If “climate apartheid” is on the rise, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, then Cop City Atlanta—the multimillion-dollar new police training facility built by clear-cutting the city’s largest green space—offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City’s contested construction (which is ongoing) an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism. It also spotlights the forces of contemporary counterinsurgency—including its aesthetic modalities—that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmental movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change. How might a prehensive climate-justice-directed art history, and an insurgent arts of the possible, meaningfully respond?

T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.

Date | Time
October 9, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies.

The recent student-led mass uprising which ousted the longstanding autocrat, Sheikh Hasina, from office ushered in a new era in Bangladesh politics. How did an uprising that began with a demand for students’ job quota reform become a mass movement to reclaim the people’s sovereignty? What united people of different religions, regions, castes, classes, and generations to confront authoritarian rule? And what political possibilities and precarities lie ahead for post-uprising Bangladesh? This talk examines how the uprising creatively broke prevailing binaries of secular-religious, nationalist-anti-nationalist, freedom fighter-Rajakar, etc. by fostering cultural and ideological coexistence, thus creating a space for collective resistance and new discourses that go beyond conventional party politics and ideological contestation.

Md Mizanur Rahman is a PhD candidate in Politics at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on liberalism and its critics, Islamic political thought, and religion and politics in South Asia. He is particularly interested in Bangladesh politics and has written on debates concerning Islam, modernity, and the politics of Islamic seminaries in Bangladesh.

Date | Time
October 10, 2024 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 202
University of California, Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by UCSC’s More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory.

This talk explores emergent water cultures. How might a theory and praxis of hydrocommoning support transitions to alternative hydrosocial relations beyond modern urban and extractive paradigms. I will lay out a methodological route for interdisciplinary water research that takes seriously situated embodied knowledge and planetary hydrologies by arguing for the generative role of art in igniting multiscalar engagements with liquid ecologies. Drawing on projects developed through the entre—ríos collective, I will situate engaged curatorial practice as a response to calls in the environmental humanities to contribute aesthetic forms that support a reclaiming of common waters.

Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a research and artistic platform for collaborative methodologies connecting communities to bodies of water. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas (2024) and “Water” in the Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (2023). entre-rios.net / lisablackmore.net

Date | Time
October 16, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

This talk reteaches the history of the research university as a series of answers to the question of what symbols are for, what symbols can do. By answers I do not mean simply what scholars have said about these matters, but also what we have done, the worlds we have made in our teaching and in our shaping of the forms of the university itself. Two portraits stand at the center, each from public universities, each cases in which scholars themselves had an unusual degree of influence: the founding of the University of Berlin in the years before 1809 and the formation of the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz over the course of the 1970s-80s. Both institutions were established during periods of academic reform and state-building ambition. In both cases we find the imprint of a peculiarly Romantic myth—the idea of an intimate relation among three sets of maps: maps of a school, maps of culture, and maps of the mind.

Noreen Khawaja teaches in the Religion and Modernity program at Yale University. Her work examines the ideas, practices, and institutions of secular reason. She is the author of The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and is currently at work on a history of the research university.

Date | Time
October 23, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

When Immanuel Kant suggested in 1798 that a citizenship of the world could be staged in Konigsberg without physical travel, he illuminated the dense heterogeneity of place. Kant’s insight might be seen to have informed many projects of British cultural studies that situated globality inside locality by focusing on the potential of working-class cultures built through migrancy and racialization in cities like London. US cultural studies, by contrast, underemphasized that local-global dynamic, perhaps because the crossings of daily experience that inspired scholars like Stuart Hall were hard to see through post-1970s America’s balkanization of racial and ethnic identities. And while Hall and others advocated an interdisciplinarity that took seriously the inextricability of representation and social life, this was not always fully attended to by the literary criticism that assumed the task of translating British cultural studies for the US academy. This cross-cultural talk brings together the earlier approaches of Hall and the Birmingham school with the histories and stories told about Harlem in order to propose working-class cosmopolitanism as a useful conceptual frame for the political present.

