Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree), a scientist who pioneered the concept of sophisticated communication between trees. Simard will share her highly anticipated new book When the Forest Breathes, in which she offers a powerful vision for saving our forests based on nature's deep-rooted cycles of renewal. "A masterclass […]

This talk will look at various musical genres in North Africa to explore the history of a region that is at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. How is music an expression of the cultural diversity of the region? How have musicians played a central political role from the colonial period to […]

On April 6, 2026, the Graduate Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium and UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions will host two short films highlighting the challenges to art and expression in Malaysia’s complex political, legal, and societal landscape. Sotong follows four fierce local drag queens who were part of the 2022 Halloween party raided […]

All AI (algorithmic intelligence) companies claim they are pursuing the next logical step in digital—perhaps even human—evolution. But, the development of AI is clearly shaped by a wide range of untethered belief systems from obscure German philosophy to The Lord of the Rings. There is nothing logical about it. It is unreasonable to make AI […]

World Wounds: The Damming of the Nile River and the Transformation of Medicine The damming of the Nile River transformed agriculture and human health in twentieth-century Egypt. While dams enabled year-round irrigation and provided hydroelectricity, the prevalence of parasitic disease also skyrocketed. Professor Derr explores the effects of damming the Nile on the health of […]

This talk examines how urban planning, animal governance, and racial politics converge in the production of interspecies belonging in Singapore. Through this, it considers what drawing, as an analytic, might offer anthropology for understanding how more-than-human worlds become governed. Focusing on the "Singapore Special" — a term for local mongrel dogs — it traces how […]

Please join us for a presentation on "Children's role in Language Documentation Efforts in Mexico". Cuando realizamos proyectos de documentación lingüística, nos encontramos con niñas y niños que quieren participar en alguna actividad del proceso de documentación, sean o no hablantes o sean hablantes de herencia. Su colaboración es valiosa en los proyectos porque aportan […]

This event engages the theme of articulation and James Clifford’s contributions to cultural studies, anthropology, and literary studies, addressing our current disconcerting cultural, historical, and ecological conjuncture. With talks by Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia), James Clifford (UCSC), and Kirin Narayan (ANU), and a panel with Mark Anderson (UCSC), Chris Connery (UCSC), Donna Haraway (UCSC), Gail Hershatter […]

This talk offers an ethnographic account of the structures of captivity that keep migrants and deportees in conditions of enforced immobility and precarity at the Mexico-U.S. border. Whereas much scholarship has framed the border primarily as a site of transit or deadly deterrence, Martinez argues that it has been transformed into a carceral frontier that […]

“Drink and make a happy day!” (New Kingdom Theben tomb) “Wine gladdens the heart of man…” (Psalm 104:15) At this ‘symposium’ event, three UCSC professors in Classical, Biblical, and Egyptian antiquity will tell stories about how various ancient cultures drank wine to commune with their gods, suspend the normal social rules, and prepare for the […]

Join us for a nocturnal celebration of art, philosophy, and activism! As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, the 2026 Santa Cruz Night of Ideas invites us not to celebrate the Enlightenment, but to interrogate it. Long associated with democracy, progress, and universal reason, the Enlightenment’s legacy remains deeply ambivalent - […]

Two lifelong peace activists and guides to Israel/Palestine, both of whom have lost family in the conflict, take readers on a revealing life-changing journey across this holy, bloodstained land and discover the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peoples. In The Future Is Peace, Sarah and Inon take […]

The Tallest Dwarf charts Julie Wyman’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change. Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship—all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Julie Wyman […]

This talk recalls the recent phenomena of the murder of physicians in Jordan and Yemen, and the rise in altercations in Saudi Arabia between physicians and patients and their family. Aiming to work on the physics of affinity, the binding and unbinding of ethical relationalities, within the patient-doctor relationship the physicians claim to be prophets […]

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed author Karen Tei Yamashita (I Hotel) to celebrate the launch of her new novel Questions 27 & 28—a masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II. Yamashita will be in conversation with Alice Yang, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC […]

Co-sponsored by the Politics Department The last two decades have seen a flood of research on neoliberalism. Defined in multiple and even conflicting ways, the term nonetheless served as a master category of analysis for scholars from history to geography and communications. Where does the field sit now as trends of authoritarianism and reterritorialization shatter […]