Gangadhar Adhikari returned to India from Germany in the 1920s with a tranche of books. He had recently completed his PhD in Chemistry in Berlin and had joined the Communist Party of Germany. Upon his return to India in 1928, he joined the Communist Party of India and was jailed in 1929 on charges of a conspiracy to commit treason against the colonial government. His books were impounded and many of them were returned to him upon his release in 1933. The same books were confiscated again in 1935. On the list of books was Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This book was returned to him again in 1936 with the assessment that it was a history book, not of instrumental use in political action. The book captured the imagination of some party intellectuals who believed that revolutionizing the family was crucial to a political and social revolution in India. Adhikari’s colleague in the party, Shripad Dange was inspired by it to chart the history of the Indian family. Engels’ categories were imported to make sense of the history of the family in India. This also occasioned a historical materialist reading of Indian epics and families, an engagement with orientalist readings, and evocations of primitive communism in Indian antiquity.

Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at UCSC. He is currently working on a book on Gangadhar Adhikari.

Date | Time
April 10, 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

Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies

This talk traces across the disjointed pairing of two portraits an imperial form of kinship that emerged among covenanted servants of the East India Company in eighteenth-century Bengal. Noting the portraits’ departures from prevailing conventions in British family portraiture, the talk examines the overlapping “joint-stock” formations of domesticity and commercial partnership through which the Hastings-Hancock household accumulated and remitted its colonial wealth. 

 Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European Art at UCLA. Her research explores the interconnected histories of art, visual culture, and aesthetic philosophy in 18th-century Britain, France, South Asia and the Atlantic World.

Date | Time
April 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

Zoom Registration Link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvdeGtqD4jEtCFmuRj0df7CA3YNV3qjBnh#/registration

This talk, very much a meditation-in-progress, asks a series of questions about how we (in the western European intellectual tradition) come to think about the categories of history and evolution and the various ways we might deconstruct this opposition, making way for co-constitutive material histories of the living. It also asks whether in the time of the now we are prepared to overcome a Cartesian inheritance to confront a shared, shattered and shattering historical predicament together with other living others.

Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at UCSC, where she has taught since 1991. Trained in early modern continental European history and literature, she also publishes in US popular culture, queer and feminist theory, and, most recently, animal studies. Author of three books (on Rabelais; on popular culture; and on Queer Early Modernity) and co-editor of a number of journal issues dealing with sexuality, race and animality, her in-progress book is tentatively titled Animate Figures.

Date | Time
April 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

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations, Global and Community Health, and the Science & Justice Research Center

This two-hour 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. Rather than structured around formal talks, each conversation will start 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, Zac Zimmer

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

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

Kat Gutierrez is an 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 a 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 in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health.

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

Date | Time
May 1, 2024 | 12:15 – 2:00 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: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations

Through a series of 222 photographs and a separate conceptual narration, this intermedial and semi-performative presentation discusses the pervasive, toxic realism of anthropochemicals and the search for alternative substances.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include  Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict  (Bristol UP 2023);  Reactivating Elements. Chemistry, Ecology, Practice (Duke UP 2021);  Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More-Than-Social Movements  (Duke UP 2018). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Substance and its Milieu. Anthropochemicals, Autonomy, and Geo-Ecological Justice and a theory photobook entitled Landscape After the Event. Constructivist Photography and the Vision of Abolition .

Date | Time
May 8, 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

Co-sponsored by The Center for Labor and Community 

This talk will explore the possible relationships between global economic restructuring and the emergence of new politics of family, gender, and sexuality. The rise of “service economies” in many forms around the world has had profound implications for individual life courses and the normative genders attached to them. Why is this, and what can we learn from it?

Gabriel Winant is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, was published in 2021.

Date | Time
May 15, 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

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA)

This talk explores the relationship between modern philozionism in the West and the denialism of the Palestinians. The nineteenth-century European Zionist idea of implanting and sustaining an exclusively Jewish nationalist state in multireligious Palestine was a response to European racial antisemitism. But it was also premised, from the outset, on the erasure of native Palestinian history and the political significance of their centuries-old belonging on their own land.