CRES Events

Connect to the Earth, Dance with the Clay

6:30PM - 8:30PM | Resource Center for Nonviolence

Join Alicia Rodriguez, the director and teacher of Taller Guaguarey (Clay Arts Center) in Cayey, Puerto Rico, to learn about her work, the center, and the vital role it plays in a community impacted by U.S. colonial policies and the climate crisis. Everyone is welcome. Donations are appreciated!

A former political prisoner, Alicia learned pottery in prison and knows firsthand the healing and therapeutic benefits of working with clay.

Guaguarey means clay in the language of the indigenous Taínos of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Alicia and Taller Guaguarey offer free pottery classes to adults and children in a communal setting in Cayey, a mountain town in Puerto Rico with a population of 6,000 people, of which 54.2% live in poverty.

The center offers an answer to poverty, crushing debt, and austerity measures rooted in U.S. colonial policies—especially urgent during these times of catastrophic hurricanes and electrical outages.

Contesting Techno-Fascisms Now!

3:30pm - 5:00pm | Namaste Lounge

This panel explores ways that fascism today manifests in unexpected sites and imaginaries, including visions of techno-utopia, nationalist movements for animal rights and calls to colonize outer space.

The panelist assembled here will each take a keyword of the emergent fascist trends and think through ways to contest fascisms now.

Neda Atanasoski; Professor and Chair, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer; Chair, CRES and Professor FMST, UCSC. Keyword: Eugenic Fascism

Neel Ahuja; Professor, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland. Keyword: Environmental Fascism

Erin McElroy; Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Keyword: Techno-Feudalism

HistCon Speaker Series: “Black Anticolonialism and Radical Relation” with Sophia Azeb

1:00pm | Humanities 1, room 420

This talk explores the radical anticolonial subjectivities forged across what Richard Iton suggests as "diasporic breathing room," or - in my own interpretation - the ungeographic sensibilities that Black study offers transnational and translational theories of decolonisation. Focusing on the productive tensions emergent from 20th century Black anticolonial practice - particularly the unmapping tendencies of Frantz Fanon - this talk attends to the cultural, political, and affective matrix of anticolonial possibilities and limits emergent from across the African diaspora. This emphasis on how Black anticolonial practice draws upon the unsettled spatial orientation of the diaspora, which informs Black anticolonial epistemologies, does not presume that racial identity itself is fixed, or that meanings made from identity and experience constitute an anticolonial politic in and of itself. Rather, the ever shifting, "undecidable blackness" that instructs and shapes particular anticolonial pursuits towards the horizon of decolonisation make legible a set of radical subjectivities that embolden anticolonial sociality beyond the "authenticating geography" of the nation-state.

Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at UCSC. Her book, tentatively titled "Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab," follows the circuits of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North and West Africa and Europe. 

Cultural Studies Talk with M. Ty: It Is Time to Say to the Water, “Disobey”: Reflections with the Art of Jumana Emil Abboud

12:15 PM – 1:30 PM | Humanities 1, Room 210

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.

Dr. Rafael A. Martínez in Conversation with Yosimar Reyes

6:30pm | Namaste Lounge, College 9/JRLC

Join us for a book talk featuring Dr. Rafael Martinez, Assistant Professor at Arizona State University. Dr.Martinez will be in conversation with Yosimar Reyes, a poet, performance artist, and Santa Clara County's first undocumented Poet Laureate. Together, they will engage in a vital discussion on migration,undocumented youth activism, and the power of literature in social movements, emphasizing solidarity in today's anti-immigrant climate.

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, chronicles the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the U.S. over the past two decades, focusing on the activism and organizing efforts of undocumented youth.

