February 18 – Jennifer Horne: “Serial Americans and the ‘Conquest Program”

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

Jennifer Horne’s work considers the film-program-as-civics-lesson in the context of the American civics movement. Centering on a film series from 1917, rife with conquesting tropes of manifest destiny, empire and nation, it explores the programming context of the late silent era to theorize seriality as a mode of American visual education. Jennifer Horne is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
February 18, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

February 25 – Gayle Salamon: “The Life and Death of Leticia King”

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

Gayle Salamon is currently working on two manuscripts. The first is an exploration of narrations of bodily pain and disability and is titled Painography: Metaphor and the Phenomenology of Chronic Pain. The second manuscript, Passing Period, analyzes the 2008 classroom shooting of gender-transgressive 15-year-old Leticia King. Gayle Salamon is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University.

Date/Time
February 25, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

March 4 – Christopher Chen: “Ed Roberson and the Poetics of Serial Identities”

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

Christopher Chen’s scholarly interests include theories of comparative racialization, racial capitalism and the black radical tradition, and debates over what Charles Taylor and others have called the “politics of recognition.” Christopher is currently working on a book-length comparative study of contemporary African-American and Asian-American experimental or “avant-garde” writing. Christopher Chen is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
March 4, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

May 27, 2016 – Simone Browne & Simon A. Cole: “Historicizing Surveillance”

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

May-27th

Friday May 27th, 2-5 pm, Humanities 1 Room 202

Simone Browne, Draw a black line through it: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Situating blackness as an absented presence in the field of surveillance studies, this talk questions how a realization of the conditions of blackness— the historical, the present, and the historical present can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance.

Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and American Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Simon A. Cole, Identity or “Mere Identification”? Biometric Databases from Fingerprinting to DNA.

This talk traces the history of biometric identification technologies from their origins through to the present and the ethical and humanistic issues that have persistently been raised by them. It then discusses how we should understand these issues in the present moment of rapid technological advancement. It focuses in particular on the relationship between “mere” identification and broader notions of identity—behavioral, racial, and so on, and implications for the increasing expansion of genetic databases.

Simon Cole is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Director of the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine.

These talks will be followed by a conversation about research projects, new issues and directions, information exchange and coffee and cookies. The colloquium is open to the public, and graduate students are encouraged especially to attend. This colloquium is sponsored by the UC Biosurveillance Working Group, the UC Humanities Research Institute and the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research.

Click here for a live stream of the event.

May 4, 2016 – Donna Haraway: “Manifestly Haraway”

Posted on January 2, 2015September 6, 2018

Haraway Wolfe Poster image

Manifestly Haraway brings together Donna Haraway’s seminal “Cyborg Manifesto” and “Companion Species Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway also includes a wide-ranging conversation between Haraway and Cary Wolfe on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of, among other works, “Primate Visions,” “Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium,” and “When Species Meet.”

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is also founding director of 3CT (Center for Critical and Cultural Theory). He is the author of “Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal and What Is Posthumanism?”

Date/Time
May 4, 2016 | 6:00-8:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

May 27, 2016 – Ruling Passions: Sexuality, Science and the (Post)colonial State

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

rulingpassions_eventposter_11x17_032016b

The past decade or so has witnessed a rapid rise in scholarship that seeks to seize or transform the language of the “science” for liberatory ends. Such an attachment to the reparative and/or divisive logic of “science” is most evident in minoritized knowledge-formations such as sexuality studies and colonial/postcolonial studies. In the face of contemporary challenges about the limits of scholarship bowing out to the forces of globalization, the colloquium will examine what is at stake for sexuality studies and postcolonial studies to carve out a critical relationship to histories of science?

The types of issues we envisage participants addressing will engage three central questions:

What are the conversations instituted about sexuality in relationship to the colonial and postcolonial state in the global south?
How does sexuality studies’s own adherence/attachment to science studies parochialize key assumptions about freedom, rights and the subject?
What are the ways in which modalities of sentiment, affect, emotion entangle with the logic of state discourses and what role does sexuality play within such exchanges?

