Gina Dent, Debbie Gould & Savannah Shange - The Morning After: A (Post)Election Conversation
2020-11-04 12:15 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual Event
The U.S. presidential election is on Nov 3. We will gather as a community the morning after to process the preceding night (and preceding years) and to think together about the weeks, months, and years to come. Gina Dent, Debbie Gould, and Savannah Shange will start off the conversation. And if it makes more sense to take to the streets on this Wednesday, then that’s what we’ll do.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 4th to receive Zoom link and password.
From Fair Fight: for voters who plan to vote by mail, you should request your ballot now so that you have plenty of time to receive and return it, by going to www.vote.org. If your state offers ballot tracking, you will be able to track your application and ballot from vote.org. You can find information on how to return your ballot, including drop boxes and other methods, on vote.org.
If you plan to vote in person, Fair Fight strongly recommends that you vote early if your state offers early voting. To make your early vote plan, visit https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/. If your state does not offer early voting, visit https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/ to find your Election Day polling location.

Gina Dent is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She writes and teaches on race, feminism, popular culture, and visual art, and her current book project — Prison as a Border and Other Essays, on popular culture and the conditions of knowledge — grows out of her work as an advocate for human rights and prison abolition.
Debbie Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against Aids (2009), and works on political emotion and affect, social movements and contentious politics, and feminist and queer theory. She was involved in ACT UP/Chicago for many years and was a founding member of the research/art/activist collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago, most famous for its International Parades of the Politically Depressed.
Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is author of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, AntiBlackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (2019) and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. 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.

Fascism and Regimes of Knowledge
2020-11-04 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual Event
This symposium asks what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the present authoritarian convergence. Panelists address the question of fascism as a geopolitically and historically diverse series of entanglements with (neo) liberalism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism, and focus on the variety of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized subjects across the planet.

Speakers

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor & Director, Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Professor & Chair, Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute and Director, Global South Center
Cynthia A. Young, Associate Professor, African American Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Penn State University

Moderators

Alyosha Goldstein, Professor, American Studies, University of New Mexico
Simón Ventura Trujillo, Assistant Professor, Latinx Studies, English Department, New York University

Presented by UCSC Center for Racial Justice and the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal

Living Writers: sidony o'neal
2020-11-05 19:00 | Virtual Event
sidony o’neal (b. 1988) is an artist and writer based in Portland, OR. Recent exhibitions include Sculpture Center, Fourteen30 Contemporary, and the Institute for New Connotative Action. Performances as a part of non-band DEAD THOROUGHBRED have been presented at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, Performance Space New York, and If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam). O’neal’s writing has been published at Arts.Black and the journal of Women & Performance. A chapbook, LYFE IN A BOTTLE TREE BOTTLE, is forthcoming from House House Press. O’neal is the recipient of the Oregon Art Commission’s 2020 Joan Shipley Award and is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland.

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Victorian Kitchens & Cocktails
2020-11-09 16:00, 2020-11-23 16:00 | Virtual Event
Dust off your copies of What Shall We Have for Dinner? by Lady Clutterbuck and Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management and join us for three interactive sessions exploring Victorian kitchens and cocktails. Dickens Project alumna Liz Pollock explores food and drink preparation in the Victorian kitchen on November 9th. In subsequent lessons, she will demonstrate how to make delicious beverages from the Victorian era.

Liz Pollock first came to Santa Cruz in 1975 to visit some friends at the UC Santa Cruz campus for the “Valentine’s Day Waltz” at Cowell College. As soon as she could, she transferred from Cal State LA to UCSC and majored in comparative literature. She met her husband at Adolph’s Italian Family Restaurant, where she bartended for five years. Liz has owned and operated the Cook’s Bookcase since 2007 and lives with her family in a restored 1914 California Craftsman bungalow in beautiful Santa Cruz.

Slugs and Steins with Sylvanna M. Falcón: The Evolving Practice of Human Rights Accountability
2020-11-09 18:30 | Virtual Event
Sylvanna M. Falcón, founder of UC Santa Cruz’s Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas, will explain how human rights accountability has shifted in the digital realm and the ways in which a new generation of human rights activists are needed with critical digital literacy skills in search for the truth.
Dr. Falcón founded Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas in September 2019. The Lab’s social justice mission is to track and monitor ongoing humanitarian, environmental and socio-political crises throughout the Americas by using open source investigative methods to promote justice and achieve accountability for communities adversely affected by human rights violations. The lab offers digital verification support to non-governmental organizations, news outlets, and other advocacy partners.

Sylvanna M. Falcón, Associate Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at UC Santa Cruz.
As Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, her research and teaching interests are in human rights, transnational and decolonial feminism, racism and antiracism, open source investigations, and transitional justice in Peru. She is a former United Nations consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Dr. Falcón authored the award-winning book Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, [University of Washington Press, 2016 – awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award] and the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship [under contract with Rutgers University Press] and New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights [Routledge, 2011]. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including International Journal of Transitional Justice, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminism.

Book talk and conversation: Peter Limbrick, Arab Modernism as World Cinema
2020-11-10 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Peter Limbrick (Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz) will discuss his new book Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi in conversation with Professor Tarek El-Ariss (Dartmouth College).
Arab Modernism as World Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South.

Peter Limbrick is Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. In addition to Arab Modernism as World Cinema, he is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2010) and articles on postcolonial and transnational cinemas.

Tarek El-Ariss is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (2018).

Organized by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa

PhD+ Workshop – Using Twitter Professionally
2020-11-12 15:30 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Learn how to promote your research and create a virtual community of Tweeple in Twitter! Learn the basics, including how to set up your page, use hashtags, use best practices, and more with Kayla Isenberg (Senior Director, Digital Engagement, University Relations at UC Santa Cruz). The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Using Twitter Professionally” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2020-2021 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of The Humanities Institute’s PhD+ Workshops. 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 will be held virtually until further notice.

Manan Ahmed: The Loss of Hindustan
2020-11-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Manan Ahmed is Associate Professor for History of South Asia at Columbia University. He specializes in the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He is the author of A Book of Conquest (2016) and The Loss of Hindustan (2020)
Part of the 2020-21 Center For South Asian Studies Lecture Series.
Organized by The Center for South Asian Studies

Morgan Parker - Morton Marcus Poetry Reading
2020-11-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Virtual Event
Please join us for the 11th annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading, featuring honored guest Morgan Parker. Poet Gary Young will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize).

