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SUMMARY:Nurturing Difference - Parenting and Disability in a Careless Age
DESCRIPTION:We’ll be discussing Danilyn Rutherford’s Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke University Press) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Can a game take care of us? (University of Chicago Press). Joined by Donna Haraway and Megan Moodie\, and moderated by THI Faculty Director\, Pranav Anand\, the panel will discuss caregiving\, parenthood\, disability\, language\, meaning\, and technology. \nIn an increasingly careless world where cruelty is celebrated and disability mocked\, these two highly-readable scholars remind us that beautiful relationships of compassion\, connection\, communication\, and empathy still exist. Rutherford recounts her experiences raising a high assistance-needs daughter\, Millie\, describing the importance of a web of caregivers who support and enrich their lives and the potential for human communication beyond words. Wardrip-Fruin writes about parenting in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic\, exploring how his own need for rest and care in the face of growing disablement reshaped his ideas about masculinity\, fatherhood\, and video game imaginaries. Both books speak to Wardrip-Fruin’s provocative question posed in the subtitle to Animal Crossing: New Horizons\, “Can a game take care of us?” If the “game” is a resource-stripped\, social media-driven capitalist competition where everyone must fight for survival\, where basic welfare programs are being destroyed\, what can we learn from care-centered disability worlds? At a time when we most need it\, these scholar-parents give us extraordinary insight into the form of attention in which all our hopes rest: love. \n \nIf you have disability-related needs\, please contact us at thi@ucsc.edu or call 831-459-1274 by January 13\, 2026. ADA parking for this event will be available in lot 170\, directly adjacent to the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Sign language interpretation will also be available during the event. \nAbout Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World: \nWhen Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact\, they took her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later\, to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors could give Millie a diagnosis\, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their first steps\, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old. Three years later\, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a widow and single mother\, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s inaccessible mind. \nNow in her twenties\, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally\, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see\, hear\, smell\, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways. \nBeautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say\, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist\, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world\, what she found there\, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt\, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that\, if we all learned it\, might allow us to live together in a fractured world. \nAbout Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a game take care of us? \nAnimal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20\, 2020—just as a pandemic kept many from family\, work\, restaurants\, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height\, the game averaged one million copies sold per day\, as players sought comfort\, escape\, and a virtual means of connection. In this book\, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin\, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability\, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next—while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules. \nWardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing\, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation\, from “streak” bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping\, in a kind of “safe” capitalism; and\, of course\, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog\, Tom Nook\, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism. \nFor many\, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series\, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves or is puzzled by this Nintendo sensation. \nDanilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton\, 2003)\, Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago\, 2012)\, Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago\, 2018)\, and\, most recently\, Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke\, 2025). \nNoah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. He studies and makes video games and electronic literature. Before his most recent book\, Noah authored or co-edited six books on games and digital media for the MIT Press\, including The New Media Reader (2003). His collaborative art projects have been exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art\, New Museum of Contemporary Art\, Krannert Art Museum\, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences. Noah holds both a PhD (2006) and an MFA (2003) from Brown University\, an MA (2000) from the Gallatin School at New York University\, and a BA (1994) from the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands. \nMegan Moodie is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is chair of the Disabled Faculty Networking Group and a core member of the disability studies initiative on campus. meganmoodie.github.io \n\nThis event is presented by the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project\, a UC Multicampus Research Program and Initiative and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and is a featured event of THI’s year of Nourishment.
URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/nurturing-difference-parenting-and-disability-in-a-careless-age/
LOCATION:Cowell Ranch Hay Barn\, Ranch View Rd\, Santa Cruz\, CA\, 95064\, United States
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260121T121500
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SUMMARY:Cinthya Martinez - Toxic Caging!: Abolish ICE & Feminist Resistance
DESCRIPTION:This talk looks at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California and the grassroots movement to abolish ICE led by formerly detained migrants and local activists. It focuses on the Adelanto Toxic Tours\, a community action where survivors and organizers guide people through the areas surrounding the detention center to share stories about environmental harm\, toxic exposure\, and violence inside detention. Through these tours\, activists connect damage to the land with harm to migrant bodies\, showing how detention impacts both people and their environments. The presentation highlights how organizing in Adelanto challenges detention and imagines futures beyond cages\, surveillance\, and border enforcement. \nCinthya Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. She earned her doctorate from the University of California\, Riverside in Ethnic Studies. Her teaching and research interests are sexual violence\, abolition theory/praxis\, and migrant detention. Her research and current book project\, ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies\, investigates sexual violence and reproductive (in)justice in ICE detention facilities\, while examining how affected communities\, and migrant activists more broadly\, are forging geographies of abolition through confronting the connections between bodies in resistance\, the carceral\, and border regimes. \n\n \nWinter 2026 COLLOQUIUM SERIES \nTHE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2026 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1\, Room 210. \nStaff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.
URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/cinthya-martinez-toxic-caging-abolish-ice-feminist-resistance/
LOCATION:Humanities 1\, Room 210\, 1156 high st\, Santa cruz\, CA\, 95060\, United States
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260124T101500
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SUMMARY:Saturday Shakespeare - Henry IV\, Part 1
DESCRIPTION:Saturday Shakespeare in Santa Cruz Presents Henry IV\, Part 1 by William Shakespeare Aptos Library on January 10\, 17\, 24\, 31 & February 7\, 2025 at 10:15 a.m. in the Aptos Library Betty Leonard Community Room (in person or join by Zoom). The first hour will be a conversation with the scheduled guest speaker followed by a volunteer read aloud of the play. On February 7\, the film The Hollow Crown\, Henry IV Part 1 will be shown. This event series is co-sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Shakespeare Workshop. \nFor more information\, Zoom Link\, or to volunteer to be a reader\, contact: saturdayshakespeare@gmail.com \nGuest Speakers / Film Presentation \n\nJan 10: Alexander Brondarbit\, A historian who specializes in kingship in late medieval and early modern England; author of two books on The Wars of the Roses. Readings: Act 1 – Act 2\, Scene 2\nJan 17: Patty Gallagher\, An actor and Professor of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz; Artistic Associate at Santa Cruz Shakespeare and the Rogue Theatre in Tucson\, Arizona. Readings: Act 2\, Scene 3 – Act 3\, Scene 2.\nJan 24: Julia Reinhardt Lupton\, Distinguished Professor of English at UC Irvine\, co-director of the UCI Shakespeare Center. She is the author of six books on Shakespeare. Readings: Act 3\, Scene 3 – Act 4.\nJan 31: Abigail Heald is currently teaching the Henriad (Richard II\, Henry IV\, Parts I and Part II\, and Henry V) at Stanford University. Readings: Act 5.\nFeb 7: Film Screening: The Hollow Crown\, Henry IV Part 1. Jeremy Irons-King Henry/ Tom Hiddleson-Prince Hal/ Simon Russell Beale-Falstaff\, directed by Richard Eyre.
URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/saturday-shakespeare-henry-iv-part-1-3/
LOCATION:Virtual and In Person
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