Schedule:

10:00am–10:15am: Introductory Remarks
Anjali Arondekar, Feminist Studies, UCSC

10:15am-10:30am: Poetic Techne
Ronaldo Wilson, Literature, UCSC

10:30-12:30: The Arabic Freud and the Invention of the Psychosexual Subject
Omnia El Shakry, History, UC Davis
Respondent: Alma Heckman, History, UCSC

12:30-1:30: Break

1:30-3:30: Origins and the Sexuality of Science in Colonial India
Durba Mitra, History, Fordham
Respondent: Megan Moodie, Anthropology, UCSC

Participants:

Durba Mitra, Department of History, Fordham University

Origins and the Sexuality of Science in Colonial India

Durba Mitra is an assistant professor of history at Fordham University. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania for the year of “Sex.”

Omnia El Shakry, Department of History, UC Davis

The Arabic Freud and the Invention of the Psychosexual Subject

Omnia El Shakry specializes in the the intellectual history of the Arab world and Europe, with a special emphasis on the history of the human sciences in Egypt. Her current book project, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, traces the lineaments of psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt.

CANCELLED – Duana Fullwiley, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University

The Racial Embrace: DNA Sequences meet Dream Sequences in Struggles for (Scientific) Liberation

Dr. Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine interested in how social identities, health outcomes, and molecular genetic findings increasingly intersect. She is the author of The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011), which examines how structural adjustment policies in Africa affected not only the lived experiences of sickle cell patients in Senegal, but also influenced the genetic science about them.

March 9, 2016 – Dr. Ramzi Fawaz: “‘Flame on!’: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of ‘The Fantastic Four'”

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

fawaz_ucsc030916

The Department of Feminist Studies and the Affect Working Group at UC Santa Cruz Present:

“Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of The Fantastic Four

DR. RAMZI FAWAZ, U. OF WISCONSIN – MADISON

Released to popular acclaim in 1961, Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four told of four anticommunist space adventurers who gain extraordinary powers when cosmic rays alter their physiology, respectively granting them control over living flame, invisibility, impenetrable rock-like skin, and physical pliability. In this talk, Ramzi Fawaz explores the surprisingly queer evolution of the series, which used the mutated bodies of its heroes to depict the transformation of the bread-winning father, doting wife and bickering male siblings of the 1950s nuclear family into icons of 1960s radicalism: the left-wing intellectual, the liberal feminist, the political activist, and the potential queer.

About the Author: Ramzi Fawaz is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), which received the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship award for best first book manuscript in LGBT Studies. Dr. Fawaz’s research has been published in American Literature, Callaloo, and GLQ.

Date/Time
March 9, 2016 | 12:00-1:30PM
Free and open to the public

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

March 8, 2016 – UCSC Emeriti Lecture: James Clifford, "Discovering the UC Santa Cruz Campus"

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

The UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Group presents the 2016 Spring Emeriti Faculty Lecture
Discovering the UC Santa Cruz Campus
James Clifford
Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness Department, UC Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz, built in a redwood forest overlooking Monterey Bay, is famously beautiful. But the usual language of aesthetics does little to reveal what makes the place extraordinary. The lecture, based on years of walking the rugged site, uses color photography and historical research to explore the interaction of architecture and ecology. It traces UC Santa Cruz’s experience of environmental design through changing times and ponders its continued significance.

Complimentary parking will be available in the Performing Arts parking lot. Questions? Please contact the Special Events Office at (831) 459-5003 or email specialevents@ucsc.edu.

(No registration required, seating is limited)

Date/Time
March 8, 2016 | 7:30 PM
Doors Open at 7:00PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Music Center Recital Hall
University of California, Santa Cruz

March 3, 2016 – Visual & Media Cultures Colloquium – Wendy Chun

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

“Wendy Chun: Current Research and Perspectives”
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author ofControl and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011). She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015). She is the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; she has been the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate. She has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled Habitual New Media ( forthcoming MIT 2016).

For more information see the Visual and Media Cultures website or email visualmedia@ucsc.edu.

Date/Time
March 3, 2016 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Porter D Building, Room 245
University of California, Santa Cruz

Of Interest Events for the Week of May 25, 2015

Posted on January 2, 2015August 1, 2017

Tuesday, May 26 / DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES / Warren Sack / “Digital Humanities Working Group/Reading Group: A Conversation with Warren Sack” / 4:00-6:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

Wednesday, May 27 / POLITICS SPEAKER SERIES / Michael K. Brown / “Contesting Equality of Opportunity: Race and Liberalism in the Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865-1872” / 3:30 – 5:00 / Charles E. Merrill Lounge

Wednesday, May 27 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Public Lecture: “Akron Apocalypse: Religion, Rubber, and Devo” / 6:00-7:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

Thursday, May 28 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Reading Seminar: “Technologies of American Secularism” / 10:00am-12:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 408

Thursday, May 28 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Sarah Manguso & Maggie Nelson / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206

Friday, May 29 / COMPLICATED LABORS RESEARCH CLUSTER / Complicated Labor: Feminism, Maternity and Creative Practice Presents a Conversation with Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson / 12:00-2:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

Friday, May 29 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Ann Drevno / “Unintended Consequences of Regulatory Spotlighting Pesticides: The Case of California’s Central Coast Agricultural Waiver Program” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202

Friday-Saturday, May 29-30 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / Global Islam: A Weekend of Film and Video / Communications 150, Studio C

* To advertise your unit or department’s event in the “Of Interest” section of this weekly bulletin, please e-mail complete event information in text format (no PDFs) to cult@ucsc.edu no later than noon on Friday of the prior week.

* Additional information and regular updates on “Of Interest” events can be found on the IHR website and on the Cultural Studies website.

Tuesday, May 26 / DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES / Warren Sack / “Digital Humanities Working Group/Reading Group: A Conversation with Warren Sack” / 4:00-6:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

Warren Sack (Film & Digital Media) will lead a conversation about his article, “A Storytelling Machine: From Propp to Software Studies” (Les Temps Modernes (novembre-décembre 2013)). Join us to consider a genealogy of narrative construction, interactive storytelling, software studies, and the place of technology in “understanding.” This discussion will prompt us all to think beyond the tools of Digital Humanities to explore the ways thinking is tangled up with technology.

Sack’s article is available online from Digital Studies in French. To receive a copy of Sack’s article in English, email digitalhumanities@ucsc.edu.

What did equality of opportunity mean during Reconstruction? Political leaders in the U.S. have assumed that voting rights combined with equality of opportunity would rectify a tortured history of slavery and racial oppression. Yet there is no consistent meaning of equality of opportunity as political elites and activists have struggled to impose their meaning on the idea. Historically, we may distinguish at least two different meanings of equality of opportunity: anti-privilege egalitarianism and the rehabilitation of subjugated populations. I argue that rehabilitation is the template for the Freedmen’s Bureau though the idea is contested by the freed people, who voice a conception of equality of opportunity based on “Negro agrarianism,” and of course deeply opposed by white southerners. I show how racial ideology and conceptions of race influenced the institutionalization of equality of opportunity and the consequences for the freed people.

Michael K. Brown, professor emeritus of Politics, is the author of Race, Money, and the American Welfare State and co-author of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. His current research focuses on race and equality of opportunity during three moments of madness—Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society—in six southern states.

Wednesday, May 27 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Public Lecture: “Akron Apocalypse: Religion, Rubber, and Devo” / 6:00-7:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

The end of the world occurred in Akron, Ohio, in the mid-1970s, when the “Rubber City” lost all its tire manufacturing. Modern narrates the sense of doom deindustrialization brought through Akron’s punk scene and the televangelist Rex Humbard’s Cathedral of Tomorrow.

Dr. John Lardas Modern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, will be visiting UCSC in a few weeks for a series of lectures and a reading seminar. Dr. Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), an eclectic, discipline-shattering book on spiritualism and religion, science and technology, and American secularism. He is currently at work on two new projects: the first explores the intersections of religion and cognition in American history and the second is a meditation on entropy, tentatively entitled “Akron Devo Divine: A Delirious History of Rubber.”

