Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience

This talk offers a speculative reading of practices that reclaim and reimagine human–soil relations within the legacies of anthropocentric, productionist, and colonial ecologies. I explore how soils come to epitomize planet Earth, life, death and memory, as well as the fraught significance of writing alternative stories of soil belonging amid the rise of white supremacist autochthonism. When nostalgic pasts and anticipated futures lose their appeal, learning from soils becomes a way of surfacing time—bringing up temporalities that resist linearity. Soil-centered worlds reorient attention toward the mixed, impure, and generative potentialities of more-than-human belonging.

María Puig de la Bellacasa works at the intersection of environmental humanities, socio-cultural studies of science, and feminist theory. Her book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) brings feminist materialist care theory into conversation with debates on more-than-human ontologies and ecological practices. She is also co-editor of Ecological Reparation (Bristol University Press, 2023) and Reactivating Elements (Duke University Press, 2022). Her talk draws from a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled When the Word for World is Soil, which explores shifting human-soil relations across science, ecological movements, and aesthetics in visual art and public culture. 

Date | Time
October 8, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 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 Chair in Feminist Studies

Within the British empire, Panjab has long been regarded as the quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a diligent, prosperous and “martial race” of peasants. Against such essentialist depictions, I explore the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Company officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new kind of hierarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry and family budgets – I challenge the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed the equation of rural power, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Weaving together economic logic with cultural difference, this presentation offers a way to re-think comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Navyug Gill is a historian of modern South Asia and global history. He is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His research explores questions of agrarian change, labor politics, caste hierarchy, postcolonial critique and histories of capitalism. His first book, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. A South Asia edition was released by Navayana in 2025. The book won the “Henry A. Wallace Award” for the best book on agricultural history outside the US from the AgriculturalHistory Society. Gill’s scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera, the Law and Political Economy Project and Trolley Times.

Date | Time
October 15, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

This talk offers a framework for understanding the entangled fate of Palestinian and Lebanese liberation by situating the 1970s Palestinian revolution and Lebanese Civil War opposition front through a shared narrative. This talk will show how these two efforts not only organized jointly, but how their aspirations were shared and impactful of the social landscape in Lebanon. By situating these histories together, this talk will reframe the notion of “civil war” in Lebanon and dissect the concept of revolution for a free Palestine.

Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC and affiliate faculty with the Center for the Middle East & North Africa. Her research centers Palestinian and Arab movements of the 20th and 21st century. She also intervenes in the question of refugees, colonialism and imperialism, Palestinian feminism, violence, and third world solidarities.

Date | Time
October 22, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 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 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 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

What does it look like when our creative process is driven by disability and community? How does the work develop, change, and differ from the already-established ways of making? In this talk, Jay Afrisando will share his recent and upcoming works focusing on how disability and community of diverse bodies drive the ways such works are created. The results include forms and methodologies that continuously evolve and possess an antidisciplinary nature, offering a new aesthetics that prioritizes humanity while questioning what it means to be an artist and what arts truly mean and represent.

Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. A neurodivergent, he works on aural diversity, disability, accessibility, and decolonizing arts through multisensory and antidisciplinary practice, manifested in music-theater, film, installation, witty storytelling, and other genre-bending experiences. He is a 2024-25 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellow and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His collaborative exhibition, “In Conversation,” curated by Kate Brehme and in collaboration with numerous artists living in Berlin and other cities, is currently on display at Galerie im Turm, Berlin, until November 23, 2025.

Featured image: Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with bunned hair, sits on outdoor neighborhood concrete steps in a serious pose, with his fingers clasped and arms on his thighs. He wears dark blue jeans, a light gray sweatshirt, and black shoes. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / Diana Pfammatter.

Date | Time
November 12, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

South American Archaeology is living through a growing push towards a theoretical focus developed from within. Of particular influence is the concept of “coloniality”, an enduring form of colonialism that affects the frameworks of reference the colonized have of themselves. However, coloniality and the emphasis on “subaltern archaeologies” as a generalized category for the production of scholars hailing from then Global South can also paper over the hierarchies and inequalities within formerly colonized regions. In this paper, I explore the work of the Andean Oral History Workshop and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui as an avenue for centering Indigenous frameworks in South American Archaeology and moving beyond a universalizing approach to coloniality. I build on the concept of ch’ixi, “a color that is the product of juxtaposition, in small points or spots, of opposed or contrasting colors” or “something that is and is not at the same time” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2020:65), and propose that a ch’ixi archaeology emphasizes the choices of people and communities to make sense of their worlds as a space of creativity and transformation that overcome the binary of colonizer/colonized.

Carla Hernández Garavito is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Peruvian archaeologist trained in the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, she completed her PhD at Vanderbilt University. Her work investigates the ways in which Andean communities in Peru made sense, transformed, and reinvented, colonial policies between the 15th century to the present. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others. Her work has been published in Spanish and English, and in several peer-reviewed journals. Her first book will be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2026.

Date | Time
November 19, 2025 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Co-sponsored with the Visual Media and Cultures and Colloquium Series

Crafting a potential history of the Jewish Muslim World means taking seriously the fact that we – Muslim Jews – are the living ruins of worlds that imperialism is committed to make disappear. Asking ‘who am I?’ / ‘who are we?’ means breaking apart the cohesiveness and solidity of the identities assigned by settler colonial states to children born within their borders. Azoulay will present her new book The Jewelers of the Ummah – A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World and will focus on her methodological choices of inhabiting the ruins of this world with kin and elected kin, and of engaging with jewelry making as part of this journey. 

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her latest books are The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination – A Political Ontology of photography (revised & augmented edition, 2024, Verso) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011); She recently published her first children’s book Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2024). Her latest films include the trilogy Unlearning Imperial Plunder: One Thousand and One Jewels (2025), The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023), and Un-documented (2019); her latest exhibitions are Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Date | Time
April 2, 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

This talk proposes southern constellations as a method and political concept. To constellate is to bring together seemingly disparate spaces or objects into the same conceptual orbit, probing the new meanings and structures that emerge. To illustrate, this talk constellates three spaces often considered outside the purview of Global South studies: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. Both South Korea and South Vietnam aligned with the US during the Cold War and therefore seemingly diverged from a Global South politics defined by socialist revolution and the Third World Liberation movement. To constellate South Korea and South Vietnam with the US South, a region in the Global North, is to then ask: how and why do some South Vietnamese and South Korean refugees and migrants to the US gravitate towards the iconography and vernacular of the US South to make legible their own “southern politics” à la Gramsci?

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). She is an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is also the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” on view at UC Irvine’s Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive Center. Her book project revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.

Date | Time
April 9, 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