For the Love of Genocide with Eman Ghanayem

Part of the CRJ Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

4:00pm - 6:00pm | Cervantes Velasquez Room, Bay Tree Building

with Eman Ghanayem, Assistant Professor of English, University of San Diego

This presentation unravels love in its colonial manifestation as a rationale for genocidal violence. It centers in its analysis the discourse currently used by those supporting and perpetuating genocide in Gaza. Love expressed in contexts of Zionist loyalties and its brand of settler nationalism, originally and across its transit, gives us insight into the feelings that animate acts of violence. In response to it, Palestinian expression, particularly in relation to atrocity and apocalyptical dread, reveals what precedes in fundamental form and must conquer genocide. How must we bear love in the face of annihilation? What ideas of it must we confront? Whose love must we learn?

Understanding Israeli and Christian Zionism with Baha Hilo and Rev. Marietta Macy

4:00pm - 6:00pm | Resource Center for Nonviolence

Join us for a discussion about U.S. Christian Zionism, its impact and its relationship to Christian nationalism, and its role in Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Palestine. 

Faculty for Justice in Palestine and CRES present: Baha Hilo

4:00pm - 6:00pm | Humanities 1, room 210 | or Zoom

Join us for a conversation with Palestinian scholar and activist, Baha Hilo, who will speak about his political education work in Palestine and the labor of surviving zionist oppression. 

Digital Poetics and the Narrations of Refusal: A Technomediated Diary

Part of the CRJ Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

4:00pm - 6:00pm | Cervantes Velasquez Room, Bay Tree Building

with Rana Sharif, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Taking as my point of departure Edward Said's 1984 essay, "Permission to Narrate," this presentation will explore the narrative potentials of technomediated spaces as sites of refusal, untethered to Zionist narrative hegemony. Centering her analysis on the 2020 virtual Palestine Writes Literature Festival, Dr. Sharif's research seeks to advance a theory of digitalpoetics that invite Palestinian sociality that while rooted in indigeneity and the land of Palestine, activates Palestine into the world through the technomediated.

Cultural Studies Event with Sophia Azeb: Mapping the "Arab" in Pan-African Political Cultures

12:15pm - 1:30pm | Humanities 1, room 210

Amid the US-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine and the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan, the constellation of transnational and multiracial movement solidarities forged throughout the myriad capitalist and colonialist crises of the 21st century continue to reckon with the precarity of their uneven legibility across various regional, continental, and global contexts. 

Book Celebration: The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

4:00pm - 6:00pm | Rachel Carson College, Red Room

Celebrate the The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023) on January 23rd!

Join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the Black Geographies Lab, and the Science & Justice Research Center, in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, from 4-6PM, to celebrate the The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023) in an authors-meets-critics styled session.

Co-edited by Associate Professor Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated.

John R. Lewis Plenary Series: "The Persecution of Ethnic Studies in Pajaro Valley Unified School District" with Christine Hong

7:00pm - 9:00pm | Social Sciences 2, room 071

Join John R. Lewis College for a community discussion with CRES Professor Dr. Christine Hong on the current Zionist dismantling of ethnic studies at PVUSD.

RSVP here

CRJ Reading Seminar: Toward a Theory of Hospitality

Part of the Peggy & Jack Baskin Foundation Intersectional Feminisms Series

10:00am - 11:30am | Humanities 1, room 210 or Register via Zoom

Please join us for a reading seminar with Vernadette Gonzalez, following the January 16 book talk.

Reading materials:

CRJ Book Talk: Empire’s Mistress: Gender, Sex, and Imperial Intimacies

Part of the Peggy & Jack Baskin Foundation Intersectional Feminisms Series

4:00pm - 5:30pm | Humanities 1, room 210 or Register via Zoom

How does attention to the intimate help us understand the gendered and sexualized dynamics of empire, and the ways in which they continue to shape how we tell our stories in the present? Empire’s Mistress pieces together the life story of Isabel Rosario Cooper, a mixed-race vaudeville and early cinema star in Manila who became infamous for her liaison with General Douglas MacArthur during the height of American colonialism in the Philippines. It tracks the mobilities and relationships generated by the United States’ desire for the Philippine archipelago—and the ways in which colonized subjects—particularly women—turned those to their own advantage. The scattered and ephemeral archive of “women like her” whose cosmopolitan itineraries ranged from Manila, to Washington, D.C., and Hollywood, outline a life lived on the edges of power but always at the center of imperial desire.