Gary Young is the author of many volumes of poems and translations, and has edited several anthologies and poetry textbooks, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California and The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place. His most recent books are Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese published by White Pine Press (2018), and That’s What I Thought, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books (2018). His book No Other Life won the William Carlos Williams Award, and in 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Young teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at the UC Santa Cruz.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and creator and host of the live talk show Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.
View and purchase Morgan Parker’s books at: https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/morganparker
The Morton Marcus Poetry Reading honors poet, teacher, and film critic Morton Marcus (1936–2009). Marcus was the 1999 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year and a recipient of the 2007 Gail Rich Award. Among his published works are eleven volumes of poetry, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages from a Scrapbook of Immigrants, Moments Without Names, Shouting Down the Silence, Pursuing the Dream Bone and The Dark Figure In The Doorway; a novel, The Brezhnev Memo; and a literary memoir, Striking Through the Masks. He taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, was the co-host of the radio program, The Poetry Show, and was the co-host of the television film review show, Cinema Scene. Learn more at: www.mortonmarcus.com
The Morton Marcus Poetry Archive can be found at UCSC Special Collections. Mort’s personal papers, manuscripts, and recordings reflect his legacy as a poet and educator, and his collection of poetry books, broadsides, literary magazines and correspondence with other poets and writers illuminate his deep involvement in, and passion for, the literary art of poetry.
Organizing Committee
Len Anderson, Danusha Laméris, Donna Mekis, Mark Ong, Maggie Paul, Irena Polić, Jory Post, Teresa Mora, Joseph Stroud, and Gary Young.
The Morton Marcus Poetry Contest
phren-Z, an online literary magazine, whose mission is to celebrate the Santa Cruz literary community, has established a national poetry contest, The Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, in honor of Morton Marcus, “whose life and work inspired the writing of many students, friends, and emerging poets.” For more information visit: http://phren-z.org/poetry_contest.html
Dennis Maloney, editor and publisher of White Pine Press has honored phren-Z by serving as the judge for this year’s contest.
Support Poetry in Santa Cruz
The Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading continues to be offered free to the public. Please consider donating to the Morton Marcus Poetry Reading at thi.ucsc.edu/projects/morton-marcus-poetry-reading as well as to Poetry Santa Cruz at: http://www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz/
Mort was a donating member of Poetry Santa Cruz from its inception in 2001.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by:
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Cabrillo College English Department
Cowell College
Living Writers Series
Ow Family Properties
Poetry Santa Cruz
Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund
Porter College
Santa Cruz Writes
Special Collections & Archives
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by November 5th, 2020.

Idan Landau: A Selectional Criterion for Adjunct Control
2020-11-13 09:00 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Idan Landau, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev – Israel, speaking on A Selectional Criterion for Adjunct Control.
Zoom Information will be emailed on Thursday, November 12, 2020

Nonfinite adjuncts display a non-uniform control distribution: While all adjuncts accept control by the local matrix subject (Obligatory Control, OC), only some accept other controllers (non-obligatory control, NOC). For example, the rationale clause in (1a) allows NOC by the stimulus clause in (1b) does not.
1a). Mary has made up her mind. Bill would present the speakers [in order PRO to give him the opportunity to practice their names].
1b).Mary giggled. Bill smiled [PRO to see her/him in underwear].
The question which adjuncts fall in which category, and why, has rarely been addressed (see Green 2-18, 2019 for an exception).
Following Landeau 2015, I propose that control operates via prediction (a property-denoting clause) or logophoric anchoring (a propositional cause). The (possibly null) prepositional head of Strict OC adjuncts (as in (1b)) s-selects a property, while that of alternating OC/NOC adjuncts (as in (1a)) s-selects either a property or proposition. This selectional distinction is independently detectable by testing whether the adjunct accepts a lexical subject, providing us with a reliable predictor of its control behavior. In this talk, I will examine 10 different types of adjuncts in English ad demonstrate how this system derives their control patterns. It is further shown that purely configurational theories, that posit complementarity between OC and NOC, are empirically inadequate. Finally, I address the question of why the predictive variant of nonfinite adjuncts is available by default (within and across languages), whereas the propositional variant is not. The explanation hinges on the principle of Economy of Projection, which favors the smaller, predictive variant over the propositional one. The dual analysis of adjunct control offers insights into puzzling language-internal facts as well as typological generalizations, so far unrelated in the theory of control.
Organized by the Department of Linguistics

PhD+ Workshop – Impassioned Online Teaching: Empathy, Embodiment and Radical Pedagogy in Practice
2020-11-13 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual Event
How do we, as educators, create virtual experiences that are inclusive, engaging, and impactful for our students? How can we make remote conditions more intimate, accessibility more equitable, and our classrooms more collaborative? What do design strategies grounded in compassion and creativity look like? From decolonizing the syllabus to somatic abolitionism and interactive storytelling, this workshop will offer practical techniques for learning and liberation. Please join us as we reimagine the possibilities of a mindfulness-based approach to teaching in the digital age.
This workshop is co-presented by The Humanities Institute (THI) and the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) at UC Santa Cruz and open to University of California faculty, staff, and students.
Panel led by UC Santa Cruz’s 2020 National Humanities Center GSSR Fellows:

Kristen Laciste (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku (History)
Alexandra Moore (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Francesca Romeo (Film and Digital Media)
Meleia Simon-Reynolds (History)
Matthew Tedford (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Kirstin Wagner (Literature)

Left to right and top to bottom: Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Kirstin Wagner, Francesca Romeo, Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku, Matthew Tedford, Kristen Laciste, Alexandra Moore

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 will be held virtually until further notice.

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Moor Mother + Rasheedah Phillips: Black Quantum Futurism
2020-11-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The exhibition is Moor Mother—a Philadelphia artist praised as part of “a new generation of visionary black storytellers” (The New York Times—premieres a new video followed by a discussion of Black Quantum Futurism theory and practice with her collaborator Rasheedah Phillips. Weaving through haunting slave narratives as dystopian allegory, negro spirituals, and Black ritual, Moor Mother’s work points to a liberated future through Black Quantum Futurism, a project in partnership with author Rasheedah Phillips. Through a time of ecological and social disaster, she says, “I’m not saying, this is the end, we’re all doomed,” but rather that “I believe there is another way. So it’s about trying to get the audience to understand another way of digesting the truth.”

The events are co-organized with T.J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz as part of the UCSC Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar’s Beyond the End of the World research project, Indexical, and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences with the collaboration of The Humanities Institute and Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a nationally- and internationally-touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums around the world, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and more. Her most recent album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is the culmination of all of her earthly experiences merged with all of her cosmic ones. On Analog Fluids, haunting slave narratives are presented as dystopian allegory and negro spirituals are flipped, remixed, and recaptured, only to be digitized into a symbiotic bio-morph program for the post-thumb drive age. It’s a record rich with the noise and chaos that affirm Moor Mother’s punk roots, yet it is also anchored in earthiness via the constant injection of Black ritual, poetry, and drums programmed to vibrate through the listener’s mitochondria.
Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. BQF Collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. BQF Collective frequently collaborates with other Black Futurists, Joy KMT, Irreversible Entanglements, Thomas Stanley, Ras Mashramani, Alex Smith to produce literature, present workshops, lectures, and performances.

Victorian Kitchens & Cocktails
2020-11-16 16:00 | Virtual Event
Dust off your copies of What Shall We Have for Dinner? by Lady Clutterbuck and Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management and join us for three interactive sessions exploring Victorian kitchens and cocktails. Dickens Project alumna Liz Pollock explores food and drink preparation in the Victorian kitchen. In subsequent lessons, she will demonstrate how to make delicious beverages from the Victorian era.

Liz Pollock first came to Santa Cruz in 1975 to visit some friends at the UC Santa Cruz campus for the “Valentine’s Day Waltz” at Cowell College. As soon as she could, she transferred from Cal State LA to UCSC and majored in comparative literature. She met her husband at Adolph’s Italian Family Restaurant, where she bartended for five years. Liz has owned and operated the Cook’s Bookcase since 2007 and lives with her family in a restored 1914 California Craftsman bungalow in beautiful Santa Cruz.

PhD+ Workshop – Getting Hired at a California Community College
2020-11-17 14:00 - 15:30 | Virtual Event
A panel discussion with current and recent instructors at California Community Colleges, who are all UC Santa Cruz graduate student alumni, including:
Beth Au, Moderator
Director
California Community Colleges Registry
Francesca Caparas, Panelist
M.A. Literature
English Professor and Faculty Coordinator, Jean Miller Resource Room for Women, Genders, and Sexuality
De Anza College
Sarah Gerhardt, Panelist
Ph.D. Chemistry
Chemistry Instructor
Cabrillo College
Elizabeth Gonzalez, Panelist
Ph.D. Psychology
Interim Director, Metas Center
San José City College
Brian Malone, Panelist
Ph.D. Literature
English Professor
De Anza College
Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano, Panelist
Ph.D. Education
Ethnic Studies Professor
Evergreen Valley College
Nicholas Vasallo, Panelist
D.M.A.
Director, Music Industry Studies, AV Technology, and Music Composition
Diablo Valley College
The Division of Graduate Studies’ professional communication workshop on “Getting Hired at a California Community College” is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute as part of our 2020-2021 PhD+ series. Workshops presented by the Division of Graduate Studies are for current UC Santa Cruz graduate students and require an active UC Santa Cruz email address.

About the PhD+ Workshop Series
Join us for the fifth year of The Humanities Institute’s PhD+ Workshops. 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 will be held virtually until further notice.

Visualizing Abolition: Visuality and Carceral Formations - Nicole Fleetwood, Herman Gray, and Nicholas Mirzoeff
2020-11-17 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
The third event in the Visualizing Abolition series brings together visual and cultural theorists Nicole Fleetwood, Herman Gray, and Nicholas Mirzoeff to consider the roles of visual culture in normalizing mass incarceration and the racist brutalities of policing within the social landscape and political vision of America. Questions of visuality and formations moves beyond critiques of film, television, advertisements, and other media to ask how dominant visions of the world—and the visual regimes that regulate what people see and what remains hidden from view—are materialized in the prison industrial complex.

This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
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.

Vicente Rafael & Jorgge Menna Barreto - Authoritarianism in the Philippines and Brazil
2020-11-18 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
This dialogic colloquium enjoins us to learn about and reflect on authoritarianism in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In each of these democracies, what histories and dynamics have contributed to these figures’ rise, and how is their appeal connected to the place of each country in global economies of material and cultural capital? How should we understand their contemporaneity and connection? How have they approached the pandemic’s necropolitical possibilities and challenges? The session will begin with brief opening remarks from Vicente Rafael on Duterte’s Philippines and Jorgge Menna Barreto on Bolsonaro’s Brazil. We will then open to a broader conversation among participants.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 18th to receive Zoom link and password.
Please Note: colloquium participants will be expected to have completed brief readings by Vicente Rafael and Jorgge Menna Barreto before the event.

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He works mainly on the cultural politics of the Philippines and occasionally on the United States, focusing on such topics as colonialism, nationalism and postcoloniality; language and religion; translation and technology; and race and empire. His books include Motherless Tongues (2016); The Promise of the Foreign (2005); White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000); and Contracting Colonialism (1988).
Jorgge Menna Barreto is a Brazilian artist and educator who works at the intersection of art and agroecology, focusing on agroforestry. Since 2015, Menna Barreto has been a professor at UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, and he is presently on postdoctoral leave in Europe. In January 2021, he will begin as Assistant Professor in Environmental Art at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the translator of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World into Brazilian Portuguese, to be launched next year.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. Staff assistance is provided by the Humanities Institute.
This session is co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast).
*2020-2021 colloquia will be held virtually until further notice. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own coffee, tea, and cookies to the session.

Pascha Bueno-Hansen: Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes - Transitional Justice Otherwise
2020-11-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Co-presented with Research Center for the Americas, Dr. Pascha Bueno-Hansen will provide a lunch time webinar lecture on the modalities of resistance of people of non-normative genders and sexualities to armed conflict, political repression, and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Dr. Bueno-Hansen is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware and earned her PhD in Politics at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice. This event is co-sponsored by The Institute for Social Transformation and is free and open to the public; advance registration is required to access the Zoom link.

Pascha Bueno-Hansen is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. Her first book Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice was just published in Spanish Derechos Feministas y Humanos en el Perú: Decolonizando la Justicia Transicional by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. She has various articles and book chapters on gender-based violence, sexuality, race, human rights, transitional justice, and social movements. Her current book project Dissident Genders and Sexualities in the Andes examines the modalities of resistance of people of non-normative genders and sexualities to armed conflict, political repression, and authoritarian regimes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
The RCA is collaborating with campus partners, specifically The Humanities Institute and the Institute for Social Transformation, to offer webinar programming on the theme of “Memory Studies in the Americas” to inspire sustained cross-border dialogues that tie the region.

Living Writers: Dawn Lundy Martin
2020-11-19 19:00 | Virtual Event
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Beyond the End of the World: Manifesta 13 Artist Talk
2020-11-20 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
War ecologies call forth not just mutuality but collapse, survival within violence. Conflict involves corporate extraction and militarised assaults on environments and environmentalists, while multispecies life and coexistence fall under grave threat. In its curatorial presentation, the Center for Creative Ecologies offers two artistic case studies asking what kind of pluriverse is possible in the face of different kinds of socioecological violence? The first study addresses the criminalisation of nonhuman life in Putumayo, southern Colombia by Hannah Meszaros Martin; the other considers sci-fi surrealism and extinction in Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in southeastern Spain, by Isabelle Carbonell. These comprise part of the Center’s ongoing research project Beyond the End of the World, which seeks out spaces of hope emerging from geographies of despair. War ecologies identify not only neoliberal enterprises using climate breakdown to introduce authoritarian politics, but also struggles – human and more-than-human – for ways to transcend the forces of socio-economic inequality and politico-environmental calamity.
Please join us for a panel discussion and Q&A with the Center for Creative Ecologies artist and curatorial team Isabelle Carbonell, Hannah Meszaros Martin, and T.J. Demos. The team will be discussing their latest exhibition at Manifesta 13 Marseille the European Nomadic Biennial.

Hannah Meszaros Martin is an artist, writer, and recent PhD graduate of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a researcher in Forensic Architecture, a European Research Council funded project, which she has been a member of since 2012. With Forensic Architecture, she has exhibited at the House of World Cultures (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona) and MUAC (Mexico City), and contributed to the book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014). She has exhibited solo work in Medellín, London, and documenta(13). She has published with Open Democracy, Third Text and Different Skies, a publication that she co-founded in 2012.
Isabelle Carbonell is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media, thinking through a cinema of the anthropocene, and how we think on multiple possible futures in this time of ecological crisis. Her work lies at the intersection of expanded documentary, environmental justice, invasive species, eco-disasters, and experimental ethnography. Her scholarship has been published in the Internet Policy Review, Conexión Journal, and the Cultural Anthropology Journal. Recent completed film works include: The River Runs Red (2018), The Blessed Assurance (2018) and, The Camel Race (2019).
This event is part of the Beyond the End of the World symposium through the Center for Creative Ecologies in collaboration with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Donka Farkas: Canonical and non-canonical speech acts
2020-11-20 13:20 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Donka Farkas speaking on Canonical and non-canonical speech acts.
Zoom Information will be emailed on Thursday, November 19, 2020.

Abstract
The general issue addressed in this talk is how best to characterize canonical and non-canonical speech acts. The framework I will use is rooted in Farkas and Bruce (2010) and Farkas and Roelofsen (2017). The speech acts I concentrate on are assertions and questions.
The first part of the talk focuses on canonical assertions and questions. Pretheoretically, canonical, or typical, assertions are informing speech acts whereby a knowledgeable speaker informs her addressee of the truth of the proposition she expresses. Canonical, or typical, questions request information, i.e., an ignorant speaker requests her addressee to resolve the issue she raises. The question addressed in this part of the talk is why should canonical assertions and questions have these properties? I will attempt to answer it by showing that these properties follow from a context structure view based on Farkas and Bruce (2010) and the basic conventional discourse effects (CDE) declaratives and interrogatives are assigned in Farkas and Roelofsen (2017). CDE are defined as functions from the denotation of sentences and input context structures to output context structures. These functions affect the discourse commitments of the speaker, the conversational table and the future states of the conversation the move projects.
The second part of the talk considers ways in which assertions and questions can be non-canonical, i.e., ways in which declaratives and interrogatives can be used in contexts that override the canonical default assumptions discussed in the first part. It will be argued that such non-default cases can be either unmarked (as in the case of `quiz’ questions in English) or marked for various types of particular deviations from the canonical case, such as markers of bias in questions, which signal a departure from the speaker neutrality assumption in questions, or markers of non-categorical commitment, which signal departures from speaker knowledgeability in assertions. It will be argued that a promising way of treating
some of the linguistic means used in non-canonical speech acts is to treat them as force modifiers, i.e. as contributing special CDE, treated formally as functions from contexts C to contexts C’, where C is the result of applying the basic CDE of the sentence to its input context (see Faller, 2002; Murray, 2010).
For questions please email Maria Zimmer.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Special post-election conversation
2020-11-20 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual Event
We’re thrilled to welcome Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of our country’s best thinkers and writers, for a virtual conversation about the state of our country post-election, truth telling, and the idea that stories and mythology can persuade and change attitudes when facts alone cannot. Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer, will serve as a starting off point for his conversation with Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic.
Hosted by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, in partnership with Bookshop Santa Cruz and Marcus Bookstores in Oakland.
We’re excited to offer free event access and copies of Coates’ novel to the first 500 UCSC students who register.
Ticketing Information
All tickets include one paperback copy of THE WATER DANCER plus entry to the event.

In-store pickup: $22 (plus Eventbrite fees)
Shipped-to-You: $27 (plus Eventbrite fees)
Free book and event access available to the first 500 current UCSC students who register. Sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. Student ID required at registration (Thank you, students! Free tickets have now sold out. General admission tickets are still available for purchase).

“What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?’ . . . The most moving part of The Water Dancer [is] the possibility it offers of an alternate history. . . . The book’s most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.”—NPR

The Humanities Institute is exploring the theme of Memory this year, and this event is sure to provide substantive insight at a moment when we’re interrogating the past and trying to move forward as a country. We encourage everyone—current students, alumni, staff and community members—to join us for what will be an insightful and timely event.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and is the author of the forthcoming essay collection, The Cruelty Is the Point: Essays on Trump’s America, which can be pre-ordered through Bookshop Santa Cruz here.

Visualizing Abolition: Film Screening "Lessons of the Hour"
2020-11-30 | Virtual Event
In collaboration with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, we are pleased to present a limited online screening of Isaac Julien Lessons of the Hour as a part of the Visualizing Abolition series. The ten-screen immersive film installation exploring the life of Frederick Douglass is on view at McEvoy Arts Oct 14, 2020–Mar 13, 2021.

A link to the screening will be sent out November 30 at 4 pm to everyone who is registered for the event with Isaac Julien and Robin Kelley. To register for the event (and receive the link), please click the button above.
Lessons of the Hour, a ten-screen film installation by British filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien, is on view at the McEvoy Foundation of the Arts October 2020-March 2021. A limited online version of the immersive exploration of the life of the visionary African American writer, abolitionist, statesman, and freed slave Frederick Douglass will be available for a limited online viewing. Incorporating excerpts from Douglass’ speeches and dramatizations of his private and public milieus, the film offers a contemplative, poetic journey into Douglass’ zeitgeist and a forceful suggestion that the lessons of the abolitionist’s hour have yet to be learned.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
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.

Visualizing Abolition: Abolition Then and Now w/ Isaac Julien and Robin D.G. Kelley
2020-12-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
Abolition Then & Now with historian and cultural theorist Robin D. G. Kelley and artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, co-presented with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, is the next event in Visualizing Abolition.

Abolition Then & Now features Robin Kelley and Isaac Julien in conversation about the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and current abolitionist uprisings against racist police brutality and the prison industrial complex. This event coincides with the presentation of Julien’s Lessons of the Hour, 2019, a ten-screen film installation that explores the legacy of Frederick Douglass and his vision for abolition in relationship to contemporaneity, at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. A composite version of that moving and monumental artwork will be screened for 24-hours online prior to the event.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
For the 2020/21 academic year, UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Gina Dent, feminist studies, has organized a year-long series of online events featuring artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition.
The events of Visualizing Abolition accompany Barring Freedom, a bi-coastal exhibition of art featuring Sonya Clark, American Artist, Dread Scott, Deana Lawson, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Sharon Daniel, Sanford Biggers, and other artists whose practices creatively confront the failure of many to see the racist biases within the criminal justice system or to comprehend the economic and social problems that the system serves to obscure. Barring Freedom will be on view at San José Museum of Art late October 2020-March 21, 2021.
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.

In Vitro: Film Screening and Conversation
2020-12-02 12:00 - 14:00 | Virtual Event
IN VITRO | Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, 2019 (TRAILER) from Spike Island – Productions on Vimeo.
Join the Center for Cultural Studies Colloquium for a special screening of the film, In Vitro, after which Peter Limbrick (UCSC professor of Film and Digital Media) will moderate a discussion with filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind.
In Vitro is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film filmed in black and white. It is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Alia, played by Hiam Abbass, is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia, played by Maisa Abd Elhadi, comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.
The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia. Central to their discussion is the intricate relationship between past, present and future, with the Bethlehem setting providing a narratively, politically and symbolically charged backdrop.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, December 2nd to receive Zoom link and password.

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Larissa Sansour was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, Palestine, and studied fine arts in London, New York and Copenhagen. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures.
Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark, Bluecoat in Liverpool, Bildmuseet in Umeå and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Sansour currently lives and works in London, UK.
Soren Lind (b. 1970) is a Danish author, artist, director and scriptwriter. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to art, film and fiction. He has published novels, shorts story collections and several children’s books.
Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide. His work was shown at the Danish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial. Other recent venues and festivals include Copenhagen Contemporary (DK), MoMA (US), Barbican (UK), Nikolaj Kunsthal (DK), Berlinale (D), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL) and BFI London Film Festival (UK). He lives and works in London.
This event is part of The Humanities Institute’s yearlong series on Memory.
The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. The sessions consist of a 40-45 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center provides coffee, tea, and cookies.*
All Center for Cultural Studies events are free and open to the public. 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: Student Reading
2020-12-03 19:00 | Virtual Event
LIVING WRITERS FALL 2020: SEEING RED—RAGE, WRITING, ART features contemporary poets, cultural critics, performance and visual artists interrogating rage, its call and possibilities, rendered across an array of works (text, installation, and performance) exploring rage’s circumstances, effects, and configurations through poetry, prose, and interdisciplinary modes.

Adrian Staub - Word frequency and predictability effects in reading: Some outstanding puzzles
2020-12-04 13:20 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Adrian Staub of the University of Massachusetts speaking on word frequency and predictability effects in reading: some outstanding puzzles
Abstract:
A word’s context-independent frequency and its context-dependent predictability both influence eye fixation durations in reading. In this talk I’ll discuss recent work investigating some questions about relationship between these two effects. One question is why manipulations of the two variables demonstrate strictly additive effects on fixation duration measures. A possibility is that they influence separate processing stages; predictability may facilitate early visual and orthographic processing, while frequency influences a later stage of lexical retrieval. If so, the two effects should show different patterns of interaction with effects of stimulus degradation, e.g., visual contrast. However, two large experiments show that frequency and predictability demonstrate similar patterns of near additivity with effects of visual contrast and font difficulty, providing no support for the two-stage hypothesis. A second question is whether there is a correlation, at the level of individual readers, between the size of frequency and predictability effects. Evaluating correlations between by-subject slopes in Bayesian mixed-effects models reveals that the answer is scale-dependent: Effects of the two variables on raw gaze duration show a positive correlation, but effects on log gaze duration do not. This is probably because the correlation is due primarily to a relationship between reading speed and effect size, which is neutralized by the log transformation. I’ll discuss how these results constrain our understanding of how the two variables influence lexical processing.

Adrian Staub works in psycholinguistics, which focuses on the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and production. He is interested in how we analyze the grammatical structure of sentences in the course of language comprehension, how we recognize words, and how these processes work together. In many of his experiments, participants’ eye movements are monitored as they read sentences in which syntactic structure has been manipulated; he directs the UMass Eyetracking Laboratory. His personal web page, including a list of publications, is here.
Zoom information will be emailed on Thursday, December 3, 2020.

Ezra Klein and Will Davies: Living in a Frayed Democracy
2020-12-05 10:00 - 11:15 | Virtual Event
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture – Ezra Klein and Will Davies: Living in Frayed Democracy
We’re all impacted by this deeply polarized moment. How do we navigate life while political and cultural divisions are dangerously amplified and the world’s oldest democracies are under threat?
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz is honored to announce a trans-Atlantic political dialogue for this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture. We’ve invited two of our top cultural and political thinkers—Ezra Klein and William Davies—to help us grapple with how we got here, why we live in such fraught times, ways the US and UK are analogues in this fractious moment, and where we might go from here.
Register

Zoom link provided upon registration

Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox, the host of the award-winning podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, and the author of the best-selling book, Why We’re Polarized. Before that, he was columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. He’s written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and (most importantly) is a UC Santa Cruz alumnus.
William Davies is Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of several books, most recently This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain and Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian, and has also written for The New York Times, New Republic and The Atlantic.
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Studies in Ethics.

