Events

An Alternative Legacy of Modernity” Insurgent Universality offers a new way of thinking political universality that radically differs from the legal universalism of human rights and cosmopolitanism. Assuming a conception of history that is not linear but articulated in a multiverse of historical temporalities, Insurgent Universality excavates an alternative trajectory of modernity, which originally bridges European and non-European political experiments. Massimiliano Tomba is professor of History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. His work aims at reconsidering…

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 larger feminist movement of university students, labor activists, civil rights lawyers, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among young Chinese women. In…

“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 argument that “yellow” and impartial journalism are, in different ways, responsible for the precipitous rise in the lynching of African Americans at the turn of the…

"Sanctuary and Medieval Kings" Key Note speaker: Elizabeth Allen  American nationalist discourse casts sanctuary as “illegal”, but actually the practice always bears a relation to the law: sanctuary cities, universities, and churches call law to account. Sanctuary has a long legal history. In the Middle Ages, felons could avoid death by running to the church, and kings bolstered their sacral power by protecting them. At the same time, those who seek sanctuary exerted an influence upon their kings “from below,”…

"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 the ground, and how these materials, once liberated, move between the earth and our bodies. She is currently researching the shapes and structures of underground oil…

"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 contemporary land and air into a substantial continuum. It tracks territorial governance as it shifts into experimental formations that draw into the choreographies of sand,…

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 by his brother, a Veteran returning from war, as he faces criminal charges, racism, and ultimately the death penalty. This film is a portrait of…

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 confronted with the limits of national citizenship as a means for addressing racial inequality. In response, activists have begun to turn toward alternative political imaginaries…

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Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement An Atlas by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project This event will feature members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project will be offering a preview of their new atlas manuscript, Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement, which will be released by PM Press in the spring of 2020. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, digital cartography, and multimedia collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project…

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