Of Interest Events for Week of January 26, 2015

 

Tuesday, Jan 27 / FEMINIST SCIENCE STUDIES COLLOQUIA / Kristina Lyons / “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Shared Bodies, and Stamina Under the Gun of the US Colombia War on Drugs” / 5:00-6:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

Tuesday, Jan 27 / IHR QUESTIONS THAT MATTER / Making the Cosmos Local—SOLD OUT / 6:00pm / Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Wednesday, Jan 28 / FILM + DIGITAL MEDIA WEDNESDAY NIGHT CINEMA / “War at a Distance” and “Eye/Machine III” / 7:00pm / Studio C (Communications 150)

Wednesday, Jan 28 / 31st ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. MEMORIAL CONVOCATION / Angela Davis / “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine” / 7:00pm – 9:00pm / Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium

Thursday, Jan 29 / LIVING WRITERS SERIES / Maya Chinchilla / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206

Friday, Jan 30 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Aubrey Hobart / “The Queen of Heaven and the Prince of Angels: Saintly Rivalry in Colonial Mexico” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202

Friday, Jan 30 / ANCIENT STUDIES / Michael Frachetti / “Uncovering a Nomadic City Along the Medieval Silk Road” / 5:00-7:00pm / Humanities I, Room 210

 

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*For more on many of the Of Interest events please see the Institute for Humanities Research calendar.

 


 


Tuesday, Jan 27 / FEMINIST SCIENCE STUDIES COLLOQUIA / Kristina Lyons / “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Shared Bodies, and Stamina Under the Gun of the US Colombia War on Drugs” / 5:00-6:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

What does it mean to live in a criminalized ecology in the Andean Amazonian foothills of Colombia? In what way does antinarcotics policy that aims to eradicate la mata que mata (the plant that kills) pursue peace through poison? Since 2000, the US-Colombia War on Drugs has relied on the militarized aerial fumigation of coca plants coupled with alternative development interventions that aim to forcibly eradicate illicit-based rural livelihoods. With ethnographic engagement among small farmers in the frontier department of Putumayo – gateway to the country’s Amazon and a region that has been the focus of hemispheric counternarcotic operations – this talk explores the di‑erent possibilities and foreclosures for life and death that emerge in a tropical forest ecology pushed to its metabolic limits under military duress. I closely trace the way human-soil relations come to potentiate forms of resistance to the violence and criminalization produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.

Kristina Lyons, PhD in Anthropology from UC Davis is a UC President’s Postdoc Fellow at UCSC in the Anthropology Department and with the Science and Justice Research Center.

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Tuesday, Jan 27 / IHR QUESTIONS THAT MATTER / Making the Cosmos Local—SOLD OUT / 6:00pm / Kuumbwa Jazz Center

This series brings together UC Santa Cruz scholars with community members to explore questions that matter to all of us.

Featuring: Minghui Hu (History) and Anthony Aguirre (Physics)
Facilitated by: Nathaniel Deutsch (IHR Director)

For millennia, people across the globe have searched the sky for answers. They have imagined and reimagined the cosmos, from an infinite and eternal backdrop full of other worlds, to a young Earth encircled by nearby planets and crystal spheres of stars. What is the relation between our lives here on Earth and the wider realm of nearby planets, distant stars, unfathomably faraway galaxies, and a potentially infinite universe—or swarm of universes? Where do we find, or create, meaning in such a picture?

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Wednesday, Jan 28 / FILM + DIGITAL MEDIA WEDNESDAY NIGHT CINEMA / “War at a Distance” and “Eye/Machine III” / 7:00pm / Studio C (Communications 150)

WAR AT A DISTANCE (2003, 54 min.)
Since the Gulf War in 1991, warfare and reporting it have become hyper-technological affairs, in which real and computer-generated images cannot be distinguished any more. With the aid of new and also unique archive material, Farocki sketches a picture of the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and shows how war technology finds its way into everyday use.

EYE / MACHINE III (2003, 25 min.)
“These are images which do not portray a process, but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape, then took an actual image during flight; the software compared the two images, resulting in a comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. Superfluous reality is denied–a constant denial provoking opposition.”
–Harun Farocki

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Wednesday, Jan 28 / 31st ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. MEMORIAL CONVOCATION / Angela Davis / “Racism, Militarism, Poverty: From Ferguson to Palestine” / 7:00 – 9:00pm / Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium

Through her activism and scholarship over the last decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in our nation’s quest for social justice. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of nine books, including her most recent book of essays called The Meaning of Freedom.

In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.”

She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

Also featuring a performance by: Singer and songwriter, AlexisRose

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Thursday, Jan 29 / LIVING WRITERS SERIES / Maya Chinchilla / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206

The Creative Writing Program presents Korimar Press, Lorenzo Herrera Y Lozano & Maya Chincilla in the Winter 2015 Living Writers Series.

Maya Chinchilla is a Guatemalan, Bay Area-based writer, video artist, and educator. Maya received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College and her undergraduate degree from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also founded and co-edited the annual non-exclusive publication, La Revista. Maya writes and performs poetry that explores themes of historical memory, heartbreak, tenderness, sexuality, and alternative futures. Her work —sassy, witty, performative, and self-aware— draws on a tradition of truth-telling and poking fun at the wounds we carry.

Her work has been published in anthologies and journals including: Mujeres de Maíz, Sinister Wisdom, Americas y Latinas: A Stanford Journal of Latin American Studies, Cipactli Journal, and The Lunada Literary Anthology. Maya is a founding member of the performance group Las Manas, a former artist-in-residence at Galería de La Raza in San Francisco, CA, and La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA, and is a VONA Voices and Dos Brujas workshop alum. She is the co-editor of Desde El Epicentro: An anthology of Central American Poetry and Art and is a lecturer at San Francisco State University.

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Friday, Jan 30 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Aubrey Hobart / “The Queen of Heaven and the Prince of Angels: Saintly Rivalry in Colonial Mexico” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202

Aubrey Hobart is a graduate student in History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC). Her presentation explores evidence that the historic rivalry between Tenochtitlan/Mexico City and Tlaxcala did not simply fade away after the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, but instead transferred to the veneration of Catholic saints, especially the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael — saints that seemed to confer political and religious favor at the local level in association with specific miracle-working images of themselves.

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available.

For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for Spring quarter contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com

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Friday, Jan 30 / ANCIENT STUDIES / Michael Frachetti / “Uncovering a Nomadic City Along the Medieval Silk Road” / 5:00-7:00pm / Humanities I, Room 210

From at least 200 BC to the 16th century CE, the Eurasian Silk Road formed the most extensive network of trade and commerce the world had ever seen. Its pathways linked populations from Beijing to Jerusalem in one of the first global networks. Much of what we know about the Silk Road is defined by archaeology from lowland oases, but mountainous regions occupied by nomads offer new insights. The newly discovered city of Tashbulak, unearthed in 2011 in the highlands of Uzbekistan, is one of the most recent and exciting discoveries along the Medieval Silk Road. Tashbulak pushes us to question our common understanding of the role of nomads in shaping the history and technology of medieval empires across Central Asia and sparks many questions about political, religious and economic change in the 11th century CE.

Dr. Michael Frachetti is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His work addresses the ancient nomadic societies of Central and Eastern Eurasia and how these shaped inter-regional networks from as early as 2000 BCE (the Mid-Bronze Age) down to the time of the later Silk Roads. He is the author of Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (UCPress, 2008). He currently conducts archaeological field research in Eastern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

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Posted in Of Interest, Uncategorized.