Rebecca Tollan: Competing Argument Privileges in Niuean
2020-12-11 13:20 | Virtual Event
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Rebecca Tollan from the University of Delaware speaking on competing argument privileges in Niuean.
Abstract:
Grammatical “subjects” have long been shown to have a privileged linguistic status, as compared
with other arguments, in the processing of long-distance dependencies (e.g., Holmes & O’Regan,
1981), in the resolution of ambiguous anaphoric pronouns (Gordon et al., 1993; Grosz et al.,
1995, a.o.) and in formal syntactic operations (cf. Keenan & Comrie, 1977). In this talk, I unpack
“subjecthood” into two components: semantic agentivity (connected with structural superiority in
the thematic domain of the syntax) and case unmarkedness (defined as the case with the widest
syntactic distribution), and show how these two factors can independently influence the outcome of syntactic and pragmatic operations. This focus is on two experimental studies of the ergative-
absolutive Polynesian language Niuean. The goal of these studies is to investigate operations in which the “subject” of a sentence has previously been shown to be privileged, based upon
findings from nominative-accusative languages in which agentivity and unmarkedness align:
first, the “subject advantage” in the processing of long-distance dependencies and second, the
preference for subject antecedents in the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns. Niuean reveals
that, in the formation of long-distance dependencies – where the task is to link a filler with a gap
site and form the relevant dependency – syntactic information about argument distribution (i.e.,
unmarkedness) is most crucial because it maximizes chances of correctly locating the gap site.
Meanwhile, in the resolution of ambiguous anaphoric pronouns, agentivity plays a more
prominent role: the more agentive argument of a preceding clause is preferred as the referent of a
pronoun as compared with a less agentive one. These studies demonstrate the underlying factors
which often cluster together to derive the grammatical function of “subject”.
Zoom Information: Will be emailed on Thursday, December 10, 2020

Christmas with Dickens
2020-12-13 16:00 - 17:15 | Virtual Event
Join us on Sunday, December 13th at 4 pm for a performance you won’t want to miss!
Charles Dickens just wants to talk about his book, A Christmas Carol, but what happens when spirits begin to show up? Is Dickens being guilt-tripped by his estranged wife, Catherine; haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Present; regretting his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge? And what is Queen Victoria doing there? It’s full of chaos, confusion, conflict, and complaints, just like a typical holiday gathering.

The UCSC Dickens Project presents, via Zoom, an original readers’ theater piece written by JoAnna Rottke and directed by Karen Schamberg. Readers will be Andrew Davids, Frank Widman, Martha Rabin, Sarah Kauffman Michael, Chris Rich, and Mark Messersmith. A Q&A session will follow the performance.

JoAnna Rottke spent her best years as Assistant Director of the Dickens Project, a research program at UCSC devoted to the life and works of Charles Dickens. She knows more about Dickens than she’d like to admit. JoAnna now works as an Adoption Counselor for the Santa Cruz SPCA and is a huge fan of tiny dogs.

Slugs and Steins: Reading Dickens Today with Professor John Jordan
2020-12-14 18:30 | Virtual Event
These days, 150 years after his death in 1870, it is nearly impossible for a week to go by without coming across some reference to Dickens in a news article, movie review, magazine essay, or crossword puzzle clue. The adjective “Dickensian” has entered common parlance throughout the English-speaking world as a way of characterizing certain kinds of people, places, and social problems. Film, television, and theatrical versions of Dickens’s novels continue to appear with surprising frequency, most recently the 2019 film adaptation of David Copperfield, directed by Armando Ianucci and featuring a multi-racial cast. Dickens, it seems, is still very much alive in 2020. In his UCSC Alumni Association talk, Professor John Jordan speculates about the reasons for Dickens’s enduring afterlife and explores some of the ways in which Dickens remains important and relevant for 21 st -century audiences.

John Jordan is a Research Professor of Literature at UCSC and Director of the Dickens Project, an international multi-campus research consortium headquartered at Santa Cruz. He has edited or co-edited several books on Dickens and is the author of Supposing Bleak House (2010).

Demystifying the Book Publishing Process & Connecting with UC Colleagues
2020-12-15 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual Event
UC Press editors will offer insight into the academic book publishing process. The presentation will include: choosing the right publisher; preparing a book proposal; how the peer review and Editorial Committee process works; revising your manuscript; and working with publishers to promote your book.
The session is intended to be interactive and questions are welcome.
Following the presentation, we will host breakout rooms with editors based on field interests. This is also an opportunity to connect with faculty and graduate students who share similar intellectual interests. When you sign up, please select a breakout room. If your area is not represented in the breakout session, please let us know your specialization.

Presenters:
Raina Polivka, Editor
Kate Marshall, Editor
Archna Patel, Associate Editor
Beth Digeser, Professor of History (UCSB) and Chair of UC Press Editorial Committee
Breakout Sessions:
Raina Polivka (Music, Cinema, Media Studies)
Niels Hooper (History, American Studies, Middle East Studies)
Kate Marshall (Anthropology, Food Studies, Latin American Studies)
Archna Patel (Art History)
Reed Malcolm (Asian Studies, Open Access)
Don’t see your field? Let us know about your interests: https://bit.ly/UCPublishingMentoring
Co-Sponsors:
UC Press
UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities,
UC Davis Humanities Institute
UC Irvine Humanities Center
UC Los Angeles Humanities
UC Merced Center for the Humanities
UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society
UC Santa Barbara Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
UC Santa Cruz The Humanities Institute
UC San Diego Institute of Arts and Humanities

Revisiting The Koza Uprising in Global Perspectives/ オンラインセミナー「コザ騒動を世界の視点で」
2020-12-19 16:30 - 18:00 | Virtual Event
Fifty years ago this December, Okinawan protests against US military rule turned violent for the first and, so far, only time. On the anniversary, the Okinawa Memories Initiative will host a public discussion about the “Koza Riots,” featuring an eyewitness photojournalist, an American army veteran who had been stationed in Okinawa and two Okinawan American scholars reflecting on race and the meaning of the event fifty years on in the days of Black Lives Matter.

The event will kick off with remarks from Alan Christy, Director of the Okinawa Memories Initiative. We will then journey to Okinawa, where we will hear from Kazuo Kuniyoshi, who will discuss Mr. Kuniyoshi’s experience on the streets of Koza as a photojournalist and resident of the city on the night of December 20, 1970. Their conversation will feature photographs taken by Mr. Kuniyoshi that night as well as a tour of the district as it is today. The conversation will continue between Stan Rushworth and Dustin Wright, Associate Director of OMI, who will discuss Mr. Rushworth’s experiences as an American soldier stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. Finally, we will hear from Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku and Wesley Ueunten who will discuss the meaning of the Koza Riot/Uprising from the perspective of the global Okinawan diaspora. The program will also feature music by Wesley Ueunten, Francis Wong and Scott Oshiro as interludes between interviews.
50年前の12月、沖縄には怒りが溢れていたといいます。そして、その感情は、交通事故という小さなきっかけからコザ“暴動”へと膨れ上がりました。
オキナワ・メモリーズ・イニシアティブでは、コザ暴動が起きてちょうど５０年となる１２月20日、朝９時半から１１時までオンラインでイベントを開催します。コザ“暴動”を実際に取材した写真家國吉和夫さん、沖縄に駐留した経験のある退役米軍人、沖縄系アメリカ人の研究者など多彩なゲストを招き、コザ“暴動”が起きた背景、その後の沖縄への影響、さらに、コザ“暴動”を通して、ブラック・ライヴズ・マター（Black Lives Matter）など現在世界に波及する人種差別抗議運動についても考えます。ぜひご参加ください。
オンラインセミナー参加には登録が必要です。
以下のフォームにお名前、メールアドレスを入力し、提出ください。
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当日は、そのリンクをクリックしてください。
参加は、議論をただ聞いていただくのでもいいですし、質疑応答も受け付けます。

Stan Rushworth was born during WW2, and served in the military in Okinawa during the early years of the Vietnam War. He has lived and worked in highland Guatemala, Hawaii, and has been teaching English in Northern California for the last 30 years, with focus on Indigenous issues. He is the author of Sam Woods American Healing (1991), Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain (2014), and Diaspora’s Children (2020). He is a citizen of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, is married, and is a grandfather.
Dustin Wright is a historian (UC Santa Cruz, 2015), co-director of the Okinawa Memories Initiative, and assistant professor in the School of World Languages and Cultures at California State University, Monterey Bay. His work has been published in Gastronomica, The Japan Times, The Sixties, Critical Asian Studies, and Sekai (世界). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Protest Nation: Anti-Base Struggle and the Fight for Peace in Modern Japan.
Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku is a PhD student in the History Department at UC Santa Cruz and serves on the leadership team for the Okinawa Memories Initiative. Lex is a mixed-race Shimanchu from San Diego and her research focuses on the politics of formal Indigenous people’s recognition for the Shimanchu (Ryukyuan) people by the government of Japan and the United Nations. She has a forthcoming article in The Avery Review about the July Fourth party outbreak of the coronavirus in Uchinaa as framed through the UN Declaration on the Rights on Indigenous Peoples.
Please stay tuned for Kazuo Kuniyoshi, Tomoko Kubota, and Wesley Ueunten bios coming soon.

The Humanities Institute is exploring the theme of Memory. We encourage everyone—current students, alumni, staff and community members—to join us for what will be an insightful and informative event.
Organized by the Okinawa Memories Initiative and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute.

Book Talk: Alma Heckman, The Sultan's Communists
2021-01-11 12:00 | Virtual Event
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). Additionally, she is working on a co-edited volume examining Jews in radical politics in a comparative framework. She has held fellowships with Fulbright, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has published her work in a number of journals and edited volumes.

“The Sultan’s Communists uncovers the history of Jewish radical involvement in Morocco’s national liberation project and examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly-independent Morocco. Closely following the lives of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Assidon), Alma Rachel Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and ‘60s, and how they survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy to ultimately become heroic emblems of state-sponsored Muslim-Jewish tolerance. The figures at the center of Heckman’s narrative stood at the intersection of colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Zionism. Their stories unfolded in a country that, upon independence, from France and Spain in 1956, allied itself with the United States (and, more quietly, with Israel) during the Cold War, while attempting to claim a place for itself within the fraught politics of the post-independence Arab world. The Sultan’s Communists contributes to the growing literature on Jews in the modern Middle East and provides a new history of twentieth-century Jewish Morocco.”

Yarimar Bonilla - An Unthinkable State: Puerto Rico, the United States and the Aporias of U.S. Empire
2021-01-13 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, unprecedented attention turned to the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico and its enduring colonial relationship with the United States. This presentation will examine the rising popularity and shifting strategies of the Puerto Rican statehood movement, with a focus on how and why annexation has come to be imagined as a form of anti-colonial politics. Over the last decades the statehood movement has grown steadily as the Puerto Rican territory has experienced an unprecedented economic crisis, with failing infrastructure, a seemingly unpayable public debt, and historic levels of out-migration. Within this context many residents envision annexation as the only way of safeguarding what is currently viewed as a precarious and unguaranteed place within the nation. In this talk, I offer an ethnographic analysis of how statehood is imagined and defended by its supporters and show how this movement uniquely articulates the very contradictions and power asymmetries that structure Puerto Rico’s relationship to the US.
Yarimar Bonilla is a Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment(2015); co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019); and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project. Bonilla also writes a monthly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día and is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s Democracy Now! Her current research—for which she was named a 2018-2020 Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, January 13th; you will receive Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
This colloquium is co-sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), the Research Center for the Americas (RCA), and the Anthropology Department.
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.

An evening with Jennifer Brea and Megan Moodie - Talking about chronic illness, care, and Covid
2021-01-14 17:00 - 19:00 | Virtual Event
Join Sundance Award winning Filmmaker Jennifer Brea and anthropologist and writer Megan Moodie for an evening of conversation and reflection on chronic illness, the global crisis of care, and Covid-19.
As the numbers of the chronically ill grow rapidly worldwide due to what is being called “long Covid,” there is much to be learned from the experience of those who were grappling with the effects of difficult-to-diagnose, understudied, and invisibilzed diseases long before the appearance of the novel coronavirus. What do the experiences of the chronically ill teach us about how to survive – not just physically, but emotionally and socially – in the face of huge knowledge gaps and medical disbelief? How can patients separated by vast distances and often unable to engage in traditional political organizing join together to demand answers and treatment? What do patient voices tell us about how the organization of medicine needs to change in order to better serve the well-being of us all?

Registrants will receive a link to pre-screen Brea’s 2017 film “Unrest” at no cost (the film is also available to view on Netflix and Amazon Prime), as well as be invited to pre-submit questions to these two medical justice advocates. Please email thi@ucsc.edu for the no cost link to screen the film. Audience members will also be invited to submit questions and participate in the discussion in real time during the event.