Thursday, May 28 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Reading Seminar: “Technologies of American Secularism” / 10:00am-12:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 408

We will read selections from Secularism in Antebellum America and a short piece on American colonial-capitalist modernity.

Please contact pxalvare@ucsc.edu for more information and/or readings for the reading seminar.

Thursday, May 28 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Sarah Manguso & Maggie Nelson / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206

Sarah Manguso is an essayist and poet. Her new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, is out now. Her five other books include The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, named one of the top ten books of 2012 by Salon, and The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the Independent, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and Time Out Chicago. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, and Spanish. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, and her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. She grew up near Boston and now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design. She can be found online at: http://www.sarahmanguso.com/

Maggie Nelson is a nonfiction writer, critic, scholar, and poet. Her works of nonfiction include The Argonauts, a work of “autotheory” about gender, sexuality, (queer) family, and the limitations and possibilities of language; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors’ Choice; the cult hit Bluets (2009); a critical study of poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007); and a memoir about sexual violence and media spectacle titled The Red Parts (2007), which will be reissued by Graywolf in Spring 2016. Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007); Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001). Her awards include a 2007 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2013 Literature grant from Creative Capital. Since 2005 she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. She currently lives in Los Angeles. She can be found online at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maggie-nelson

The Complicated Labor Research Cluster is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together artists and scholars around questions of feminism, maternity, and creative process. It seeks to center questions of care in our research and art whether they are explicit sites of inspiration and study or simply important to the conditions in which we undertake expressive practices.

Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Her five other books include The Guardians, named one of the top ten books of the year bySalon, and The Two Kinds of Decay, named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the Independent, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and Time Out Chicago. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize.

Maggie Nelson is the author of five books of nonfiction and four books of poetry. Her most recent book is The Argonauts, a work of “auto-theory” about gender, sexuality, sodomitical maternity, queer family, and the limitations and possibilities of language. Her 2011 book of art and cultural criticism, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors’ Choice. Her other nonfiction books include the cult hit Bluets. Recent awards include a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 Innovative Literature grant from Creative Capital.

The most common sources of water column toxicity in California’s Central Coast are diazinon and chlorpyrifos, both organophosphate pesticides. The Conditional Waiver of Waste Discharge Requirements for Discharges from Irrigated Lands (“The Conditional Agricultural Waiver”) is the primary regulatory mechanism to achieve Clean Water Act TMDL requirements for water toxicity in California. Using policy documents, monitoring and enforcement data, meeting minutes, interviews, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, Drevno describes the rise and fall of the two pesticides spotlighted for regulation in the Central Coast Region. Results from this study indicate that the 2012 Central Coast Conditional Agricultural Waiver successfully reduced the use of diazinon and chlorpyrifos, but several unintended consequences, such as pesticide switching and continued toxicity, remain.

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available.

For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com

Friday-Saturday, May 29-30 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / Global Islam: A Weekend of Film and Video / Communications 150, Studio C

Friday, May 29

4:00-5:30pm: Videos by Mounir Fatmi including Mixology (2010), Technologia (2010), and Rain Making (2004); Discussion with Tarek El Haik, Assistant Professor, Cinema, San Francisco State University & Peter Limbrick, Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz.

7:00-9:00pm: The feature film is Dernier Maquis/Aden, dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (France, 2008); Discussion with Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz &
Peter Limbrick, Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz.

Saturday, May 30

10:00am-12:30pm: Film screening of New Muslim Cool, dir. Jennifer Maytorena-Taylor (USA, 2009); Discussion with director Jennifer Maytorena-Taylor, Assistant Professor, Social Documentation, UC Santa Cruz

1:30-3:30pm: Videos by Monira Al-Qadiri featuring Abu Athiyya (Father of Pain) (2013), Behind the Sun (2013), Prism (2007-ongoing); Discussion with Monira Al-Qadiri

4:00-6:00pm: Film screening of Descending with Angels, dir. Christian Suhr (Denmark, 2013); Discussion with Christian Suhr & Mayanthi Fernando