocidal productions of African identities on the continent. She is the graduate student intern at both UCSF’s Multicultural Resource Center and the LGBT Resource Center. Zoé received her MSc in Health, Community, and Development from the London School of Economics, and her B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Her work seeks to merge political theory, visual studies, and critical approaches to science in service of a multidisciplinary means of articulating blackness(es). Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, The New Republic, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Arts.Black, and she is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. Along with William C. Anderson, she is the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Our Liberation (AK Press).
Sadie Barnette earned her BFA from CalArts and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums such as LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, the California African American Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem (where she was also Artist-in-Residence), Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim. She is the recipient of Art Matters and Artadia awards and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Vogue. She lives in Oakland, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli) is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on Indigenous studies, critical race studies, settler colonial studies, and anarchist studies. Kauanui earned her doctorate in History of Consciousness and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008) and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018). She is also the editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018), which is based on the radio program she produced and hosted for seven years, “Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond” that was widely syndicated through the Pacifica radio network. Kauanui currently serves as a co-producer for an anarchist politics show called, “Anarchy on Air,” a majority-POC show co-produced with a group of Wesleyan students, which builds on her earlier work on a related program, “Horizontal Power Hour.” She is one of the six original co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), established in 2008. Kauanui also serves as an advisory board member of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Ben Kafka — The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy
2021-04-07 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
What does it mean to be driven crazy? By a parent, a professor, a president, perhaps even the internet itself? In 1959 the psychoanalyst Harold Searles published a paper in The British Journal of Medical Psychology, “The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy: An Element in the Aetiology and Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia.” “My clinical experience,” he wrote, “has indicated that the individual becomes schizophrenic partly by reason of a long-continued effort, a largely or wholly unconscious effort, on the part of some person or persons highly important in his upbringing, to drive him crazy.” This talk will consider Searles’s thesis and its implications for our understanding of mental life. It will argue that, while it may not be a very good explanation for schizophrenia, it nevertheless offers us new opportunities to think about our relations to media, culture, and one another.

This colloquium is co-sponsored by the History Department.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 7th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Ben Kafka is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is also a psychoanalyst in private practice. He the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012) and co-editor, with Francesco Pellizzi and Stefanos Geroulanos, of The Problem of the Fetish: William Pietz’s Lost Manuscript (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is currently working on a book about gaslighting, folies-à-deux, double binds, Catch-22s, and other forms of induced insanity.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Dwaipan Banerjee - The Aesthetics of Postcolonial Science: Art and Physics in 1950s Bombay
2021-04-08 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Dwaipayan Banerjee is Associate Professor in the department of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. He is the author of two books, Hematologies – The Political Life of Blood in India and Enduring Cancer – Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi. His new project is situated at the intersection of early-postcolonial physics, computing and the arts in Kolkata and Mumbai.

Part of the 2020-21 Center For South Asian Studies Lecture Series.

Living Writers: Andrea Abi-Karam with Literature Graduate Student Madison McCartha
2021-04-08 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Under the full Community Engagement Scholarship, Andrea received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. With Drea Marina they co-hosted Words of Resistance [2012-2017] a monthly, radical, QTPOC open floor poetry series to fundraise for political prisoners’ commissary funds. Selected by Bhanu Kapil, Andrea’s debut is EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for publication in September 2021 at Nightboat Books. Andrea toured with Sister Spit in 2018 and has performed at RADAR, The Poetry Project, The STUD, Basilica Soundscape, TransVisionaries, Southern Exposure, Counterpulse, & Radius for Arab-American Writers. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are a leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.

Madison McCartha is a black poet and multimedia artist whose work appears in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, DREGINALD, The Fanzine, Full Stop, jubilat, and elsewhere. Their writing has received support from Winter Tangerine, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and was shortlisted for the 2019-2021 CAAPP Creative Writing Fellowship. In summer 2021, Madison will hold a residency through the Ucross Foundation. Madison holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where they received the Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Award in Creative Writing, and is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Madison’s debut book-length poem, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in 2021. Their second book of poetry, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.

PhD+ Workshop – Memory Work: Oral History as Toolkit for Creating a Living & Making an Impact
2021-04-09 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
Memory Work: Oral History as Toolkit for Creating a Living & Making an Impact
Join oral historian Cameron Vanderscoff to discuss the practice of oral history in times of crisis. “Memory Work” will explore the potential of the oral history toolkit for your own career and for social impact. This talk will share the practical lessons and pitfalls of converting a history education into paid historical work outside of conventional tenure-track pathways. We’ll consider the oral historian as a new public intellectual, and examine oral history not only in terms of its prosaic power as a discipline, but its poetic and popular power as an artform—as orature. Concrete case studies will be shared, and the fundaments of oral history method, theory, and ethics will be explored. Newcomers and experienced oral historians alike are welcome.
Cameron Vanderscoff is an oral historian and writer with his own practice based in New York City and a deep track record of public and private partnerships. He holds an MA from Columbia University and consults internationally across a versatile project portfolio, designing and executing impactful projects and offering comprehensive workshops. As Co-Founder of the Okinawa Memories Initiative, historical dialogue and education is the heart of his work. Cameron is also the co-editor of Seeds of Something Different, a celebrated new oral history of UC Santa Cruz and experimentation in education. He is currently collaborating on his second book, a social memoir touching on pressing themes of racial and social justice in American history.
This workshop is presented in partnership with CART Commons, an ongoing project hosted by the University Library’s Special Collections & Archives. CART Commons provides opportunities for graduate students to engage with one another and with archivists in considering questions related to primary source research practices.
About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more. *Note that all 2020-2021 PhD+ workshops are open to University of California faculty, staff, and students and will be held virtually until further notice.

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Kathryn Davidson Linguistics Colloquium
2021-04-09 13:20 | Virtual Event

Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist
2021-04-12 18:00 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
NPR science reporter Lulu Miller will discuss her fantastic nonfiction debut Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss. Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (available in paperback on April 6th). This riveting book, begins with an account of biologist David Starr Jordan, and then goes down a rabbit hole of history, morality, and scientific adventure. Mary Roach calls it, “Perfect, just perfect,” and Sy Montgomery says, “This book will capture your heart, seize your imagination, smash your preconceptions, and rock your world.” This event is presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz, and cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

This is a free event. The featured book may be purchased here.
Why Fish Don’t Exist tells the strange tale of 19th-century taxonomist David Starr Jordan, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightening, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent over a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.
Miller digs into this obscure moment in science history to take us on a remarkable journey that explores some of the biggest questions of our lives: the nature of persistence, of life’s purpose, and how we strive to make sense of a chaotic world. Like Susan Orlean peeled back layers in The Orchid Thief, Miller takes us from the desecration of David Starr Jordan’s specimen collection to a possible murder, and from a colony of victims of eugenics to her own love life—interweaving biography, memoir, and the latest science, psychology, and philosophy to investigate what it takes to live a life of resilience.
Why Fish Don’t Exist is an astonishing and category-defying work, by turns harrowing and life-affirming. Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, it’s a story for anyone who has ever found themselves lost amidst the chaos of life, and reminds us how we—like David Starr Jordan—can find the courage to stand up again in the wreckage.
Lulu Miller is the co-founder of the NPR program Invisibilia, a series about the unseen forces that control human behavior. Before creating Invisibilia, she produced Radiolab for five years and was a reporter on the NPR Science Desk. She received a MFA from the University of Virginia on a Poe-Faulkner Fellowship. She is currently the co-host of NPR’s Radiolab.

Abolition from the Inside Out w/ jackie sumell, Albert Woodfox, and Tim Young
2021-04-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The Institute of the Arts and Sciences is pleased to partner with the Legal Studies Program to present jackie sumell, Albert Woodfox, and Tim Young. Award-winning artist jackie sumell works collaboratively with people incarcerated across the U.S. to promote abolition. Albert Woodfox is an activist and author who spent decades in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Tim Young is a poet and activist currently on San Quentin’s Death Row and sumell’s collaborator on UC Santa Cruz’s Solitary Garden. Together, they will discuss the activism and collaborations taking place between people inside and outside of prisons to, as sumell puts it, “imagine a landscape without prisons.

Featured Music Performance – Elena Pinderhughes
Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
jackie sumell is a multidisciplinary artist inspired by the lives of everyday people. Her work speaks to both traditional artist communities and those historically marginalized by structural racism. sumell’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the US and Europe. Her residencies and awards include 2017 Blade of Grass-David Rockefeller Fund Joint Fellow in Criminal Justice, 2016 Robert Rauschenberg Artist-As-Activist Fellowship, 2015 Eyebeam Project Fellowship, and 2008 Akademie Solitude Fellowship. An ardent public speaker and prison abolitionist, sumell has lectured in Colleges and Universities around the US including UC Berkeley (BAMPFA), RISD, ZKM Karlsruhe, and as keynote for the National Prisoner Advocacy Conference 2014. sumell began the Solitary Gardens project to honor the legacy of political prisoner Herman Wallace, who was held in solitary confinement for over 40 years and with whom jackie corresponded and collaborated for 12 years. Her collaborative work with Herman Wallace, The House That Herman Built, is the subject of the Emmy Award Winning documentary Herman’s House, screened to a national audience on PBS in 2013. sumell’s work explores the intersection of creative practices, mindfulness studies, social sculpture, and the principles of The Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
Albert Woodfox is an activist and the author of “Solitary,” a 2019 National Book Award finalist. Known as one of the Angola Three, along with Robert King and Herman Wallace, Woodfox served nearly 44 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was released in 2016. Woodfox was a committed activist in prison, he remains so today, speaking to a wide array of audiences, including the Innocence Project, Harvard, Yale, and other universities, the National Lawyers Guild, as well as at Amnesty International events in London, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium.
Timothy James Young is a writer, activist, and a wrongfully convicted prisoner on Death Row. He was arrested in April of 1999 for a crime that he did not commit and was subsequently sentenced to Death Row in April of 2006. He is now partaking in the Appellate process as a means of proving his innocence and regaining his freedom. Tim is a collaborator in Solitary Garden, a participatory public sculpture and garden project by award-winning artist jackie sumell. The sculpture follows the blueprint of a 6’x9’ U.S. solitary confinement cell similar to the one that Tim has been confined to for twenty-one years. The cell is surrounded by a garden which Tim designed via letters and drawings to students and volunteers, who cultivate it as his proxies.Tim’s writings have been featured in the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Rebecca Hernandez — Categories, Identities, and Objects: Naming Native Art
2021-04-14 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This presentation will examine the inherent complexities in the academic study and public representation of American Indian culture(s), and how the categorization and defining of Native American objects aids in the construction of American Indian identity.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 14th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Rebecca Hernandez is currently the Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, where she is focused on the retention of Native students and developing programs that promote a better understanding of American Indian culture(s) and lifeways at UCSC. She has worked in university administration for 15 years and taught courses in universities and community colleges. Her PhD is in American Studies with a concentration in Native American Studies and Visual Culture. She also holds an MFA in Exhibition Design and Museum Studies.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Reparations for Black Americans: The Road to Racial Equality in California and Beyond
2021-04-15 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
In 2020, California established the nation’s first state task force to study and make recommendations on reparations for the institution of slavery, the atrocities that followed the end of slavery, and the discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present. Although the movement for reparations extends to the eighteenth century, it has gained new momentum in recent years. Join us for a conversation with some of the country’s leading experts and advocates for reparations, to discuss these questions and more:

How does the movement for reparations fit into efforts to close the racial wealth gap and promote racial equity?
Why study and discuss reparations in California?
What are the connections between the California task force and national debates about reparations?
What might reparations for Black Americans at a federal level look like in the 21st century?

Limited number of FREE books available to event registrants (priority will be given to UCSC students).
Co-sponsored by: The Institute for Social Transformation, Center for Racial Justice, and Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UC Santa Cruz.
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen are co-authors of the 2020 book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, which makes a powerful case for Black reparations and offers a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program.
William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics and Business, and Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity’s research includes a focus on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution. He is a past president of the National Economic Association and the Southern Economic Association.
A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. Mullen’s research focuses on race, art, history and politics. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is a past president of the North Carolina Folklife Institute.
Anne Price is the first woman President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. She has worked in the public sector on a wide range of issues including child welfare, hunger, workforce development, community development and higher education. Anne was one of the first national leaders to examine narratives about race and wealth. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Mercury News, The Wall Street Journal, Citylab, O Magazine, and other publications. Anne holds a BA in Economics from Hampton University and a Master’s Degree in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the Milano School of Management and Urban Policy in New York City.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee was born in segregated El Paso, Texas. As a single mother raising two sons, she attended Mills College in Oakland, and later received her Master’s in Social Work from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1998, she was elected to serve California’s 9th congressional district (now the 13th) in a special election. Currently, Congresswoman Lee is a member of the House Appropriations Committee and Chair of the subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations. She serves as Co-Chair of the Steering & Policy Committee, former Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Chair Emeritus of the Progressive Caucus, Co-Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Health Task Force, and Co-Chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus. As Co-Chair, Rep. Lee works to ensure that committees reflect the diversity, dynamism, and integrity of the Democratic Caucus. As a member of the House Democratic Leadership, she is the highest ranking African American woman in the U.S. Congress.

Saidiya Hartman: The Afterlife of Slavery
2021-04-19 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The Humanities Institute is honored to welcome esteemed Professor Saidiya Hartman for a free, live, online conversation about her relationship to the archives of Black life, the intersections between history and literature, and the politics of memory.
Confronting slavery and its long, unfinished aftermath, Hartman’s work is a brave, imaginative, genre-bending exercise in historical resurrection. Through a hybrid of documentary research and informed speculation, Hartman gives us back the stories of those enslaved and struggling for freedom.
In the interdisciplinary spirit of innovative scholar and historian Hayden White, Professor Hartman will engage in a public conversation with two leading UC Santa Cruz humanities scholars, literary critic Vilashini Cooppan and historian Greg O’Malley.
Register

This event is the Inaugural Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture and kicks off UC Santa Cruz’s 2021 Alumni Week April 19 – 25. Check the schedule for more events and ways to connect with the campus community.
The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture Series is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. and Josephine Baird Memorial Fund, via an endowment that supports yearly lectures relevant to historical and cultural theory, and to ensure that Hayden White’s legacy and intellectual spirit is honored and sustained.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.
Vilashini Cooppan is professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches comparative and world literature, with an emphasis on postcolonial theory, genre theory, memory studies, and affect theory. She has published extensively on world literature, and on memory and trauma. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing and is completing a book titled The World at Large: Memoryscapes in World Literature.
Greg O’Malley is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His first book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, received four awards: The American Historical Association’s Forkosch Prize for British history; the AHA’s Rawley Prize for Atlantic history; The Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association; and the Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians. He is currently writing a new book, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom in the Revolutionary Era.

*Homepage Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

(Re)Enacting Revolution: Dread Scott and Erin Gray
2021-04-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Dread Scott’s recent large-scale art project, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, was a community-engaged performance reenacting the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history. Prof. Gray, UC Davis, will join him in conversation about art, revolution, and reenactments. This is the next event in Visualizing Abolition, an online program featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His work is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Dread’s studio is now based in Brooklyn.
Dr. Erin Gray is a writer, educator, and activist currently living in occupied Huichin (Oakland, California). Erin is an assistant professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies in the English department at UC Davis, where she writes and teaches at the intersections of critical theory and visual and performance studies to interrogate the aesthetic production of racist and anti-racist thought. Erin’s current book project, The Moving Image of Lynching: Liberalizing Racial Terror in the Long Photographic Century, theorizes the co-emergence and continuing imbrication of lynch law and racial liberalism as constitutive elements of U.S imperial power. Her co-edited anthology, The Black Radical Tradition in the United States, is forthcoming from Verso Press in 2021. She has published essays in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Truthout, and Viewpoint.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Susan Lepselter — Left-Standing
2021-04-21 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Left-Standing is a performance of written and video poems. The video does not illustrate the writing; rather the two media become an interconnected poetics. Together, these forms of poetry engage visual, aural, and affective dimensions of ordinary human encounters with the nonhuman world. The overall scenario presents encounters both with animals who wander a suburban neighborhood after a woods has been razed and developed, and with the trees, grasses, waters, and crops in the leftover woods and its surrounding farmlands. Lepselter’s presentation evokes a world at a moment of ecological, social, and epistemological precarity and continuity.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 21st; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Susan Lepselter is Associate Professor of American Studies, and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Folklore, at Indiana University Bloomington. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to narrative and poetics in the United States, and has published work on UFO stories, conspiracy theories, dream narratives, and hoarding shows. She is currently completing a multimedia book of poetry supported by a New Frontiers award from Indiana University. Her book The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny (University of Michigan Press, 2016) won the 2017 Society for Cultural Anthropology Bateson Prize.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Lunchtime chat with Humanities Dean Jasmine Alinder
2021-04-21 13:00 - 14:00 | Virtual Event
Please join the Humanities Division’s newest Dean, Jasmine Alinder, to hear her thoughts on her first year as Dean as well as her inspirational vision for the growth and development of the Humanities Division. A brief talk on these topics will be followed by a casual question and answer period. All are welcome!

Living Writers: Anthony Cody
2021-04-22 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and finalist for a 2020 National Book Award. He is a CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Boiler, ctrl+v journal, among others. Anthony is a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and co-edited How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. He is a recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate from Fresno State where he continues to collaborate with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. Anthony has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference. He provides communication support to CantoMundo, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press.

Michelle Sheehan Linguistics Colloquium
2021-04-23 09:00 | Virtual Event

Conflict and Revolutionary Possibility in North Africa: Sudan, Algeria, and the Western Sahara
2021-04-23 10:00 - 11:30 | Virtual Event
In the past several years, moments of political opposition and revolutionary possibility have continued to unfold across North Africa. In 2018, protest erupted in Sudan. Algeria followed when in 2019, President Bouteflika announced his intention to seek a fifth term. In the Western Sahara, the Polisario Front resumed its armed struggle in 2020 after the end of a twenty-nine year-long UN mediated cease-fire. Featuring Khalid Medani (McGill University), Vivian Solana (Carleton University), and Farida Souiah (Aix-Marseille University), this event will explore the evolution of revolutionary politics in contemporary North Africa, which has received relatively less attention in the media than the protests that, a decade ago, comprised the “Arab Spring.” Our panelists will shed light on the underlying causes of resistance in each national context as well as its broader implications for regional politics, including questions of pacification, peace, and the politicization of undocumented migration in the region. This event is presented by THI’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Vivian Solana is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology in Ottawa, Canada.Based on long-term ethnographic research in Sahrawi refugee camps located in Southern Algeria, her work studies the social regeneration of the political struggle for the decolonisation of Western Sahara. With a focus on women and youth, she examines everyday forms of political labor that sustain and regeneratethe Sahrawi movement for national independence within the sovereign spaces of other nation-states.
Farida Souiah holds a PhD (Cum Laude) in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and is currently a research associate at Aix-Marseille University, France, in the Centre méditerrannéen de sociologie, de science politique et d’Histoire. Farida studies migration, international mobility and protest. She is particularly attentive to symbolic constructions, social imaginaries and the politicization of migration.
Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, where he is also Chair of the African Studies Program. He is the recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award between 2007-2009. His book, entitled“Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa,” is forthcoming later this year from Cambridge University Press.

Aimee Meredith Cox — Cosmic Cartographies // BodyStorming
2021-04-28 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This talk/participatory workshop will draw from the methods and theoretical orientation of two of Cox’s current projects. The first, Cosmic Cartographies, explores how people define and actualize strategies for Black liberation and is inspired by the ways in which a group of multigeneration Black women activists articulate their physical and psychic relationship to space in Cincinnati. The second, BodyStorm, tracks the social choreography, mobilities, gestures, ways of experiencing the body, and what we might even call dance techniques that are emerging in this time of intensified uncertainty and precarity, as a response to the present and, potentially, as a way of practicing for the future. Cox’s presentation and audience engagement will employ the embodied knowledge and relational techniques developed within and across both projects to explore our own capacities to access new ways of feeling, comprehending, and being in the world.

This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 28th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Aimee Meredith Cox is an anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Anthropology and African American Studies departments at Yale University. Aimee’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. She is the editor of the volume Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018). Aimee is also a dancer and choreographer. She performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Aimee is currently working on two book projects based on ethnographic research among Black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio; Jackson, Mississippi; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn. This overall project is called “Living Past Slow Death.”
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Jodi Dean: Anti-Communism and the Barriers to Liberation
2021-04-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
COVID, climate change, and capitalism present a set of fundamental crises. What will it take for the left to be adequate to the task of addressing them? This talk will consider the barriers constituted by the continuation of anti-communist assumptions. It will draw out the limits of left “assemblism,” state-phobia, and amorphous inclusivity and highlight the necessity of a disciplined struggle for state power. If the problems are as severe as the ever-present evocations of dystopian catastrophe indicate, then the only way forward is the revolutionary seizure of the state and the immediate building of socialism.

Moderated by UC Santa Cruz Professors Debbie Gould (Sociology) and T. J. Demos (History of Art and Visual Culture)
Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke 2009), The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), Crowds and Party (Verso 2016), and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso 2019).
Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, bringing leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit beyond.ucsc.edu

Documenting Justice: Panel Discussion w/ Dee Hibbert-Jones, Nomi Talisman, and guests
2021-05-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The Institute of the Arts and Sciences is pleased to present ‘Documenting Justice,’ a screening of short films curated by Dee Hibbert-Jones, professor, art, UCSC, and filmmaker Nomi Talisman, followed by a panel discussion by the filmmakers. The documentary films on prisons and justice will be available to watch online between April 30 – May 4. Advance registration required for online access to viewing the films and attending the discussion. See below for information on the films.

Huntsville Station, 2020, 14’
Jamie Meltzer and Chris Filippone
Every weekday, inmates are released from Huntsville State Penitentiary, taking in their first moments of freedom with phone calls, cigarettes, and quiet reflection at the Greyhound station up the block.
Beyond the Wire (working title), 2020, 15’
Ted Griswold
Former Army Ranger Chris Pesqueira experiences freedom after 33 years at Soledad State Prison in California. He leans into a community of formerly incarcerated veterans for support as he takes his first steps back into society.
What Happened to Dujuan Armstrong? 2020, 19’
Lucas Guilkey
When a young man mysteriously dies in a Bay Area jail, his mother begins a determined quest to find out what happened to him, but quickly runs into the opaque and powerful position of American sheriffs.
Laps, 2015, 17’
R.J. Lozada
The San Quentin 1000 Mile Running Club is a group of men incarcerated at California’s historical San Quentin State Prison who find temporary solace in long distance running. Laps captures a regular training day in the recreation yard.
The Box, 2021, 16′
James Burns
The Box is a hybrid short film immersing audiences in the realities of solitary confinement through interviews with three people, one of whom is the film’s director, who spent a combined 9 years in solitary.
Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman are collaborative filmmakers whose animated short documentary Last Day of Freedom was awarded a Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award, the California Public Defenders Association Gideon Award, a Northern California Emmy, Best Short at the International Documentary (IDA) Awards, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Their films have been supported by the IDA Enterprise Fund grant, NEA, Cal Humanities Documentary Project Grant, and the Pacific Pioneer Fund, among others. Hibbert-Jones and Talisman are Guggenheim Fellows, MacDowell Colony Fellows, Creative Capital awardees and recipients of the Filmmakers Award from The Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. They are currently residents at SFFilmHouse. They live and work in San Francisco, CA.

Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance
2021-05-04 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
On Tuesday, May 4, 2021 at 5:30pm–7:00pm, there will be 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.
Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press) 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 book launch and the contributors.
The Science & Justice Research Center’s Just Biomedicine research cluster, contributed a chapter titled: ‘Just Biomedicine on Third Street? Health and Wealth Inequities in San Francisco’s Biotech Hub.’ The Third Street 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 Transportation, Infrastructure, and Economy contribution by Kristin Miller (Sociology).
The No Place Like Home project contributed a visual summary and map from their large-scale study of the affordable housing crisis for Santa Cruz County tenants. The survey results provide a springboard for the study’s wider discussion of local and regional policy options in addressing the housing crisis, particularly for renters.
Co-Sponsored by University Relations, 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.

Larisa Jasarevic — Beekeeping in the End Times
2021-05-05 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
A family of would-be migrants reenacts a swarm hunt at their former apiary in northeastern Bosnia. Their folk spells were well-attuned to the sorts of crises that tatter old human-apian ties, except the latest: extreme weather and emigration. Meanwhile, one tepid February, shepherds reflect on gratitude as their sheep graze by the growing coal-power plant. “The End is not yet,” they say. These are snapshots of what Jasarevic calls the quiets of disaster. Sharing a rough cut of a story from an ethnographic film, Jasarevic’s presentation concerns disaster ecology, Islamic eschatology, and ethnography as a homesteading craft.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 5th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Larisa Jasarevic is an independent scholar and a 2021 Wenner-Gren Fejos Fellow. An anthropologist, she has research interests in bodies and health, nature, and eschatology. A beekeeper and a homesteader, she is developing dread about multispecies climate futures. Her second book, Beekeeping in the End Times(IUP), is in preparation. She taught for a decade at the University of Chicago.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Living Writers: Toya Groves and Muriel Leun with Literature Graduate Student Mia Boykin
2021-05-06 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Toya L. Groves is a lifelong teacher and writer who currently works with formerly incarcerated students at Laney College in Oakland, California. She holds a BA in African American studies from UC. Berkeley, a MA in Women’s Spirituality from Sofia University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Her writing includes attributes that reveal both the challenges of her journey while also highlighting the victory of forgiving herself and those who once trespassed against her. After losing the use of her right dominant hand in a car accident she re-learned to write and navigate the world, as a black person and as a woman, literally single handedly. It is her life’s work to illuminate the dark, by telling the story of Motherhood as she sees and experiences it with hopes to inspire others to raise up their voices in chants for healing, love, and freedom.
Mia Boykin is a daughter of California, originally born and raised in Los Angeles and currently finds home in The Bay. Known mainly by her stage/pen name, Mimi Tempestt, she is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She is the creator of the wonderful archival interview series Black.Queer.Alive. which highlights the personal narratives of Black and queer people throughout the world. Her debut collection of poems, The Monumental Misrememberings, is forthcoming with Co-Conspirator Press. She was chosen for Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices for poetry in 2021, and is currently a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco.
Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021, and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau.

Special Issue Launch: Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective
2021-05-07 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
This roundtable celebrates the launch of the Critical Ethnic Studies special issue “Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective.” Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel, and beyond, the special issue’s contributors move past superficial comparisons and think through the circulation of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside the circulation of anti-colonial strategies via transnational social movements. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos — for example, critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, Native studies, Middle East studies, European critical migration studies, comparative colonial studies — this collaboration has generated rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of borders that respond to the urgent challenges of our current moment as they relate to questions of migration and displacement.

Panelists:

Josen Diaz (University of San Diego)
Ivan Char-Lopez (UT Austin)
Loubna Qutami (UCLA)
Jennifer Mogannam (UC Davis)
Leslie Quintanilla (SF State)
Emily Hue (UC Riverside)
Davorn Sisavath (Fresno State)
Nick Mitchell (UCSC)

Presented by The Humanities Institute’s Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Cluster

Geographies of Kinship: A Conversation with Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem and Adoption Rights Activist Kim Stoker
2021-05-10 14:40 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
THI’s Forgotten Wars Research Cluster and the Center for Racial Justice have partnered to present a conversation on the war-forged Korean adoptee diaspora with the director of Geographies of Kinship Deann Borshay Liem and adoption rights activist Kim Stoker, facilitated by Amy Ginther (Theater Arts). (About the film: In a tale about the rise of Korea’s global adoption program, four adult adoptees who were raised in foreign families return to their country of birth, mapping the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew. Along the way they question the policies and practices that led South Korea to become the world’s largest “sending country”—with 200,000 children adopted out to North America, Europe, and Australia. Emboldened by w’hat they have experienced and learned, they become advocates for birth family and adoptee rights, support for single mothers, and historical reckoning).

It is recommended that attendees view the film before the event. Attendees with an @ucsc.edu email may watch the film for free at this website (under school email films, click “Geographies of Kinship”): https://www.newday.com/watch-now
Deann Borshay Liem has over twenty years experience working in development, production and distribution of independent documentaries. She produced, directed, and wrote the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (Sundance, 2000) and the award-winning films, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS, 2010) and Memory of Forgotten War (with Ramsay Liem; PBS, 2015). She served as executive producer for Spencer Nakasako’s Kelly Loves Tony (PBS, 1998) and AKA Don Bonus (PBS, 1996, Emmy Award); On Coal River by Francine Cavanaugh and Adams Wood (Silverdocs, 2010); Ishi’s Return by Chris Eyre (PBS, 2016); and Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story by Ben Wang (PBS, 2017). She also co-produced Special Circumstances by Marianne Teleki (PBS, 2009) and Burqa Boxers by Alka Raghuram (2016), and served as story editor for the award-winning film, The Apology, by Tiffany Hsiung (HotDocs, 2016). She was the former director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) where she supervised the development, distribution and broadcast of new films for public television and worked with Congress to support minority representation in public media. A former Sundance Institute Fellow, Deann directed, produced, and wrote the new documentary, Geographies of Kinship.
Kim Stoker lived in South Korea for almost twenty years. She was a leading activist for adoptee rights with Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), the first adoptee-run political advocacy group of its kind. Returning to the country of her birth and building a life there has indelibly changed her outlook on the world, on the Koreas, and on international adoption. She’s currently based back in the United States where she works as a writer and editor.