Jennifer Brea is an independent documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has an AB from Princeton University and was a PhD student at Harvard until sudden illness left her bedridden. In the aftermath, she rediscovered her first love, film. Her Sundance award-winning feature documentary, “Unrest,” has screened in over 30 countries and had its US national broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. She is also co-creator of Unrest VR, winner of the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities Award. An activist for people with disabilities and chronic illness, she co-founded a global advocacy network, #MEAction and is a TED Fellow.
“Unrest,” her film debut, was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Paley Center for Media’s DocPitch competition and is supported by the Harnisch Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, BRITDOC’s Good Pitch, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Fledgling Fund and the Sundance Institute. You can read more about her at jenbrea.com or @jenbrea on twitter
Megan Moodie is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches about feminist theory, disability studies, and creative ethnography. A writer of essay, fiction, film criticism, and drama, Moodie’s work has appeared in publications such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Quarterly, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. Megan regularly communicates with broad audiences in and beyond anthropology; her writing on topics such as disability, genetic illness, motherhood, film, art, and daily strategies for survival has appeared in MUTHA Magazine, Film Quarterly, SAPIENS, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, and her 2018 essay “Birthright” (Chicago Quarterly Review (26)) was named a “Notable Essay of the Year” by Best American Essays 2019.
Read more:

Feature article on “Unrest” from The Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-jennifer-brea-unrest-documentary-20170929-story.html
Moodie’s July 2020 essay on the aftermath of “Unrest” and the challenges of relapsing/remitting illness here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-the-chronically-ill-re-mission-filmmaker-jennifer-breas-life-after-unrest/

Presented by the Humanities Institute’s Body, (Anti)Narrative, and Corporeal Creative Practices Research Cluster and the Institute for Social Transformation.

If you have disability-related needs, please contact the The Humanities Institute at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 4, 2021. The event will include closed captioning and ASL translation.

Living Writers: Sofia Samatar
2021-01-14 17:20 | Virtual Event
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors, including the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University in Virginia.

Migrant Futures: South Asia and The Middle East (I) Sound into Form
2021-01-15 10:00 - 12:00 | Virtual Event
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Featuring Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Artist) and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor, Tufts University).

Prisons, Histories and Erasures: Joanne Barker, Maria Gaspar and Kelly Lytle Hernandez
2021-01-19 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual Event
For the next Visualizing Abolition event, Joanne Barker, Maria Gaspar, and Kelly Lytle Hernández join us to discuss the histories and present struggles that disappear within the labyrinthian network of prisons, jails, and detention centers in the United States. Together, these influential artist and historians will talk about what is made visible when the settler colonial politics that sustain the prison industrial complex come into focus.

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.

Joanne Barker is Lenape (a citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians). She is professor and chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She is currently serving on The Segora Te Land Trust Board and The Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Board. Barker is the author of Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity, and the editor of Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination.
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar’s practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History. She is also the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

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.

Inaugurating Alternative Futures: A Conversation with Melanie Yazzie and Michelle Daigle
2021-01-20 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual Event
The U.S. President’s Inauguration is on January 20th. We use that date as an occasion to think about alternative futures and political possibilities not beholden to colonial and capitalist dispossession, U.S. sovereignty, and the nation-state form, focusing in particular on Indigenous pathways to alternative political-ethical futures. Melanie Yazzie (University of New Mexico) and Michelle Daigle (University of Toronto) will be in conversation with Gina Dent (UCSC) and Caitlin Keliiaa (UCSC) to discuss methods of resurgence and freedom premised on abolitionist, decolonial, and feminist praxis.
Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is an Assistant Professor of Native American studies and American studies at the University of New Mexico. She is also the national chair of the Red Nation, a grassroots organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism. She does historical research at the intersections of Indigenous studies, feminist and queer studies, carceral studies, Diné (Navajo) studies, and environmental studies. She also does public intellectual and activist work on Native women’s rights, LGBTQ2 rights, environmental justice, policing and incarceration, Indigenous housing justice, urban Indigenous issues, and international solidarity.
Michelle Daigle is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research examines colonial capitalist dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies, as well as Indigenous practices of resurgence and freedom. Her current research project is on extractive geographies in Mushkegowuk territory. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Environment & Planning D, and Political Geography.

RSVP by 11 AM (PST) on Wednesday, January 20th; 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.

Dina Danon: Modernity in the Eastern Sephardi Diaspora - The Jews of Late Ottoman Izmir
2021-01-21 11:40 - 13:15 | Virtual Event
Dina Danon (Binghamton University) will speak in HIS 74B on her book titled The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (Stanford University Press, 2020). This lecture will tell the story of a long-overlooked Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, the lecture will also offer a new read on Jewish modernity. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally unremarkable? What happens when there is no “Jewish Question?” Through the voices of beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, this lecture will underscore how it was new attitudes to poverty and social class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community’s encounter with the modern age.

Dina Danon is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Binghamton University. She holds a doctorate in History from Stanford University. She is the author of The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (Stanford University Press, 2020). She was recently a fellow at the Katz Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she began work on new project on the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage, and divorce in the eastern Sephardi diaspora.
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.

Nick Estes and Melanie K. Yazzie, of The Red Nation
2021-01-21 16:30 - 18:30 | Virtual Event
Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) and Melanie Yazzie (Diné) of The Red Nation, respond to the prompt: What lies beyond dystopian catastrophism, and how can we cultivate radical futures of social justice and ecological flourishing?
Welcomed by Chairman Valentin Lopez (Amah Mutsun)
Moderated by Mayanthi Fernando and T. J. Demos

Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa from the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Resistance (Verso, 2019), and the host of The Red Nation Podcast.
Melanie K. Yazzie, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history, political ecology, Indigenous feminisms, queer Indigenous studies, and theories of policing and the state. She also organizes with The Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism.
Valentin Lopez has been the Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band since 2003, one of three historic tribes that are recognized as Ohlone. Valentin is Mutsun, Awaswas, Chumash and Yokuts. The Amah Mutsun are comprised of the documented descendants of Missions San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz. Valentin Lopez is a Native American Advisor to the University of California, Office of the President on issues related to repatriation.
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

Book Talk - Christine Hong: A Violent Peace: Race, US Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific
2021-01-22 14:00 - 17:00 | Virtual Event
Join us for a book Talk and celebration of Christine Hong’s (Assoc Prof Lit and Director of CRES) new book A Violent Peace: Race, US Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford U Press, 2020) with respondents: Neel Ahuja (Assoc Professor, FMST and CRES) and Alyosha Goldstein (Professor, American Studies, University of New Mexico).

Prisons and Poetics: Reginald Dwayne Betts and Craig Haney
2021-01-26 16:00 - 17:30 | 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 | 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.
