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.

Co-sponsored by History of Consciousness: GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations

Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making with.” We live in a profoundly sympoietic world. This talk begins with Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), a multi-faceted biologist who co-founded the view of Earth as Gaia, a planet with wildly improbable gas ratios and with sustained, unlikely equilibria that only living beings could account for. Margulis thought that if bacteria had not already accomplished something, it was hardly worth doing. Indebted to Margulis, I explore the work of three contemporary biologists who together demonstrate the crucial game-changing ideas and research practices essential to partial healing on a damaged planet. The talk concludes by moving more deeply to naturecultures in the sympoiesis of the living and the dead and the vital practices of strong mourning.

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. She has served as thesis adviser for over 60 doctoral students in several disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Cultural Studies.

Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her books include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016); Manifestly Haraway (2016); When Species Meet (2008); The Companion Species Manifesto (2003); The Haraway Reader (2004); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (1997, 2^nd ed 2018); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991); Primate Visions (1989); and Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields (1976, 2004). Her books and articles are translated into many languages. Fabrizio Terravova made a feature-length film, titled Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, ( 2016), and Diana Toucedo made Camille & Ulysse with Haraway and Vinciane Despret. With Adele Clarke she co-edited Making Kin Not Population (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), which addresses questions of human numbers, feminist anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multispecies flourishing. 

Date | Time
January 31, 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 Film + Digital Media

This talk is a story about the ways that global digital infrastructure, especially the data centers and subsea cable networks that form the backbone of the internet, are produced out of tight-knit relationships that can weather geopolitical transitions, economic competition, and corporate tensions. I describe the process of “socializing” an infrastructure project, an essential part of the ongoing construction of a global digital network. Building a more sustainable internet, I show, is not only a process of technical coordination, of describing metrics, and of setting standards, but working within a globally-distributed and yet intimately connected geography.

Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at the University of California-Berkeley, conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press.

Date | Time
February 7, 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

A conversation about Thenmozhi’s new book The Trauma of Caste and reflections on the US Based movement for caste equity.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit American artist, theorist, and organizer who works on the issues of religion, race, caste, gender, technology and justice. She is the Executive Director of Equality Labs and the author of The Trauma of Caste. 

Date | Time
February 14, 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://bit.ly/3P3ZJe3

Co-sponsored by Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast)

The talk will argue that land struggles as framed by agrarian, food and environmental justice movements have regained academic and political importance in recent years, but that in the era of fragmented working classes and environmental/climate crisis, these require rethinking and reframing. Mapping contemporary land issues of working classes, the talk will emphasise the need to look into the changing social dynamics in rural-urban, agriculture-nonagriculture continuum/corridor and production/social reproduction, and land/labour entanglements as useful reference points to think about political struggles around land and labour, livelihoods and ecological sustainability along class and intersecting axes of social differences (race/ethnicity, gender, generation). The talk will explore the small but important role played or ought to be played by scholar-activists in these political struggles. The talk will mobilise insights from Southeast Asia country cases (and by extension, southern China), and from some African countries and Colombia where I have ongoing field research. 

Jun Borras is a Filipino migrant worker currently working as professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in The Hague, Netherlands. He is a long-time agrarian movement activist in the Philippines and internationally. He was a member of the International Coordinating Committee of the La Via Campesina during its formative years, in 1993-1996. He is a recipient of the European Research Council Advanced Grant, enabling him to study how land rushes shape global social life, and does fieldwork for this in Southeast Asia and China, Ethiopia and Colombia. He works in the tradition of, and at the same time studies, scholar-activism. He was Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years until 2023. He co-organizes the regular International Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism meant for PhD researchers and early career scholars from/in the Global South.  

Date | Time
February 21, 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

China’s economic and social development over the last 25 years has featured significant elements from the neoliberal playbook–ideologies of competition and human capital, market metrics, efficiency, suppression of labor rights, and more–coexisting with severe state limitations on private property, impediments to the formation of a capitalist class, and, especially in the last ten years, an expansion of state-owned enterprises and party control of the economy. This talk argues for the continued relevance of neoliberalism to an understanding of China today, and suggests that China’s particular and limited neoliberal character offers insights into the nature of contemporary capitalism, and of its antagonists.

Christopher Connery is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. He has published on early imperial Chinese literati culture (Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China); the oceanic mythos in early and late capitalism (“Pacific Rim Discourse”, “The Oceanic Feeling”, “Sea Power”, et al); the global 1960s (The Asian Sixties , The Sixties and the World Event, “The World Sixties”, “The End of the Sixties”); and contemporary Chinese intellectual politics and culture. Since 2010 he has been a member (writer, performer, political consultant) of Shanghai-based, Chinese-language theater group Grass Stage, which has performed throughout China, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and North America.

Date | Time
March 6, 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

In the 1960s and 70s, Red Power intellectuals and activists engaged in a remarkably ambitious wholesale rewriting of American Indian history. New works of popular and academic history challenged standard narratives of U.S. territorial expansion, with particular emphasis paid to major events of the nineteenth century ‘Indian Wars’, such as Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This presentation seeks to understand Red Power Historiography as more than just retrospective revision and, instead, as a distinct mode of contemporaneous political critique. Particular attention is paid to the way that Red Power Historiography helped to reframe popular interpretations of Cold War conflict, especially, the spectre of the guerilla, the partisan, and the revolutionary insurgent. Work from this period serves as a model then for how we might bind disparate struggles together, across great time and space.

Robert Nichols is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work in social and political theory has been published in several books and journal articles, including Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke, 2020); The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, ed. and trans., (Minnesota, 2021); and The World of Freedom: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology (Stanford, 2014).

Date | Time
November 29, 2023 | 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 is sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS)

As a documentary filmmaker, working in India, and especially as one interested in political conversation and social change, you inherit a form. The documentary form ostensibly exists outside commercial mainstream Indian cinema, privileges realism, and is marked by ethical nobility and commitment, and a willingness to be a little bit bored for a political cause. Shorn of frivolity, of excess, of emotional unpredictability and most importantly of pleasure, such settled pieties of the documentary form are difficult to accept. Instead, I offer, a kind of Hindi film duet, as the basis for thinking about documentary form: the lover’s argument which invokes shared experience, seduction, dangerous knowledge, revelation and pleasure. What kind of politics might this aesthetic suggest, when the argument is made in the service of connection, not conquest?

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, urban life and popular culture. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Wellcome Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art, and screened around the world. Her films as director include the documentaries Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra? and Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahanai, among others and a series of short musical films including The Amourous Adventures of Megha and Shakku in the Valley of Consent. She has written the fiction feature Khamosh Pani, the documentaries Skin Deep, Stuntmen of Bollywood, and If You Pause, the play Ishquiya:Dharavi Ishtyle and the comic Priya’s Mirror. She has published several essays on film, popular culture, love and desire as well as short stories and writes a weekly newspaper column, Paro-normal Activity in Sunday Mid-day. In 2015 she founded the Agents of Ishq, an award-winning digital platform for conversations on sex, love and desire in India and is currently its Creative Director.

Date | Time
April 12, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Please note: this is a hybrid event. To receive a link, RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.