On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much […]

  “Candor and Courage: Ida B. Wells and Fearless Speech” This paper explicates Ida B. Wells’s argument that journalists and leaders have a moral obligation to speak fearlessly. To do so, I unearth the normative relationship between candor, courage, and duty underlying Wells’s anti-lynching editorials and reporting during the Progressive Era. First, I recount Wells’s […]

"Public Sun"   A. Laurie Palmer ’s place-based work takes form as sculpture, public projects, and writing, and she collaborates on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Her book In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (2014) investigates what happens to places where materials are removed from […]

"Continent in Dust: China in Aerosol Phases“ Jerry Zee is an assistant professor at UCSC's Anthropology Department. His work considers experiments in politics and environments in China's meteorological contemporary. This talk offers a political anthropology of strange weather. As Chinese deserts increasingly appear as latent dust storms, it tracks geo-meteorological phase shifts as they rework […]

Professor Hibbert-Jones will be screening her academy award nominated short film "Last Day of Freedom." When Bill Babbitt realizes his brother Manny has committed a crime he agonizes over his decision- should he call the police? Last Day of Freedom is a richly animated personal narrative that tells the story of Bill’s decision to stand […]

This talk examines the possibilities and limitations of the “Black Mediterranean” (which emphasizes the power-laden relations of cultural exchange and racial violence linking Europe and Africa) as an analytical framework for understanding the historical and contemporary forms of racial criminalization and racialized citizenship in Italy. The emergent "Black Italian" movement in Italy has been increasingly […]

  Dai Jinhua’s lecture will address the place of post-colonial theory in the twenty-first century. This question is highly relevant to China, as it recalls the history of China’s involvement in the non-aligned movement, and subsequent efforts after the break with the Soviet Union to form third-world solidarities. But Dai calls into question whether the […]

Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program for 2017-2019. She received her BA from the University of Oxford in Modern History and French, and completed her PhD in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2017. Her research and teaching focus on the francophone and Arab worlds, with a […]

  This talk explores the emergence of modern offshore tax havens as a way to reopen the history of the decades ca. 1920s-1980s. During these decades an archipelago of distinct legal spaces appeared in a world otherwise increasingly dominated by more sizable nation-states. Tax havens were particularly important among these spaces, reaching from the Channel […]

  Discourses of urban knowledge professionals (architects, PR professionals, etc.) on the Arab Gulf city have framed this city as an “laboratory,” a “sci-fi” space, and generally have disconnected the space from its social and historical contexts. In this paper I argue that a Marxist or class struggle perspective can best highlight how such discourses […]