Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience
What a vital occasion it would be to receive intellectual gifts that enable us to better grasp our current socio-ecological moment, especially as many of us feel short of interpretations. We are inspired by Stuart Hall’s conjunctural thinking, as we face a situation where intensive and condensed contradictions unfold—not from a single primary cause, but through intricate political and ecological, economic and cultural, social and geological articulations and re-articulations that shape the specificity of our present and reorder the coordinates of crisis and opportunity. This panel, along with the discussion that will follow, aims to be a moment of gift-giving—leaving behind conceptual, narratological, or visual gifts for those who seek to understand a present that is elusive and deeply troubling.
Jim Clifford, Professor Emeritus in History of Consciousness and founding director of the Center for Cultural Studies, is best known for his historical and literary critiques of anthropological representation, travel writing, and museum practices. His last book, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century (2013), is the third in a trilogy which also includes The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997). Jim is currently investigating the colonial legacies and future possibilities of ethnological museums in the former First World.
Camilla Hawthorne is a critical human geographer and associate professor of sociology and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz who studies migration, citizenship, racial capitalism, and the insurgent abolition geographies of the Black Mediterranean. She is the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (2022), translated into Italian as Razza e cittadinanza. Frontiere contese e contestate nel Mediterraneo nero (2023), and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (2021), The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (2023), and Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Collected Works of Katherine McKittrick (forthcoming 2026). She also serves as program director of the Black Europe Summer School, an intensive course on citizenship, race, and the Black diaspora in Europe that is held for two weeks each summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Gail Hershatter is Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emer. of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies. Her books include The Workers of Tianjin (1986, Chinese translation 2016), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997, Chinese translation 2003), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011; Chinese translation 2017) and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019). She is at work on a book provisionally entitled “Travels on the Revolution’s Edge.”
Laurie Palmer is an artist, writer, and teacher whose research-based work focuses on undoing and re-crafting human practices of relating with the material world towards building just, livable, and joyful social and environmental relations. Palmer just retired after 10 years in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she helped her colleagues build the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program.
Dimitris Papadopoulos is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, and cultural and visual studies. He is Professor of History of Consciousness in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Vanita Seth is an associate professor in the Politics Department.
Date | Time
October 29, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz