BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//The Humanities Institute - ECPv6.16.1//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:The Humanities Institute
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for The Humanities Institute
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:20250309T100000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:20251102T090000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:20260308T100000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:20261101T090000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:20270314T100000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:20271107T090000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260519T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260519T133000
DTSTAMP:20260513T174513
CREATED:20260331T215829Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260331T220331Z
UID:10007897-1779192000-1779197400@thi.ucsc.edu
SUMMARY:Privacy’s Defender: Fight Against Digital Surveillance with Cindy Cohn
DESCRIPTION:Cindy Cohn has devoted her life to the fight for digital rights. She’s tangled with federal officials to keep our online conversations secure from the government’s prying eyes\, fought to ensure that you are told when your information has been turned over to the government\, and argued before judges to protect our right to speak and to share science and knowledge on the internet. \nIn Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press)\, Cindy weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users\, innovators\, whistleblowers\, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s\, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s\, and the fight against FBI gag orders. \nDuring this national book tour\, Cindy will be at UC Santa Cruz to give a book talk on May 19\, 2026 from 12:00-1:30 pm. \n \nFree and open to the public with registration. This event is both in-person and virtual. \nCindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation\, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom\, justice and innovation for all the people of the world. Before becoming Executive Director a decade ago\, Cindy was the organization’s Legal Director from 2000-2015\, and led the organization’s impact litigation work on bringing balance to copyright law\, stopping mass spying and protecting freedom of expression online. She’s won many awards for her work and even more court decisions. \n\nInstitute for Social Transformation\, The Humanities Institute\, Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas\, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS)\, and the Security Research Lab.
URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/privacys-defender-fight-against-digital-surveillance-with-cindy-cohn/
LOCATION:Humanities 1\, Room 210\, 1156 high st\, Santa cruz\, CA\, 95060\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://thi.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Privacy-Defender.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T121500
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260520T133000
DTSTAMP:20260513T174513
CREATED:20260323T231059Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260323T232223Z
UID:10007891-1779279300-1779283800@thi.ucsc.edu
SUMMARY:Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature
DESCRIPTION:Co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies \nAlthough capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification\, it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world\, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. Free Gifts argues that to understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change\, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. The book recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world\, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown\, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light. \nAlyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics\, capitalism\, Marxism\, feminism\, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. Alyssa is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019)\, and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025)\, and her academic work has been published in the American Political Science Review\, Political Theory\, NOMOS\, Perspectives on Politics\, Contemporary Political Theory\, among other outlets. \n\nPresented by the Center for Cultural Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology Colloquium. This event is open to all students\, faculty\, staff\, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law. \n\n \nSpring 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 Spring 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/alyssa-battistoni-free-gifts-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-nature/
LOCATION:Humanities 1\, Room 210\, 1156 high st\, Santa cruz\, CA\, 95060\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://thi.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Copy-of-banner-2.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260527T121500
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260527T133000
DTSTAMP:20260513T174513
CREATED:20250321T025355Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260323T231900Z
UID:10007638-1779884100-1779888600@thi.ucsc.edu
SUMMARY:Murad Idris – Against Hate: On the Politics of a False Diagnosis
DESCRIPTION:Co-sponsored by the Global Political Thought Working Group \nThe idea that “hate” names a fundamental problem of our time has engulfed Anglophone public discourse. Republicans and Democrats\, university presidents and doxxing campaigns\, advocacy organizations and journalists\, scholarly experts and “hate glossaries” criticize what they oppose as hate\, demand standing against hate\, and seem to treat hate as a diagnosis—one that comes with its own institutional prescriptions. In recent years\, Gaza has put the pervasiveness and power of this discourse on full display. What is the long history of this way of diagnosing politics and the world? Who hates\, what counts as hating\, who is hated\, and what broader philosophical structures and shifts underlie the subject for whom hate is a cipher or a code for understanding the world? The presentation offers a genealogy of “hate” through the question of Palestine over the last six decades\, its transformations\, and its intersections with anti-Muslim racism. \n \nMurad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His award-winning book\, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford\, 2019)\, examines how philosophers fantasize about peace in order to promote hierarchy\, war\, and repression. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford\, 2020)\, with Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas\, and co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE\, 2025)\, with Leigh Jenco and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. He is completing projects about Sayyid Qutb’s global and critical thought\, the genealogies of racializing Islam\, and the politics of hate. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics. \n\nPresented by the Center for Cultural Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the Department of Anthropology Colloquium. This event is open to all students\, faculty\, staff\, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law. \n\n \nSpring 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 Spring 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/murad-idris-dialogue-for-hate-a-global-genealogy/
LOCATION:Humanities 1\, Room 210\, 1156 high st\, Santa cruz\, CA\, 95060\, United States
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260601T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260601T133000
DTSTAMP:20260513T174513
CREATED:20260318T190225Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260319T201139Z
UID:10007886-1780315200-1780320600@thi.ucsc.edu
SUMMARY:CMENA Student Choice Lecture:  Razan Ghazzawi -Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography
DESCRIPTION:Join us for the annual student choice lecture presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa:  Razan Ghazzawi\, “Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography.”  From a positionality of an exiled protestor in Europe and a former political prisoner in Syria\, this project traces the journeys of eight self-identified Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ artists\, workers\, performers\, and refugees from their temporary exile locations in Lebanon to their refugee destinations in Europe. It explores the interlocutors’ temporal encounters with geographies of checkpoints and prisons in Syria and Lebanon\, on one side\, and racialized borders of Europe\, on the other. This project investigates narratives of what Rima Hammami calls “carceral geographies” as well as surviving checkpoints\, prisons\, and asylum journeys from Syria and Lebanon to Europe. The talk will focus on one of the book’s chapters\, which examines stories of navigating and surviving racialized borders as LGBTQ refugees of color\, and how this experience is securitized and militarized; it will also explore emotional labor and care as affective forms of protest within the context of military carceral states in Syria and Lebanon as well as Europe’s “refugee crisis.” \nDr. Razan Ghazzawi (they/them/هي\هن) is an award-winning human rights defender\, former political prisoner\, and recovering blogger. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women\, Gender\, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A MESA Global Academy Fellow for 2024–2025\, Ghazzawi’s work has appeared in ARTE\, Al Jazeera English\, The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication\, and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. They are currently developing their first book monograph\, an ethnographic study of sexuality politics in Syria and Lebanon that examines revolution\, the “war on terror\,” and the “refugee crisis” from south–south perspectives. \n\nCo-presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa and the Arab Students Union. Lunch will be served during the talk.
URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/from-carceral-geographies-to-racialized-borders-a-queer-feminist-ethnography/
LOCATION:Humanities 1\, Room 210\, 1156 high st\, Santa cruz\, CA\, 95060\, United States
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR