This talk examines how National Book Award-winning poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky and poet-essayist Wendy S. Walters explore the relationship between capitalism and racialization through poetics of spatial boundary formation. Mobilizing innovative poetic forms, Borzutzky’s recursive, translational syntax mirrors capitalist processes of abstraction and Walters’ sonnets are mapped onto suburban planning documents. Borzutzky’s poetry offers a sustained meditation on the globalized political economy of border walls, revealing how the US-Mexico boundary, debt walls, and factory enclosures simultaneously divide and connect populations through transnational circuits of capital accumulation and neoliberal state violence. Walters’ Troy, Michigan, a book-length experimental autobiography in sonnets, reads race as a set of bounded conditions of life in the post-Fordist Rust Belt structured by the history of residential segregation, highway and transportation infrastructure, and thwarted class mobility.

Christopher Chen is Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles, poetry, and reviews in boundary 2, Post45 Contemporaries, South Atlantic Quarterly, The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Money and American Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (2022), a comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American experimental poetry.

Date | Time
January 14, 2026 | 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 looks at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California and the grassroots movement to abolish ICE led by formerly detained migrants and local activists. It focuses on the Adelanto Toxic Tours, a community action where survivors and organizers guide people through the areas surrounding the detention center to share stories about environmental harm, toxic exposure, and violence inside detention. Through these tours, activists connect damage to the land with harm to migrant bodies, showing how detention impacts both people and their environments. The presentation highlights how organizing in Adelanto challenges detention and imagines futures beyond cages, surveillance, and border enforcement.

Cinthya Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Riverside in Ethnic Studies. Her teaching and research interests are sexual violence, abolition theory/praxis, and migrant detention. Her research and current book project, ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies, investigates sexual violence and reproductive (in)justice in ICE detention facilities, while examining how affected communities, and migrant activists more broadly, are forging geographies of abolition through confronting the connections between bodies in resistance, the carceral, and border regimes.

Date | Time
January 21, 2026 | 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 Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA), The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Join us for conversation with Lana Tatour, in dialogue with Muriam Haleh Davis, on her recently published edited volume Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2025, co-edited with Ronit Lentin). This collection argues that the colonization of Palestine is inseparable from the global histories and logics of race, and it places Palestine at the heart of conversations about imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

The event will delve into the rich and often-overlooked tradition of theorizing race within Palestine studies; the entanglements of race and international law; the politics and practice of racialization; and the structures and everyday expressions of anti-Palestinian racism. It will also speak to the urgency of the present moment, addressing how these frameworks help us understand Israel’s ongoing violence in Gaza and the wider global landscape of solidarity, resistance and struggle.

Lana Tatour is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of New South Wales, and an Associate at the Australian Human Rights Institute. She is a scholar of settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, and citizenship, with a focus on Palestine. Her coedited book, Race and the Question of Palestine was published in 2025 with Stanford University Press. She is currently completing her monograph, Colonized Citizens: Liberalism, Settler Colonialism, and Palestinian resistance. Lana is also a public commentator. She has appeared on ABC News, the BBC, and TRT World, and her publications have appeared in The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, The Age, Overland, and more.

Date | Time
January 28, 2026 | 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 identifies a critical feature of late populism: popularism. Traditional populism operates through articulation: actively constructing “the people” as a political category by linking heterogeneous demands together against an elite or other.  Popularism, alternatively, functions through refraction: it seeks maximum resonance with pre-existing popular attitudes and treats “the people” as an already-coherent homogenous group, simultaneously distorting the ones it claims to embody. While these modes of political practice diverge, they are two contradictory sides of the same political phenomena. The talk will explain what popularism is; why left and right populisms have increasingly converged on anti-immigrant and culturally conservative positions, and why popularism commits a fundamental error when it attempts to reflect popular common sense.

Mike McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies here at UC Santa Cruz. At the center of his work is a focus on class and democracy. His first book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was published with Cornell University Press in 2017 and was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. His most recent book is The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It), which was published by Verso Books in 2025. In addition to academic publishing, his work has been featured in Boston Review, The Guardian, Hammer & Hope, Jacobin, The New York Times, The New Left Review, and The Washington Post. He is currently writing about class and political identity.

Date | Time
February 4, 2026 | 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 focuses on the development of a population science in the decade that preceded the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines and throughout the Marcos dictatorship. The regime’s management of reproductive health, in particular, illustrates the construction of new technologies of measurement and containment. The talk focuses on readings of “family planning” archives that highlight both family planning as the management of the Philippines labor-surplus economy and the different ways that family planning workers struggled against these impositions.

Josen Masangkay Diaz (she/they) writes and teaches about race, gender, colonialism, and authoritarianism. Her book, Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2023), analyzes the formation of Filipino American subjectivity through a study of U.S.-Philippine cold war politics.

Date | Time
February 11, 2026 | 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

In the spring of 1975, a 1,500-year-old Indigenous cemetery on Lee Road in Watsonville, California, was threatened by a development project. Members of the local Native American community with ties to this sacred site occupied the construction site in protest of the development. The local Sheriff called upon the newly formed well-armed County SWAT force, leading to an armed confrontation. They were quickly joined by allies, including representatives from the San Jose AIM office, local Vietnam Veterans against the War / Winter Soldiers, and representatives from the Indigenous run Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association from Humboldt County. Fortunately, a compromise was made and violence was averted. This incident is one piece of a larger book project looking at similar grass roots, Indigenous led movements to protect sacred spaces in California in the 1970s and early 80s.

Martin Rizzo-Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Film & Digital Media department at UCSC. He is a historian and media maker, author of We are not Animals, which explores the history of Indigenous peoples of the Santa Cruz area, as well as co-producer of the podcast Challenging Colonialism. He has worked closely and collaboratively with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and other local Tribes.

Date | Time
February 18, 2026 | 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

It is a common (aspirational) refrain that climate change “changes everything,” and equally common to note that climate-related transitions seem to be changing very little at all. What climate-related changes are happening now? And how might we grasp emergent trajectories while we’re in the midst of these transitions? With a substantive focus on the city-hinterland relationship and the American West, and based on five years of fieldwork related to renewable energy, conservation, and housing development on public lands in Nevada and Utah, this talk gets purchase on these questions by presenting climate change as a form of macro-social change. I draw on classical and contemporary macro-historical sociology and critical geography to show how this framework provides new insights on climate transitions and describe its implications for understanding contemporary climate politics, policy, and visions of a just transition.

Hillary Angelo is an Associate Professor of Sociology, founding Director of UCSC’s Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies, and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her work combines historical sociology, critical social theory, and urban political economy and ecology to analyze contemporary urban and environmental culture and politics. She has published widely in leading sociology, geography, and urban studies journals and her first book, How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens, was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press.

Date | Time
February 25, 2026 | 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 proposes a new reading of Early Modern European sources for African history in light of Islamic African written records and oral traditions. It examines how Islam interacted with local religions and cultural practices in order to become meaningful and suitable for West African communities. Focusing on the need for protection against crocodile attacks along major Senegambian rivers, the talk explores how History, Anthropology, and Islamic Studies can be brought into conversation to offer a fuller understanding of Islamization in West Africa.

Dr. Thiago Mota is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on Islam in West Africa, colonial encounters, and the social history of knowledge production across Afro-Atlantic spaces. His next book, Global Islam from Below: Islamic Political Culture in Senegambia and the Atlantic World, 1400–1850, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and examines how ordinary Muslims shaped political and religious life in Senegambia and its Atlantic connections. He has taught widely on African history, including courses on Islamic manuscript cultures, precolonial African history, and debates on the restitution of African cultural heritage.

Date | Time
March 4, 2026 | 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

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