Following on this quarter’s series of conversations about the historical space opened by the current pandemic, we will come together in a collective, active exercise of imagining the university to come. Prior to the meeting, please respond to five questions about the future university you would like to participate in post-pandemic; the questions are versions of those from Bruno Latour’s essay discussed in early May. Each of you will suggest one practice you think should cease, one you think should continue, and one new practice that you would like to be part of the university of the future, as well as how to enable the kind of capacities needed to transition to these new activities. We will spend the colloquium working together to see where we agree and where we disagree, and to come up with something to hope for that might help and even guide us in the time to come.

Jody Greene came to UC Santa Cruz in 1998 and has served as Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and the History of Consciousness. Her research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature; non-dualist Western philosophy, especially the work of Spivak, Derrida, and Nancy; human rights and international law; queer studies; and the history of literary discourse and literary institutions. Her forthcoming collection, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, is The Hostile Takeover: Human Rights after Corporate Personhood. She is the recipient of the UCSC Humanities Division John Dizikes Teaching Award (2008), the Disability Resource Center Champion of Change Award (2018), and, twice, of the UCSC Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching Award (2001, 2014). In 2016 she was appointed the founding Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) and she now serves as UCSC’s first Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning.

Please respond to the questions by 10AM on Wednesday, June 3.

Please also RSVP by 10AM on Wednesday, June 3 to receive Zoom link and password for the session.

Photo by Casey Horner

This talk draws on Shange’s recently published book, Progressive Dystopia, in which she argues that San Francisco is a site of social apocalypse for Black communities.  Given the momentum ‘abolition’ has as a political critique of prisons and policing, what does it offer us as scholars trying to apprehend the broad set of violences that compose the current moment?  Put another way, what does abolition demand of us?

Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique.

Date/Time
January 15, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

In We The Enemy, Carlos Motta will present a series of recent and past works, including those exhibited at the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery. Motta’s work documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. As a historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.

Carlos Motta (b. 1978) was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives and works in New York City. Motta has been the subject of survey exhibitions including at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia,  Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, and Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden. His work is in the permanent collections of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona; and Museo de Arte de Banco de la República, Bogotá, among others.His solo exhibitions include Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2016); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2016); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2015); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2013); New Museum, New York (2012); MoMA PS1, New York (2009); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2009). Motta participated in 32 Bienal de São Paulo (2016); X Gwangju Biennale (2014); and X Lyon Biennale (2010). His films have been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2016, 2010); Toronto International Film Festival (2013); and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (2016); among others. Motta has been awarded the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).

Date/Time
January 22, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

In his recent publication, Theft is Property! (Duke 2020), Robert Nichols reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of examining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, this work also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.

Robert Nichols is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities).

Date/Time
January 29, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

During the 1920s, researchers from the New York natural history museum led by Roy Chapman Andrews spent nearly a decade exploring the Gobi Desert in Central Asia. But they were expelled from their base of operations in northern China when the Guomindang party created a new state in Nanjing. Whereas Chinese intellectuals accused American paleontologists of plundering their national heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaur fossils predated the creation of China, they belonged equally to all mankind. I hope to use the ensuing controversy to motivate a critical discussion about knowledge production in a global context.

Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. He recently published a book about dinosaurs, and he is starting a new project, tentatively entitled “The Ice Age: A Global History.”

Date/Time
February 5, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Co-sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center

Michael Allan’s colloquium talk has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for Spring or Fall 2020.

Alongside discussions of worldliness, globalization, and planetarity, the talk will focus on a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company from 1896-1903. This microhistory of the transnational origins of early cinema will lead to questions about what it means to apprehend the world through the eyes of a camera.

Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, where he is also program faculty in Cinema Studies, Arabic, and Middle East Studies. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016) and serves as editor of Comparative Literature.

Date/Time
February 12, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Elizabeth Povinelli’s colloquium talk has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for Spring or Fall 2020.

This talk examines four axioms of existence that have emerged and expanded in recent years across a large segment of critical theory; the stakes of understanding the historical conditions of these axioms; and their power to provide a foundation for remolding political concepts in the wake of geontopower. From one perspective the emergence of these axioms can be correlated to the current catastrophe of climatic and environmental collapse and industrial toxicity. This talks ask what sorts of catastrophes are foregrounded or occluded depending on how one understands the order and sources of these axioms and if one understands them as a coming catastrophe (l’catastrophe à venir) or as an ancestral one (l’catastrophe ancestral/histoire)?

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York; Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities; and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Povinelli’s writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with Indigenous colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and six films with the Karrabing Film Collective. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, the Contour Biennale; MoMA-PS and numerous others.

Date/Time
February 19, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Photo by Marcel de Buck

Dee Hibbert-Jones’ colloquium talk has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for Spring or Fall 2020.

Hibbert-Jones will discuss the challenges, politics and aesthetics in making her upcoming film Run With It, a feature documentary that is entirely animated.Made in collaboration with Nomi Talisman, the film tells the story of De’Jaun Correia, a young man on the Dean’s list at Morehouse college, who grew up mentored by his uncle Troy Davis, on death row.

 Professor Dee Hibbert-Jones is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy award winning filmmaker and visual artist who examines critical social issues through her animated documentary and fine art installations. In 2016 she  was awarded a United States Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award in recognition for their outstanding national commitment to civil rights and social justice; and a California Public Defenders Association Gideon Award by the California Public Defenders Association. Dee teaches art at UC Santa Cruz and is affiliate faculty in film, digital art new media and legal studies.

Date/Time
February 26, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Joseph Blankholm’s colloquium talk has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for Spring or Fall 2020.

Being secular means not being religious, but it also means participating in a religion-like tradition. This paradox shapes the everyday lives of secular people, as well as institutions that depend on categories like secular, spiritual, religious, and superstitious. Relying on years of ethnographic research among very secular people, this lecture describes four ways of producing the secular by purifying it of religious pollution. This approach shows how secular people become less religious and how religion and spirituality can be transformed and enabled to circulate in spaces that would otherwise prohibit them.

Joseph Blankholm is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching and interdisciplinary research focus primarily on American religion, secularism, and secular people. Most recently, he has published on Karl Marx’s forgotten secularism, Saba Mahmood’s contribution to the study of religion, and the contradictory ways in which American law understands nonbelievers. He is currently finishing a manuscript on secular people’s religious ambivalence.

Date/Time
March 4, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Miriam Greenberg is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research links urban studies, cultural studies, and the study of place, politics, and the environment.  She is  author of Branding New York:  How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008) and Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford, 2014), and co-editor of The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age (Cornell, 2017) She has done a range of public-facing projects based in our region, including Critical Sustainabilites: Competing Discourses of Urban Development in California  and No Place Like Home – The Affordable Housing Crisis Study of Santa Cruz County.

Steve McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies.  His research has focused on labor, gender, migration, racial formation, and globalization.  He is currently working on a book, based on historical and multi-sited ethnographic research, focused on the rise and reproduction of ethno-national labor niches in contemporary global labor markets.  Steve is also working locally in the Santa Cruz area on a series of community-initiated student-engaged research (CISER) projects: Working for Dignity – the Low Wage Worker Study of Santa Cruz County; No Place Like Home – The Affordable Housting Crisis Study of SC County; and We Belong: Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice.

Date/Time
March 4, 2020 | 1:30 – 3:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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