Futures: Sora Han, Adrienne Maree Brown and Savannah Shange
2021-05-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Visualizing Abolition, the year-long program featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition, concludes with a conversation on strategies, activism, and liberatory futures with Sora Han, Adrienne Maree Brown and Savannah Shange.

Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent and featuring artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020-March 21, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz. Barring Freedom travels to NYC John Jay College of Criminal Justice April 28-July 15, 2021.

Sora Han is the Director of the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program at UC Irvine, and an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society with courtesy appointments in the School of Law and African American Studies. Her first book, Letters of the Law (Stanford University Press 2015), extends the theoretical insights of critical race theory to produce new readings of American law’s landmark decisions on race and civil rights. She is also the co-author of the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, Third Edition (Edward Elgar Publishing 2020). She is currently working on two books: Slavery as Contract: A Study in the Case of Blackness, which brings together poetics, contract law and afro-pessimist theory to think beyond the property metaphor of slavery; and Mu, the First Letter of an Anti-Colonial Alphabet, an experimental text on the “anagrammatic scramble” (Nathaniel Mackey) of the unconscious materiality of abolitionism. Recent publications on these new lines of research include “Slavery as Contract,” in Law and Literature (2016) and “Poetics of Mu” in Textual Practice (2018).
Adrienne Maree Brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.
Savannah Shange is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Her research and teaching interests include state violence, late liberal statecraft, multiracial coalition, ethnographic ethics, queer politics, and abolition. Her book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.

Evren Savcı — Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
2021-05-12 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Savcı will speak about her book Queer in Translation, which draws on the case of Turkey’s 16 years of AKP governance to intervene in Queer Studies’ separate — indeed, diagonically opposed — approaches to neoliberalism and to Islam. She theorizes “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities to deploy marginality onto ever-expanding populations instead of concentrating it in the lower echelons of society, and she suggests that sexual liberation movements are the most productive places from which to theorize neoliberal Islam, as well as to imagine resistances to it. After an initial presentation, Savcı will then be in conversation with Mayanthi Fernando (UCSC).

This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA).
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 12th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, Duke University Press) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project, tentatively entitled Failures of Modernization: Polygamy, Islamic Matrimony and Cousin Marriages in the Turkish Republic, turns to those sexual practices that were deemed “uncivilized” and either heavily discouraged or outlawed by the Turkish Republic. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and Family; Ethnography; Sexualities; Political Power and Social Theory; Theory & Event; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; GLQ, and in several edited collections.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Noura Erakat: Palestine as an Anti-Racist Struggle?
2021-05-12 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Legal Studies Program Distinguished Lecture presents Professor Noura Erakat (Rutgers University): Palestine as an Anti-Racist Struggle?
More information and Zoom info: https://legalstudies.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/news-article.html
This event is co-sponsored by THI’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Ji Young Kim: La prosodia del Uptalk en el Español de Herencia
2021-05-12 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
El objetivo de este estudio es investigar los patrones entonativos del uptalk en el español de los hablantes de herencia en Los Ángeles, cuyos padres emigraron de México. El uptalk, también llamado High Rising Terminal (HRT), se trata de la entonación ascendente en enunciados declarativos. Generalmente se considera que el uptalk es un rasgo prosódico del inglés, sobre todo el acento valley girl de California. Puesto que los hablantes de herencia son bilingües en español e inglés, se supone que el uso de uptalk es una muestra de la transferencia del inglés al español. Aunque el uptalk se ha investigado mayoritariamente en las variedades del inglés, es importante tener en cuenta el hecho de que este fenómeno prosódico también se observe en otros idiomas, incluso el español. Por ejemplo, en México, el uptalk es una de las características estereotipadas del habla fresa. Por lo tanto, antes de hablar sobre la influencia del inglés en el español de los hablantes de herencia, es primordial analizar la variación lingüística del español del lugar de origen. En este trabajo, se usó el sistema de etiquetaje Sp_ToBI (Beckman et al., 2002; Prieto y Roseano, 2010) para comparar los contornos entonativos del uptalk de los hablantes de herencia y los hablantes monolingües de español. También se analizó la realización acústica del uptalk de los dos grupos. Los datos muestran que los monolingües producen el uptalk con los contornos más dinámicos y con un ascenso final más empinado que los hablantes de herencia. De estos hallazgos se sugieren estudios futuros para explicar la divergencia prosódica del uptalk de los hablantes de herencia.
Please click here to join the Zoom event: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/4712467066?pwd=[REDACTED]
PRESENTATION WILL BE IN SPANISH
Presented by UCSC Spanish Studies and the Department Of Languages and Applied Linguistics.
Ji Young Kim es profesora asistente de la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles. Sus áreas de especialización son la fonética y fonología del español, la adquisición de lenguas de herencia, y el bilingüismo. Su investigación se centra en la realización de los segmentos y la prosodia del español como lengua de herencia, el acento de herencia, y la variación fonética del español de EEUU. Ha publicado artículos sobre estos temas en revistas académicas y es co-editora de la edición especial de la revista Languages “Heritage Speaker Phonetics and Phonology: Testing Models and Expanding the Range of Data.”

Pasolini in Morocco: The Geopolitics of Cinematic Space and Transnational Production
2021-05-12 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Morocco, and especially the desert oasis of Ouarzazate, is well-known as a destination for big-budget Hollywood film productions like The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000). Well before those films, however, iconoclastic Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) shot his Oedipus the King in the same region in 1966. Some of his films’ other locations were found elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East: Persia, Eritrea, Palestine, and Yemen. Pasolini’s films are deeply invested in their respective locations, just as the filmmaker himself was invested in the idea that encounters with “Third World” peoples and places held a radical potential for rethinking the relations of capitalist modernity. In turning, in particular, to his Moroccan Oedipus, this talk addresses the entangled relations of Orientalism and anticolonial aesthetics and the politics of race, queer desire, eroticism, and space in Pasolini’s work. Moreover, it does so by thinking with the Moroccan films and filmmakers that have made political and aesthetic engagements with his work. Using a critical analysis of Pasolini’s Oedipus and an engagement with the film’s Moroccan interlocutors such as Ali Essafi, Daoud Aoulad-Syad, and Ahmed Bouanani, this talk will offer a theoretical investigation of Pasolini’s afterlives in the Maghreb.

Peter Limbrick is professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (University of California Press, 2020) and Making Settler Cinemas (Palgrave, 2010) as well as articles in journals like Third Text, Camera Obscura, and Cinema Journal. In 2013 he curated a retrospective of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi’s films, which screened at the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Block Cinema (Chicago), and Tate Modern (London).
About the Series
The annual Visual and Media Cultures Colloquia (VMCC) at UC Santa Cruz are a collaboration between the graduate programs in Film and Digital Media Department and Visual Studies in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department. The series brings an array of cutting-edge scholars to speak on a broad spectrum of subjects. This event is co-sponsored by THI’s Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora
2021-05-13 11:40 - 13:15 | Virtual Event
Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth century through World War II, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried.

Zoom link will be sent out prior to the event.
Devi Mays is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Michigan. Her book, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020) won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture. She is working on two new projects, the first focusing on Ottoman and North African Jews as tastemakers in fin-de- siècle and interwar Paris with Julia Phillips Cohen, and the second an introduction to and translation of Izmir-based Ottoman Jewish journalist Alexandre Ben Ghiat’s Ladino diary of World War I, entitled Two Steps from the Abyss: An Ottoman Jewish Witness to War.
This presentation will be given during Professor Alma Heckman’s Spring Course offering, HIS 185I: Latin American Jewish History in the Modern Period.

Sites of Memory, Spaces of Dispute: Missions and Monuments in the United States
2021-05-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Join the Research Center for the America for their final event of the “Memory Studies in the Americas” thematic series which explores how markers or symbols of memory are imagined and disputed. Listen to presentations on the San Gabriel mission in Tovaangar (known as Los Angeles today) by Dr. Catherine Ramírez (Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies) and Confederate monuments in Virginia by Dr. Kate Jones (Associate Professor, History), as they weave the personal with the scholarly to explore the contested terrain of memory in the United States. The Q&A will be facilitated by Dr. Rebecca Hernandez, Director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz. Closed captioning and an ASL interpreter will be provided. This event is free and open to the public and co-sponsored with the Institute for Social Transformation and The Humanities Institute.

Dr. Catherine S. Ramírez
Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a scholar of migration, citizenship, race, and gender; Mexican American history; Latinx literature and visual culture; comparative ethnic studies; and speculative fiction. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History (2020) and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (2009) and she is a co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (forthcoming in 2021). She has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Public Books.
Dr. Catherine Jones
Associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Cruz. She completed her PhD in History at the Johns Hopkins University in 2007. Her first book, Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia, was published with the University of Virginia Press in 2015. It won the Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth in 2016. She is currently at work on a book about the history of child incarceration in the post-Civil War era. She has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, J19, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

CANCELLED: Reflections on Movement and Movement-Building
2021-05-14 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
What does it mean to conjure a world without borders, a world without prisons, and a world without the carceral logics that detain and deport? How do we understand the connections and potential coalitions among struggles against policing and prisons, mobilizations against border fortification, and movements to create a more just university such as the COLA strike? This panel explores the abolitionist imperative to eradicate borders—which is fundamentally distinct from imperialist, neoliberal, and liberal humanitarian demands for borderlessness—as one that necessarily brings the prison industrial complex, immigrant detention, border fortification, and labor struggles into the same analytical frame.

Panelists:

Nunu Kidane (Priority Africa Network)
Nick Mitchell (UCSC)
Gave Evans (UCSC, PhD student)
Taylor Wondergem (UCSC, PhD student)
Ilaria Giglioli (New College of Florida)

Presented by The Humanities Institute’s Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Cluster

Gregg Mitman - Empire of Rubber: Scenes from Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Thom Gentle Environmental History Lecture
Empire of Rubber: Scenes from Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.
Empire of Rubber tells a riveting story of of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, as Firestone sought to transform Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Drawing upon excerpts from Mitman’s forthcoming book, this talk illuminates how Black activists, writers, scientists, diplomats, and businesspeople across the African diaspora rallied to support or oppose the experiment that was Firestone in Liberia. It also offers an intimate portrait of how industrial ecologies, born of racial capitalism, shaped the relationships among people, trees, chemicals, machines, and parasites on what became a Jim Crow corporate enclave on African soil.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia, will be published by The New Press in the fall of 2021.

This lecture is made possible by the generosity of Thom Gentle (Cowell ’69, History), a pioneer class alumnus who established The Thom Gentle Endowment for History to support student awards in environmental history as well as lectures of distinguished speakers with an environmental emphasis. Presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center for World History.

Music for Abolition: Artist Panel w/ Curator Terri Lyne Carrington and Guests
2021-05-18 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
Music for Abolition, directed and curated by Terri Lyne Carrington, is a project bringing together musicians across a variety of genres to create a soundtrack—and provide a heartbeat—to our shared struggle for abolition. Expressing grief, rage, exhaustion, and resolution in the face of the U.S. history of racism and oppression, the music resonates with calls of freedom.
Join us May 18 for a conversation about the role of sound and music in the struggle for prison abolition with the participating musicians, including Lisa Fischer, Kris Davis, Val Jeanty, Lily Finnegan, Maimouna Youssef aka “Mumu Fresh”, Queen Cora Coleman, Nicholas Payton, Jason Moran, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Nicole Mitchell, Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Dianne Reeves, Camila Cortina Bello, Elena Pinderhughes, Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science.

Music for Abolition videos can be found here.
Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Professor Gina Dent, Feminist Studies. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020- June, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Three-time GRAMMY® award-winning drummer, producer, educator and activist, Terri Lyne Carrington started her professional career as a “kid wonder” while studying under a full scholarship at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In the mid ’80’s she worked as an in-demand drummer in New York before gaining national recognition on late night TV as the house drummer for both the Arsenio Hall Show and Quincy Jones’ VIBE TV show.
In 1989, Ms. Carrington released a GRAMMY®-nominated debut CD on Verve Forecast, Real Life Story, and toured extensively with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, among others. In 2011 she released the GRAMMY®Award-winning album, The Mosaic Project, featuring a cast of all-star women instrumentalists and vocalists, and in 2013 she released Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, which also earned a GRAMMY®Award, establishing her as the first woman ever to win in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category.
To date Ms. Carrington has performed on over 100 recordings and has worked extensively with luminary artists such as Al Jarreau, Stan Getz, Woody Shaw, Clark Terry, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, James Moody, Yellowjackets, Esperanza Spalding, and many more. Additionally, Ms. Carrington is an honorary doctorate recipient from Berklee, and currently serves as Founder and Artistic Director for the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.
In 2019 Ms. Carrington was granted the Doris Duke Artist Award, a prestigious acknowledgement in recognition of her past and ongoing contributions to jazz music. Her current band project, Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science (a collaboration with Aaron Parks and Matthew Stevens), released their debut album, Waiting Game, in November, 2019 on Motema Music.

Aarti Sethi & Navyug Gill — Dissent: Farmers, Protests, India
2021-05-19 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
The farmers protests in India have ignited a widespread resistance movement globally. Focused initially on repressive farm laws enacted by the Indian state, the protests have now expanded to include broader environmental, social and political concerns impacting the livelihood, independence and sustenance of working people. What was first seen as an agrarian protest movement has become a rallying call for much-needed debates on dissent, casteism, gender, and economic justice.

This colloquium is a joint event with the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS).
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 19th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
Aarthi Sethi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are in agrarian anthropology, political-economy and the study of South Asia. She holds degrees in political science, and cinema and cultural studies, from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2017, and before joining Berkeley, she had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Brown universities. She has previously published on, and has ongoing research and teaching interests in, urban ethnography, and cinematic, media and visual cultures.

Navyug Gill is a scholar of modern South Asia and global history. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. He received a Ph.D. from Emory University, and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor history, caste politics, postcolonial critique and global capitalism. Currently he is completing a book on the emergence of the peasant and the rule of capital in colonial Panjab. His academic and popular writings have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Law and Political Economy Project, Borderlines and Trolley Times.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather online at 12:10 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.
Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

A Fortress in Brooklyn, Michael Casper and Nathaniel Deutsch
2021-05-19 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Join authors Michael Casper and Nathaniel Deutsch in conversation with Lila Corwin Berman about Casper and Deutsch’s new book A Fortress in Brooklyn.
The Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups in the entire United States. A Fortress in Brooklyn tells the remarkable story of how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, A Fortress in Brooklyn presents both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

Michael Casper received his Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has contributed to American Jewish History and the New York Review of Books.
Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Murray Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and is the Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Among his other books are Inventing America’s “Worst” Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael and The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, as well as Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit, and Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Forward, as well as several scholarly journals.

Jonas Staal: Deep Future Propagandas
2021-05-20 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual Event
Propaganda manufactures consent and establishes normativity; it constructs reality and makes worlds. The propagandas of our present produce the futureless futures of dystopian normativity: the libertarian geoengineering of drowned worlds, Flat Earth dark-age anti-globes, and eco-fascist genocide. But these are not the only options available. From popular mass movements to new planetary unions and transnational party-forms, the art of counter-power organizing is struggling for the means of production of the future, to ensure meaningful survival in interspecies comradeship and a biosphere for all. At the intersection of political and artistic imagination, between organizing work and utopian activism, this presentation will sketch the morphologies of a deep future propaganda.

Moderated by T. J. Demos and Martabel Wasserman
Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, propaganda, and democracy. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016–2019). With BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, he co-founded the New World Academy (2013-16); with Florian Malzacher he is currently directing the utopian training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing); and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union. His exhibition-projects include: Art of the Stateless State (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015), After Europe (State of Concept, Athens, 2016), The Scottish-European Parliament (CCA, Glasgow, 2018) and Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Federation of North Syria, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018-ongoing). With a PhD research on propaganda art at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Staal’s most recent book is Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019).
Beyond the End of the World comprises a year-long research and exhibition project and public lecture series, directed by T. J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies, bringing leading international thinkers and cultural practitioners to UC Santa Cruz. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. For more information visit beyond.ucsc.edu

Living Writers: Joan Naviyuk Kane
2021-05-20 17:20 - 18:55 | Virtual Event
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). The author of eight collections of poetry and prose, she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction at Harvard, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s currently a Visiting Fellow of Race and Ethnicity at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College. Her second book, Hyperboreal (winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize), will be published in translation by Editions Caractères this summer, and a collection of new poems, Dark Traffic, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in September. She raises her sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

CANCELLED: PhD+ Publishing Workshop
2021-05-21 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
As co-editors of the recently published special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies on Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective, we invite you to join us for a workshop focused on academic journal article publishing. We will cover: adapting elements from your dissertation into journal articles; creating your own publication pipeline; navigating the journal submission, review, and publishing process; and dealing with rejections. We will also discuss the process of submitting to journal special issues, such as ours–including how to pitch your work to a special issue, how to work with editors on your piece during revise-and-resubmit, and how to propose a guest-edited special issue.

Panelists:

Jenny Kelly (UCSC)
Camilla Hawthorne (UCSC)

Presented by The Humanities Institute’s Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Cluster

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Migrant Futures: South Asia and The Middle East (II) Jagged Environments
2021-05-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Featured speakers: Amita Baviskar (Professor, Sociology-Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Ashoka University) and Gökçe Günel (Assistant Professor, Antropology Rice University).
