The Humanities Institute

CHRISTOPHER DURT: "Galileo and the Emergence of Modern Philosophy"
2010-10-28 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Cowell Conference Room, Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Philosophy graduate student Christopher Durt will give the following talk, “Galileo and the Emergence of Modern Philosophy,” as a Work in Progress.
Come join us!

John Mraz: "Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Icons, Documents"
2010-10-26 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities 1, Room 520, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
John Mraz will examine the photography made during the armed struggle, 1910-1920, through a profusely illustrated lecture. He will then place particular emphasis on identifying the commitment of photographers to different groups in Mexico by looking at five Revolutionary icons.
John Mraz is a Research Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico.
This series is sponsored by: the UC Santa Cruz Chicano/Latino Research Center; UCSC Departments of History; History of Art and Visual Culture; Latin American and Latino Studies; and by Oakes College.

Open Access Day at McHenry Library
2010-10-22 15:00 - 18:00 | McHenry Library (3rd Floor), Special Collections
Open Access Week is an annual international event promoting the idea that scholarly research should be freely and openly available. For Open Access Week 2010, the University Library is sponsoring an afternoon event where about a dozen faculty members representing each of the academic divisions will talk about the ways in which they are making their research, data and teaching resources freely accessible. Please join us, starting at 3:00 pm, for an opportunity to see how UCSC researchers across the disciplines are addressing open access publishing. You are welcome to stay as long as you like. Refreshments will be served.
Schedule of speakers available here.

Ruth Mueller: “Bound to Nothing but Science Itself? Academic Life Science Careers and the Nomadic Disposable Research Scientist”
2010-10-20 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities 1, Room 420, Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Ruth Mueller is a contract researcher at the Department of Social Studies of Science and a lecturer at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Vienna.
She will present: “Bound to Nothing but Science Itself? Academic Life Science Careers and the Nomadic Disposable Research Scientist,” at UCSC on Wednesday, October 20, 2010.
Donna Haraway has argued that “the exclusion of the non-independent person” (Haraway 1997) has been constitutive for the social organization of the emerging modern sciences, practically excluding everyone but the bourgeois white man from participating in scientific knowledge production, in part because the multiple others were perceived as socially and emotionally bound, attached and tied. Drawing on recent research work in Austria and the US, this talk will look into how independence, tielessness and detachment are essential features of the scientific self in the contemporary socio-epistemic configurations of the academic life sciences. It look at how the ideal scientific person – especially in fast growing, highly global and increasingly commercialized fields such as the life sciences – is still imagined as being tied to nothing but science itself, happily subordinating other interests in life to the scientific vocation.
Against a backdrop of rising competition for academic positions, it seems that in the life sciences and in academia beyond, increasingly normative ideas are emerging about what a scientist’s life course should look like in order to qualify for a career in science. Central elements of this normative vision include engaging in international mobility and global competition, as well as submitting to ongoing procedures of evaluation, application and selection. Together, these requirements constitute a kind of “blueprint” for measuring the quality of the scientists’ work and the suitability of their lives for careers in research – a blueprint which has become institutionalized in the employment and assessment policies of contemporary academic institutions.
These contemporary career rationales both draw on and rework the notion of the detached, independent, tieless scientists on a number of levels, participating in the shaping of a nomadic, disposable research scientist who is accumulating nothing “but the absence of inhibition, a sort of free energy prepared to invest itself anywhere.” (Latour 1984)
However, at any given moment in time, these scientists are also part of specific local collectives – such as research group, project teams – in which they work and live. This paper will explore how young scientists make sense of these different forms of collectivity in their local research environments, given the current career rationales that emphasise individualism, competition, mobility and tielessness. I will argue that what we are currently witnessing is a trend towards the institutionalization of highly fragile and exploitative social relations in academic settings and of a “devil-may-care” mentality towards colleagues, groups and institutions that young scientists increasingly consider an obligatory trait for making a career in the life sciences today.

Angela Davis: Legacies in the Making
2009-10-31 09:00 - 2009-11-01 13:00 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Recognizing the Academic, Activist and Cultural Interventions of a Contemporary Visionary
For almost four decades, Angela Y. Davis’s scholarship and activism has defined the meaning and practice of being a public intellectual and has radically transformed many sites of knowledge production, including the positioning of the U.S. academy as a site of intervention and social transformation. Few professors have had such a broad impact in their fields of expertise or on the world in their lifetimes. This gathering of her former students, in conversation with scholars nationally, maps the impact of her vision on issues such as democratic theory, philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies/popular culture, social policy, race, class, and feminisms. Professor Davis has also trained students as activist scholars for almost four decades in both university systems in California. We thus convene this conference to examine the poetics and politics of Professor Davis’s pedagogy in California over the past forty years (1969-2009) and to consider how her role as an activist-scholar-teacher bridges the academy/community divide and dismantles the false dichotomy of theory/praxis.
One focus of the event will be to highlight cultural production that has emerged in conversation with the writing and theorizing that Angela Davis has facilitated and inspired. We are inviting Professor Davis’ colleagues, friends, and family to provide video messages recognizing her considerable on-going contributions to academic and activist work; these will be compiled into a montage to be screened at the symposium. The event, as a whole, will be recorded, and we plan to liaise with the California Documentary Fund to translate those records into a multi-media resource for education. There will also be an evening of music and poetry in honor of Professor Davis and her contributions to cultural “legacies in the making.”
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Humanities Lecture Hall
9:00 am – Breakfast
9:15 am – Screening The Fire This Time, a trailer of a film by Blair Doroshwalther
9:45 am – Welcome
10:00 am – Panel 1: Voices of Resistance
Facilitator: Rashad Shabazz, George Washington Henderson Post Doctoral Fellow, Geography, University of Vermont
W. Mark Cobb, Theoretical Transmission and Creative Defiance: Angela Davis and Intergenerational Politics
Che Gossett, Kiyoshi Kuromiya and the Legacy of Queer and Trans Anti-Prison Activism
Jordan T. Camp, The Sound Before the Fury of the Oppressed
Andrea Smith, The Color of Violence: Angela Davis and the Radicalization of the
Anti-Violence Movement
11:30 am – Panel 2: Race, Gender, and Politics
Facilitator: J. Kehaulani Kauanui, American Studies, Anthropology, Wesleyan University
Erik McDuffie , “I was walking a path… already established by my mother”: Black Left
Feminism and the Making of Angela Y. Davis’ Black Feminist Scholarship and Activism
Jack Jackson, Passing Class Notes: How Queer
Maylei Blackwell, Multiple Insurgencies: Women of Color Feminisms, Genealogies of
Resistance
1 pm- 2:30 pm Lunch
Public Secrets: An Interactive Art Installation by Sharon Daniel, Professor, Film & Digital Media, Humanities 210
2:30 pm – Panel 3: Cultural Legacies
Facilitator: Kevin Fellezs, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, UC Merced
Sherrie Tucker, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism-in-the-Making: Reflections from the
Women’s Studies Classrooms of Angela Davis in the 1980s and 1990s
Roya Rastegar and Susy Zepeda, To “expand and make more capacious our notion of
freedom”: The Women of Color Research Cluster and Film Festival
Sujatha Moni, When Home becomes a Prison, does Prison become Home? Reflections on
Violent Diasporic Displacement in Jag Mundhra’s film, Provoked
Michelle F. Erai, Civilizing Images: Violence and the Visual Interpellation of Maori women
4-4:15 pm Break
4:15 pm – Panel 4: Are Prisons Obsolete?
Facilitator: Sora Han, Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine
Elizabeth Alexander, Reframing the Idea of the Prison-Industrial Complex
Leslie Patrick, “Are Prisons Obsolete?”: If Only It Were So–A Tribute to Angela Davis’ Foresight.
Lizbet Simmons, Angela Davis and the Terrains of Justice: Schools, Prisons, and New Orleans
Cassandra Shaylor, “Lectures on Liberation” to “Lectures on Abolition”: Angela Davis and New Terrains of Struggle
5:45-7 pm – Reception, Humanities 202
7 pm – Introduction: Maylei Blackwell
Screening: Mountains that Take Wing – Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation, a film by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan (QUAD Productions © 2009)
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Humanities Lecture Hall
9:30 Breakfast
9:45 Welcome
10 am-noon Panel: Legacies in the Making Panel
Facilitator: Bettina Aptheker, Professor of Feminist Studies and History, UC Santa Cruz
Neferti Tadiar, Women’s Studies, Barnard College, “Lifetimes in Becoming Human”
Saidiya Hartman, English, Columbia University, “A Little History of Abolition Dream Book”
Jacqui Alexander, Women’s Studies & Gender Studies, U of Toronto, “Working the Conjunctions: Angela Davis & the Radicalization of Oppositional Praxis”
12-12:15 pm – Break
12:15-12:30 Piano Performance: Anthony Davis (Kevin Fellezs, introduction)
12:30 pm – Screening: Angela Y. Davis and Radical Pedagogy, a film by Angela N Carroll and Eric Stanley
1:00 pm – Closing Remarks: Angela Davis
—–
Photo by John Lee and poster design by Arianne Archer.
Event Sponsored by: University of California Humanities Research Institute Conference Grant, The Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment, the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies, the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC Faculty Against the War, History of Consciousness Department, UCSC Vice Chancellor for Research, UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Chief Diversity Officer, Community Studies, Feminist Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, Merrill College, Oakes College, Philosophy, Porter College, Literature, Cowell College, American Studies, Languages, Politics, Psychology, and Stevenson College.
Conference Organizing Committee:
Maylei Blackwell, Christopher Connery, Michelle Erai, Carla Freccero, Irena Polić, Shann Ritchie, Trevor Joy Sangrey, Eric Stanley, Gregory Youmans, with additional assistance from Bettina Aptheker, Kevin Fellezs, Sora Han, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Natalie Purcell, and Rashad Shabazz.
Staff Assistance provided by the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research.

A Reading by Monique Truong
2009-10-07 19:00 - 20:30 | Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206, UCSC Humanities Lecture Hall, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
The University of California, Santa Cruz Center for Labor Studies Presents
In Collaboration with UCSC’s Living Writers Reading Series:
A Reading by Internationally Acclaimed Novelist Monique Truong

Monique Truong is the author of the “poetically rendered and literally savory” 2003 novel, The Book of Salt, the fictional story of a gay Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris during the 1920s and 30s, and his previous life in Vietnam. Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the U.S. at the age of six. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. The Book of Salt among other honors received the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Gittings Literature Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and was given an Award of Excellence from the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University. Truong is also the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction. Truong’s new book, Bitter in the Mouth, will be published by Random House in 2010.
The UCSC Center for Labor Studies is funded by the Miguel Contreras Labor Fund of the University of California Office of the President, and co-sponsored by the UCSC Division of Humanities.
The UCSC Living Writers Reading Series is hosted by the Creative Writing Program of the Literature Department. In addition to the Miguel Contreras Fund, this event was generously supported by a Diversity Fund Grant from the UCSC Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, and by Poets & Writers, through a grant from the James Irvine Foundation, and co-sponsored by the Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center, the East Asian Studies Studies Program, the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund and the Laurie Sain Creative Writing Fund.
For more information or accommodations, contact the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, ihr@ucsc.edu, (831) 459-5655. For maps, maps.ucsc.edu.
Click here to view the event poster as a PDF.
