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

This talk has been cancelled. Dr. Brenda Lara will be speaking this Wednesday instead. Please see here for more details. 

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

“Archives of Nepantla” explores Chicana feminist philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa’s intellectual, affective, and spectral legacy through a critical engagement with UCSC’s Gloria Anzaldúa Altares Collection and the University of Texas-Austin’s Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. Drawing from her book manuscript Latinx Hauntings, Brenda Lara places Anzaldúa within a broader conversation on queer Latinx scholars whose untimely deaths unveil cycles of unresolved violence in academia. Lara theorizes materiality in Anzaldúa’s collections—altares, manuscripts, and autohistorias—as haunting spaces that negotiate mourning and remembrance. Brenda Lara’s talk reveals the reverent narratives and spectral knowledge that reframes the borderlands between life and death in institutional archives and resistant histories.

Brenda Lara is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz’s Literature Department and an incoming Assistant Professor at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from UCLA. Her research intersects haunting and Chicana Feminism to analyze queer Latinx scholars’ deaths and legacies. She has been awarded the Inter-University Program for Latino Research Mellon Fellowship and Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies Fellowship. Lara has published work in the award-winning collection Monsters & Saints (2024), Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, and Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas.

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

Co-sponsored by The Center for the Middle East and North Africa

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.

Dr. Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in the Middle East. Professor Makdisi’s most recent book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (Public Affairs, 2010), The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000), and Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Professor Makdisi has also published articles in the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report. He has held fellowships at the  Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin), the Carnegie Corporation, and the American Academy of Berlin.

Date | Time
June 4, 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

Settler sexuality, family, and “love” are key to sustaining settler property relations in the US and Canada. In this in-process book chapter (a shorter version was previously published in a 2024 edited volume), I draw on the work of historians, anthropologists, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have investigated the history of state-sanctioned marriage and monogamy in the US, Hawai’i, Canada, and Europe. I also build on popular and academic polyamory literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies and critical race theory. In addition, (auto)ethnographic examination of eco-erotic, polyamorous, and other more-than-monogamous relating inform alternative concepts of anticolonial relating after the unsettling of settler sex and family. Finally, I center the role of country—both music and place—to think through and beyond unsustainable settler-colonial practices of making relations with human loves and more-than-human loves. Decolonization is more sustainable with music.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the Media Indigena podcast. She is also a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; and Indigenous sexualities. You can also follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization at https://kimtallbear.substack.com.

Date | Time
January 15, 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

“Race relations” became synonymous with various obstacles to the “integration” of Commonwealth migrants in postwar Britain and, ultimately, shorthand for social and political issues perceived to be related to racial differences in general. However, interest in race relations did not center initially on Caribbean, South Asian, and African migrants to metropolitan Britain. Before the mid-1960s, race relations served as a means of conceptualizing and grappling with “problems of the end of Empire,” and efforts to study and manage them focused on centers of extractive industries in British settler colonies in Africa. This talk demonstrates how white liberals and business leaders in colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies targeting race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of decolonization and to shape postcolonial futures with neoliberal solutions. From this perspective, when it comes to liberal politics of race, as the South African artist William Kentridge suggests, “London is a suburb of Johannesburg” (“Art in a State of Siege (100 Years of Easy Living),” 1988).

Marc Matera is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2015). He co-authored The Global 1930s: The International Decade (Routledge, 2017) with Susan Kingsley Kent and The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent. He recently contributed to and coauthored introductory and concluding essays for a thematic issue of Modern British History, “Marking Race in Twentieth Century Britain”. The research for Professor Matera’s talk was supported in part by a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Date | Time
January 22, 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