Sandhya Shukla is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her most recent work is Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024). She is also the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology. 

Date | Time
October 30, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Join the CCS community as we process what just happened. We will be discussing electoral politics, the role of media in the election, political affects, and what is to be done. With: Liz Beaumont, Jody Biehl, and Daniel Wirls. 

Liz Beaumont is Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research explores the politics and law of citizenship and constitutional democracy, with particular interests in problems of unequal citizenship, how citizens, civic groups, and movements seek to use, challenge, and transform rights and law. Her most recent book is the co-edited volume Civic Education in Polarized Times, New York University Press (2024).

Jody K. Biehl is an award-winning journalist and journalism educator. She spent 15 years as a reporter and editor, including at Germany’s Der Spiegel, before joining the faculty at SUNY Buffalo, where she redesigned the journalism program curriculum. She came to UCSC in 2021 and is a Humanities Divisional Associate Teaching Professor. She is interested in the role that community and local journalism play in society and serves as the Community Voices editor at Lookout Santa Cruz. In 2024, she was part of the Lookout team to win the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting.

Daniel Wirls is Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz and author of numerous works on the history of Congress and the Senate as well as U.S. military policy and American political thought. His most recent book is The Senate: From White Supremacy to Government Gridlock (University of Virginia Press, 2021). Dan also serves on the board of the Council for a Livable World, the nation’s oldest anti-nuclear weapons political action committee.

Date | Time
November 6, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Abundance: Living with a Forest (2024) is a filmic biography of foraging, forest, and jhum cultivation in Nagaland, a hill state in Northeast India where approximately 60% of the population depend on jhum cultivation. Jhum cultivation and foraging have been recognized as community practices of indigenous knowledge. However, both these practices and the forest to which they are intrinsically linked have been threatened by the plantation, monocropping, and infrastructure activities that have surged with the ongoing ceasefire between Naga armed groups and the government.

Abundance: Living with a Forest follows Zareno, a Lotha forager in the forest of Khumtsü, and traces the foraged edible plants as they make their way to the market in Wokha town. The film gestures to an impending loss that Indigenous communities encounter across the world.

Dolly Kikon is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Center for South Asian Studies. She is the author of Experiences of Naga Women in Armed Conflict: Narratives from a Militarized Society (2004); Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (2015); Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019); with Bengt G. Karlsson, Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (2019); with Duncan McDuie-Ram, Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (2021); with Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Bengt G. Karlsson, Sanjay Barbora, and Meenal Tula, Seeds and Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023).

Date | Time
November 13, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

This talk attends to what the Subaltern Studies tradition begins to think and gives to our own times to think. The emergence of Subaltern Studies was part of the increasing prominence of the “New Social Movements,” new because they were focused more on oppression than exploitation. Recognizing this allows us to discern that the Subaltern Studies project is driven by a subaltern intimation of freedom—a freedom that recognizes that domination takes the form of not only exploitation but oppression, and a freedom that, even as it exits subalternity, seeks not to make a new group subaltern in either way. Revisiting my 1999 book, Hybrid Histories, I explore this subaltern intimation of freedom by focusing on 1) how it played a role in the turn away from a focus on subaltern autonomy; 2) how the community constituted by it differs from those constituted by claims to oppression such as those made by Hindu nationalists or white nationalists; and 3) how it allows us to read differently the claim to indigeneity involved in the identity “Adivasi.”

Ajay Skaria studied Political Science and History at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, during which he also worked as a journalist for Indian Express. He teaches at the University of Minnesota. A member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective from 1995 till its dissolution, he is one of the co-editors of Subaltern Studies Vol. XII, and the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016). He is currently completing a collection of essays, Thinking With Gandhi and Ambedkar, and is also working on another book, Ambedkar’s Buddhism.

Date | Time
November 20, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz