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

Co-sponsored by The Center for South Asian Studies

This talk examines Naga modes of storytelling as anticolonial epistemologies that enact Naga sovereignty in the here and now. Reflecting on the capacity of storytelling to facilitate movement between past, present, and future, the talk highlights moments of visual and aural attention that shape the Indigenous present.

Elspeth Iralu (Angami Naga) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Planning at the University of New Mexico, where her research and teaching focus on Indigenous methodologies, Indigenous space, place, and mapping, and violence and visual culture. Her scholarly writing has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, Political Geography, and American Quarterly.

Date | Time
April 16, 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

Co-sponsored by The-More-Than-Human(ities) Labaratory 

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site’s disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered.

Reaching far beyond the Sonoran Desert, these stories of entanglement tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, even as they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. Through first-person reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multi-species disablement, Taylor delinates necessary networks of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.”

Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. Her latest book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024).

Date | Time
April 18, 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

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: earth ecologies x technoscience conversations, Global and Community Health, and the Science & Justice Research Center

This roundtable improv (12.15-2.00pm) brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations, each beginning with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology. With: Dimitris Papadopoulos (convener), Karen Barad, James Doucet-Battle, Kat Gutierrez, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Jenny Reardon, Warren Sack, Kriti Sharma, Matt Sparke, and Zac Zimmer.

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.

James Doucet-Battle  is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Kat Gutierrez is Assistant Professor in the History Department.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center.

Warren Sack is Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department.

Kriti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Matt Sparke is Professor of Politics and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.

Zac Zimmer is Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.

Date | Time
April 23, 2025 | 12:15 – 2:00 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Perhaps water is a mouth that runs toward unwritten histories.  This possibility comes closer to the senses in the work of Jumana Emil Abboud, an artist whose practice is grounded in Palestinian landscapes—and the refusal to cede them to their brutal equation with narratives of damage that colonial occupation programmatically inflicts.  For some time, Abboud has attended thoughtfully to the waterscapes surrounding Galilee and Jerusalem—reanimating the folktales that they harbor, bringing them into the color of a fresh image, and taking the time to search for what has been said to have disappeared irrevocably.  Keeping company with Abboud’s art, this talk reflects on what water can hold and how the connection to its reservoirs of memory might be sustained—in defiance of state violence and settler agribusiness, which together sever Palestinians from the life-giving waterways with which their ancestral knowledge is interspersed.  Come see how ecological sensitivity and counter-colonial remembrance course together in Abboud’s art; and how she practices literacy in invisibility, all while refreshing the sense—without which history devolves into propaganda—that the erasure of evidence does not mean that nothing is there.

M. Ty is an ember of a diaspora. They are an Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Date | Time
April 30, 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

Sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions

The University of Michigan possesses extensive archival, photographic, archaeological and natural history collections from the Philippines, many of which were built during the American colonial period from objects, images, and ancestors taken without the consent of local source communities. This talk introduces a multi-year, collaborative effort by Michigan faculty, curators, collection managers, students, and community partners to develop and enact reparative approaches to these collections. It reflects on how the historical and contemporary specificities of the Philippines and its diaspora both contribute to and complicate on-going conversations around museums, repatriation, and historical justice.

Deirdre de la Cruz is a historian and anthropologist whose work examines global formations and global relations from the historical and cultural vantage point of the Philippines. Her first and second books trace the discursive, material and performative processes through which the Philippine emerges as a major spiritual and religious center over the long twentieth century. For the last several years, de la Cruz has also served as co-PI of ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan, a collaborative project of public scholarship that seeks to repair historical harm by creating models for more ethical and equitable Philippine collections. De la Cruz is Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan and currently serves as Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. She is also an award-winning teacher, and with U-M undergraduates has been building The Philippines and the University of Michigan, an online exhibit of student-led original research and writing on the history of the relationship between the Philippines and the University of Michigan.

Date | Time
May 7, 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

Co-sponsored by the Global Political Thought Working Group and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa

This lecture posits hate, dialogue, and their conjunction as fundamental for the contemporary moralization of violence and hierarchy. It analyzes how the two terms operate through a series of disavowals, displacements, and transubstantiations, tracking their place in the history of political thought, structures of minoritization, and contemporary formations where they became rhetorical vehicles and conceptual nodes for anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian policies and discourses. Out of this history, the hateful subject emerges, indexed by the deployment of a demand for dialogue. The lecture then outlines three global moments in which hate and dialogue were pegged to the development of refugee and terrorism discourses, outlining how the two terms traveled as a covering trope that psychologizes violence. 

Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His award-winning book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2019), examines how philosophers fantasize about peace in order to promote hierarchy, war, and repression. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford, 2020), with Leigh Jenco and Megan Thomas, and co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025), with Leigh Jenco and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. He is completing projects about Sayyid Qutb’s global and critical thought, the genealogies of racializing Islam, and the politics of hate and dialogue. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics.

Date | Time
May 14, 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

Co-sponsored with the Aurora Endowment for Sikh Studies

In 1972, Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled close to 80,000 South Asians of Ugandan heritage from the country by dictatorial decree. This talk revisits this weighty historical event, arguing that it is neither an exceptional nor a parochial event, neither a result of primordial Afro-South Asian racial conflict, nor an opening into a redemptive search for Afro-South Asian interracial solidarities. The talk explores the aftermaths and continuous nature of the expulsion event, examining its effects and affects; the images, representations, and differentiated experiences and memories of the event; and the tense and ambivalent practices of citizenship, sovereignty, and governance that have emerged in the decades following the expulsion. It describes Afro-Asian entanglements in transcontinental Uganda through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender, and sexuality, arguing for stronger attention to knowledge production on global Afro-South Asian connections and the continued dynamics of community, citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms during shifting imperial, postcolonial, nationalist, and geopolitical times. Finally, the talk examines the significance of global anthropologies of expulsion in relation to the ongoing contemporary mass expulsions under the Trump regime in the US.citizenship, and identity on the African Continent as central to envisioning contemporary Black African self-determinism, racial reconciliation, and interracial pluralisms.

Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She trained in anthropology and gender studies at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has previously held appointments at UC Berkeley, UC Merced, and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Hundle has recently published Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transcontinental Uganda (Duke University Press, 2025), an anthropological examination of citizenship and the ambivalent politics and processes of racial nonreconciliation in post-Asian expulsion Uganda and the study of scholarly and epistemological expulsions from the contemporary university. She has also published in several peer-reviewed journals, including American Anthropologist, Public Culture, and Critical Ethnic Studies, and is currently working on a book project on Sikh and Punjabi and Black and Afro-Diasporic encounters that engages with her interests in Sikhism and global South Asian and African diasporas, critical religious and secularism studies; race, religion, caste, labor-capital relations, gender and sexuality; feminist anthropology and critical university studies. At UCI Anthropology, she has led Sikh Studies and Punjabi language program-building and many other initiatives, including the Sikh feminisms working group from 2020-2022. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory. 

Date | Time
May 28, 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