This event is co-sponsored by the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine”

With billions of people in low-income countries still without Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, this pandemic has exposed the neo-colonial structures of the political economy of intellectual property system and the World Trade Organization (WTO). This talk will delve into an often overlooked history of how the WTO TRIPS Agreement came into existence and the impact it has had on the global South over the 27 years it has been in force – and how it will impact future pandemic preparedness and climate change.

Tahir Amin is a founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organization working to address structural inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. He has over 25 years of experience in intellectual property (IP) law, during which he has practiced with two of the leading IP law firms in the United Kingdom and served as IP Counsel for multinational corporations. His work with I-MAK focuses on re-shaping IP laws and the political economy of ‘innovation’ to better serve the public interest by changing the structural power dynamics that allow health and economic inequities to persist. He has served as legal advisor/consultant to many international groups, including the European Patent Office and World Health Organization, and has testified before Congress on the role of IP in rising drug prices. He is a former Harvard Medical School Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine and was a 2009 TED Fellow.

Date | Time
October 19, 2022 | 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 event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Feminist Studies, History, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and the Center for Racial Justice

This talk names the layered applications, quotidian quality, and refusals of physical, psychological, and archival violence against Haitian women during the US occupation (1915-1934). Told alongside the story of a teenage girl’s life and death, the talk ultimately considers experimental historical practices as an opportunity to intervene in the presumed teleology of Black women’s lives through the practice of archival offering.  

Grace L. Sanders Johnson is a historian, visual artist, and assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of study include modern Caribbean history, transnational feminisms, oral history, and environmental humanities. Her most recent work can be found in several journals including Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (2022), American Anthropologist (2022), and Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (2018). Her book White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship, and Political Wayfaring in Haiti is forthcoming (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Date | Time
October 26, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Followed by Archive, History, Memory: A Conversation with Grace L. Sanders Johnson and Gina Athena Ulysse 4:00 – 5:30 PM [PST] in Humanities 202

This talk describes a new book project, an exploration of deep sea culture centred on the Indian Ocean as an ‘ocean of the south’. Drawn by the alternative histories and geography of the world of the Indian Ocean at the surface—the topic of my first book, Writing Ocean Worlds—the new book explores what possibilities exist, in this ancient and south-centred oceanic world, for apprehending, narrating and imagining what lies beneath. It aims to do so by taking as a structuring framework the ocean’s five vertical zones—the sunlight, the twilight, the midnight, the abyss, and the trenches—in the context of warming planetary seas. 

Charne Lavery is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and Research Associate based at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She explores ocean writing of the global South in a time of environmental change. Her first monograph, Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English, appeared in 2021. With Isabel Hofmeyr, she co-directs the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South

Date | Time
November 2, 2022 | 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 investigates the benefits and burdens of positionality, or the disclosure of how an author’s racial, gender, class, or other self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research article can enhance the validity of its empirical data and its theoretical contribution. However, such self-disclosure puts scholars in a vulnerable position, and those most likely to reveal how their positionality shapes their research are women, ethnic minorities, or both. At this stage of the field’s methodological development, the burdens of positionality are being carried unevenly by a tiny minority of researchers. Drawing in part on my own empirical research and professional experience, this talk invites scholars to redress this imbalance by embracing expressions of positionality.

Mark Fathi Massoud is Professor of Politics and Director of the Legal Studies Program at UCSC. He is the author of two books that address the interplay of law, politics, and religion. Law’s Fragile State (Cambridge University Press 2013) won awards from the American Political Science Association and the Law and Society Association. Shari’a, Inshallah (Cambridge University Press 2021) won awards from the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, and was a finalist for the PROSE Award for the best book in government and politics published last year, from the Association of American Publishers. He is currently editing a volume on positionality.

Date | Time
November 9, 2022 | 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 and will be rescheduled for Winter 2023.

According to premodern elites, the luxurious appetites of the poor were not only feminine and exotic but also the greatest threat to social order. Popular demands for better wages, sustenance, more festival days, or any improvement in the conditions of ordinary folk were denounced as “luxury.” But scholarship about this discourse has been misdirected by premodern sumptuary laws, focusing on luxury as a class of things. I focus on the act of luxuriating instead, drawing out its embodied, affective, and tactical dimensions as a “structure of feeling.” I argue that a focus on luxuriating opens our thought to the political potential in the physical, sensory, and lived experience of the poor as they lay claim to enjoyment and abundance.

Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics, currently working on a book manuscript Luxuriating in Democracy, Abundance, and the Enjoyment of Bodies Politic. He is the author of Appeals to Interest: Language and the Shaping of Political Agency and the editor of and contributor to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, and Action. His other writings have appeared in journals including Political Theory, Theory and Event, Political Research Quarterly, The New Political Science, and The Arrow.

Date | Time
November 16, 2022 | 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 event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

The border is the shared topos of the anthropologist, the historian, the archaeologist, the artist, the musician and the poet, as they all bring into dialogue the past and future with the present, the inside with the outside, the particular with the general, ideas with the senses. This lecture explores border and trauma spaces through a journey of antiphonic witnessing and memory as a way of (re)establishing a self-reflexive relationship with the past that changes the positioning of the present. Drawing on 30 years of conscious and unconscious fieldwork, writing, teaching and practicing multimedia public anthropology, I reflect on my own antinomic subject position in my discipline as a so called “native,” or “indigenous” ethnographer and also as a diasporic, American-trained, post-Boasian anthropologist.

C. Nadia Seremetakis is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Peloponnese. She has written seven books in both English and Greek, including The Last Word: Women Death & Divination in Inner Mani, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, and Sensing the Everyday.

Date | Time
November 23, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, November 23rd; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

This talk has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for Winter 2023.

From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature in pediatric psychological studies of Bad Mothers. Newly codified diagnoses of aloof “refrigerator mothers” and overstimulating “hot mothers” were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.” Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this talk attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The talk thus elaborates a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.” 

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University and a Visiting Fellow at the Columbia University Center for The Study of Social Difference. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left, which will be releasing its first issue in Fall 2022.

Date | Time
November 30, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Taking recent discussions of “Copernican Forecasting” as a point of departure, this talk will look to historical and probabilistic arguments representing science in terms of ongoing demonstrations of the increasingly marginal position of humanity. A sketch of some of the genealogies of these arguments and their representations suggest how ill-fitting they might be when set against varying historical conceptions of centrality, probability, and forecasting.

Date | Time
April 6, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 6th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2022 series, please fill out this form.

This event has been cancelled due to illness and will be rescheduled for Fall 2022.

“Hot and Cool Mothers” moves toward a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.” The article begins with an investigation into midcentury pediatric psychological studies on Bad Mothers and their impacts on their children. The most famous, if not persistent, of these diagnoses is that of the so-called refrigerator mother. The refrigerator mother is not the only bad model of maternality that midcentury psychiatry discovered, however; overstimulating mothers, called in this study “hot mothers,” were identified as equally problematic. From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature. Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this article attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The author argues that these newly codified diagnoses were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.”

Hannah Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, expected 2023). She teaches in the Departments of History and English at UC Berkeley.

Date | Time
April 13, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 13th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2022 series, please fill out this form.