photo of a street sign

January 17 – Muriam Haleh Davis – The Absent Preface: Algerian Readings of Frantz Fanon after Independence

In 1959, Ferhat Abbas, the President of the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), refused Frantz Fanon’s request to write a preface for L’An V de la révolution algérienne. This never-written preface is emblematic of a larger silence regarding the lively Algerian debates on Fanon’s writings after independence. By foregrounding North African interpretations of Fanon’s work, this talk asks a series of questions about the capture of revolutionary thought, the role of national frameworks in global intellectual history, and the possibilities of epistemological “delinking.”

Muriam Haleh Davis is an Associate Professor of History at UCSC. Her first book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. She has also co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018. Her academic writing has been published by the Journal of Modern Intellectual History, Middle East Critique, the Journal of Contemporary History, Lateral, and 20 et 21: Revue d’histoire. She has also authored pieces for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, Public Books, and Truth Out. She is co-chair of the editorial committee for MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and is co-editor of the Maghreb Page for Jadaliyya.

Date | Time
January 17, 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

Prof. zhao in a blazer

January 24 – Mengyang (Zoe) Zhao – Verify You Are Human: How Video Game Automation Intensifies Extraction of Platform Game Work

Part of a broader book project on the rise of platform video game work in China, this study examines the impact of automation fears on escalating labor extraction from gaming service workers. It reveals that platform workers are compelled to demonstrate their “pure manual” services, amidst concerns over automated tools infiltrating the industry. Such pressures lead to practices like live streaming and performing slowness as human labor validation, inadvertently increasing hidden labor and the risk of harassment. This study advocates for recognizing validation labor in explicating automation and labor control in the platform economy, and underscores evolving human-machine dynamics in the global data work landscape.

Zoe Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Their interdisciplinary research centers on digital labor, platformization, and social movements, with a particular focus on new forms of work, technology, diaspora and labor activism under platform and venture capitalism. Their art practice leverages gamification to reimagine ways of commoning and queering the care infrastructure.

Date | Time
January 24, 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

Prof. Haraway, bugs on shoulders

January 31 – Donna Haraway – Making Kin: Lynn Margulis in Sympoiesis with Sibling Scientists

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations

Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making with.” We live in a profoundly sympoietic world. This talk begins with Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), a multi-faceted biologist who co-founded the view of Earth as Gaia, a planet with wildly improbable gas ratios and with sustained, unlikely equilibria that only living beings could account for. Margulis thought that if bacteria had not already accomplished something, it was hardly worth doing. Indebted to Margulis, I explore the work of three contemporary biologists who together demonstrate the crucial game-changing ideas and research practices essential to partial healing on a damaged planet. The talk concludes by moving more deeply to naturecultures in the sympoiesis of the living and the dead and the vital practices of strong mourning.

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies.

Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). Her books and articles are translated into many languages. Fabrizio Terravova made a feature-length film, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, ( 2016), and Diana Toucedo made Camille & Ulysse with Haraway and Vinciane Despret. With Adele Clarke she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing. 

Date | Time
January 31, 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

Prof. Starosielski

February 7 – Nicole Starosielski – Socializing the Network

Co-sponsored by Film + Digital Media

This talk is a story about the ways that global digital infrastructure, especially the data centers and subsea cable networks that form the backbone of the internet, are produced out of tight-knit relationships that can weather geopolitical transitions, economic competition, and corporate tensions. I describe the process of “socializing” an infrastructure project, an essential part of the ongoing construction of a global digital network. Building a more sustainable internet, I show, is not only a process of technical coordination, of describing metrics, and of setting standards, but working within a globally-distributed and yet intimately connected geography.

Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at the University of California-Berkeley, conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press.

Date | Time
February 7, 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

Thenmozhi Soundararajan and book

February 14 – Thenmozhi Soundararajan – The Trauma of Caste and the US Equity Movement

Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies

A conversation about Thenmozhi’s new book The Trauma of Caste and reflections on the US Based movement for caste equity.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American artist, theorist, and organizer who works on the issues of religion, race, caste, gender, technology and justice. She is the Executive Director of Equality Labs and the author of The Trauma of Caste

Date | Time
February 14, 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

Zoom Registration Link: https://bit.ly/3P3ZJe3

Prof. Borass in a sweater

February 21 – Jun Borras – Land Struggles and Scholar-Activism

Co-sponsored by Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast)

The talk will argue that land struggles as framed by agrarian, food and environmental justice movements have regained academic and political importance in recent years, but that in the era of fragmented working classes and environmental/climate crisis, these require rethinking and reframing. Mapping contemporary land issues of working classes, the talk will emphasise the need to look into the changing social dynamics in rural-urban, agriculture-nonagriculture continuum/corridor and production/social reproduction, and land/labour entanglements as useful reference points to think about political struggles around land and labour, livelihoods and ecological sustainability along class and intersecting axes of social differences (race/ethnicity, gender, generation). The talk will explore the small but important role played or ought to be played by scholar-activists in these political struggles. The talk will mobilise insights from Southeast Asia country cases (and by extension, southern China), and from some African countries and Colombia where I have ongoing field research. 

Jun Borras is a Filipino migrant worker currently working as professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in The Hague, Netherlands. He is a long-time agrarian movement activist in the Philippines and internationally. He was a member of the International Coordinating Committee of the La Via Campesina during its formative years, in 1993-1996. He is a recipient of the European Research Council Advanced Grant, enabling him to study how land rushes shape global social life, and does fieldwork for this in Southeast Asia and China, Ethiopia and Colombia. He works in the tradition of, and at the same time studies, scholar-activism. He was Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years until 2023. He co-organizes the regular International Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism meant for PhD researchers and early career scholars from/in the Global South.  

Date | Time
February 21, 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

Prof polzak white wall

February 28 – Kailani Polzak – Voyage Visuality: European Representations of Oceania at the Intersection of Eighteenth-Century Racial Theory and Artistic Practice

Amid discussions about universal rights, contestations over land, and debates over the morality of chattel slavery, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly sought to codify social hierarchy in observable physical differences. This project depended upon and spurred the production of circulatable pictures of bodies in the form of prints. At the same time, recent encounters between European and Pacific Islanders disrupted previously accepted human divisions based on a four-continent model. This talk will analyze prints made after European voyages in Oceania to consider how these works give form to interactions between different visual practices and ways of knowing. Though images made during the so-called “voyages of discovery” are often treated as mere illustrations, this talk will indicate how they do not simply replicate European racialist theories but rather reveal uncertainties and shifts in the visual epistemologies of race.

Kailani Polzak is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in early-modern European visual culture, focusing on questions of intercultural contact, race, and colonialism in representations of the Pacific. Polzak’s current book project examines the graphic and printed works created about the circumnavigatory expeditions conducted by Britain, France, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were mobilized in constructions of racial difference and geographical space. Her current research and publications emphasize the methodological questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives.

Date | Time
February 28, 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

Prof. Connery, street background

March 6 – Christopher Connery – China and the Mutations of Neoliberalism: Thoughts on the Current Conjuncture

China’s economic and social development over the last 25 years has featured significant elements from the neoliberal playbook–ideologies of competition and human capital, market metrics, efficiency, suppression of labor rights, and more–coexisting with severe state limitations on private property, impediments to the formation of a capitalist class, and, especially in the last ten years, an expansion of state-owned enterprises and party control of the economy. This talk argues for the continued relevance of neoliberalism to an understanding of China today, and suggests that China’s particular and limited neoliberal character offers insights into the nature of contemporary capitalism, and of its antagonists.

Christopher Connery is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. He has published on early imperial Chinese literati culture (Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China); the oceanic mythos in early and late capitalism (“Pacific Rim Discourse”, “The Oceanic Feeling”, “Sea Power”, et al); the global 1960s (The Asian Sixties , The Sixties and the World Event, “The World Sixties”, “The End of the Sixties”); and contemporary Chinese intellectual politics and culture. Since 2010 he has been a member (writer, performer, political consultant) of Shanghai-based, Chinese-language theater group Grass Stage, which has performed throughout China, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and North America.

Date | Time
March 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

person in black button down in front of bush

October 11 – Nick Mitchell – The University in Surplus Perspective, 1945-1968

Is it possible to historicize higher education without taking its basic categories for granted? In this talk, I aim to provide a historical and theoretical framework for the emergence of mass higher education in the twentieth century U.S. framed by the problem of surpluses—population, labor, and governance capacity. Faced with the prospect of mass unemployment in the wake of the second world war, U.S. state-making found in the university a means of putting wartime budget surpluses to work in an effort to absorb demobilized population and labor surpluses. The category of the college student emerges in this period as a means of anticipating and managing the potential crises attendant to modern warfare. But as it develops, it does not remain there. The university as a site for the absorption of surplus emerges as a site for the struggle over how and toward what ends surplus time—time free of and freed from the wage—might be used.

Nick Mitchell (she/her) works in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. As a researcher, Mitchell is principally engaged with higher education in the U.S. as a problem for historical and theoretical inquiry. As a writer, Mitchell aims to make better sense of university life-worlds by developing scales, vocabularies, and categories to reframe and rethink its rhythms and textures. These research and writing efforts can be found in essays published in Feminist Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The New Inquiry, and Spectre, as well as in two forthcoming books: Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism (under contract with Duke University Press) and The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutionalized Knowledge.

Date | Time
October 11, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Long haired person looking out airplane window

October 18 – Martina Broner – From Arboreal to Aerial: Seeing the Amazon from Above

Can seeing the Amazon from above bring about new perspectives on the forest at a critical time? This talk proposes that the documentary Helena Sarayaku manta (dir. Eriberto Gualinga, 2021) rethinks the aerial view by pushing against its historical associations with omniscience and a desire for mastery and by reframing it instead around the vitality of the forest in a site that resists exploitation: the Indigenous territory of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As I examine the role of trees in the film’s production, I argue that Helena Sarayaku manta achieves this new aerial grammar through an attunement to the arboreal.

Martina Broner’s research sits at the intersection of Latin American cinema and media studies and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript, Forest Formats: Media and Environment in the Amazon, examines new media formats that emerge from entanglements between human and other living entities in the transnational Amazon rainforest. She is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth.

Date | Time
October 18, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Image by Eriberto Gualinga