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper and Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. She is co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (and the Duke University Press decolonial guide series) and the forthcoming Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader.

Film Screening of "The Long Walk of Carlos Guerrero" and Q&A with Director Joseph Mathew

Part of the Journeys along the Mexico Border Series

5:00pm - 8:00pm | Merrill College Provost House

"What Side Are You On?" Author Mike Wilson in Conversation with Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

Part of the Journeys along the Mexico Border Series

4:00pm - 6:00pm | Merrill College Provost House

Mike Wilson is a dedicated humanitarian and co-author of What Side Are You On? with Dr. Jose Antonio Lucero. His work addresses the intersections of poverty, racism, and colonialism, with a focus on migrant rights and humanitarian aid along the border. Known for establishing water stations for migrants on tribal lands, Mike's advocacy often places him at odds with both the U.S. government and his own Indigenous community. His recent book offers a profound examination of these critical issues.

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, as well as an affiliate faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies.

The Imperative to Refuse Psychic Intrusion in Palestine-Lebanon Solidarities

Part of the CRJ Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

4:00-6:00pm | Cervantes Velasquez Room, Bay Tree Bldg, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA

This talk will discuss the ways that psychic intrusions are central features of settler colonial logics and how they are used with specific intent to disrupt solidarities. Palestine-Lebanon solidarities will be used as a "case study" to read the psycho-politico-affective forces that demobilize.

CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

International, Anticolonial Vanguards: The Palestinian Transnational Student Movement in Historical Perspective

Part of the CRJ Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

4:00-6:00pm | Cervantes Velasquez Room, Bay Tree Bldg, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA

This presentation focuses on the political potential of contemporary Palestinian transnational youth activism in Europe and USA. It compares student political engagement namely by examining the formation and development of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) during what is regarded as the "golden age" of the Palestinian revolution (1960s-1970s) with contemporary initiatives, efforts and strategies of mobilization amongst Palestinian youth in shatat (Diaspora). By looking to the past through a historical continuum that has molded present-day Palestinian youth activism, I propose that new futures can only be made through methodologies that tether together time and space.

CRES Undergraduate Welcome

New undergraduates who are interested in majoring in CRES are invited to attend our fall Undergraduate Welcome and Major Presentation on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 from 11am-1pm in Humanities 1, room 210. Come meet the CRES department faculty and staff, learn about the major and our minors, and hear about exciting classes and opportunities. Refreshments will be provided! 

Click to RSVP!

2024 Puerto Rican Studies Association Biennial Conference: Scales of Solidarity

The Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) will be hosting its bi-annual conference at UCSC this year from Friday, August 23 to Sunday, August 25. PRSA is an interdisciplinary academic organization that promotes the development and circulation of knowledge about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans from the Puerto Rican islands and its broad diasporas. 

This year’s theme is Scales of Solidarity and will think about the role of solidarity in building a freer and more just world. During the conference there will be panels, workshops, film screenings, performances, and a bombazo that will bring musicians from around California to participate. PRSA will also be collaborating with the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery to mount an exhibit focused on Puerto Rican communities in California curated by Aurora Levins Morales.

Register Here!

Works-In-Progress Event with Robin Gabriel and Jenny Kelly

3-5pm | Hum 1, 210 | RSVP Here

Robin Gabriel is a fifth-year Ph.D candidate in the Sociology department with a designated emphasis in CRES and FMST. Her dissertation (tentatively titled 'Poetry is Not a Luxury': Decoloniality and Palestinian American Youth Activism) analyzes the Palestinian Youth Movement's (PYM) annual Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Anthology, regarding it as an archived of exiled Palestinian youth's art and activism on Turtle Island. She will be sharing pieces of her project that deal with questions of youth and resistance, which may ultimately materialize as a chapter, or be threaded throughout the project. 

Empire's Mistress Book Talk and Seminar with Vernadette Gonzalez

May 23: 4-5:30pm | May 24: 10-11:30am | Hum 1, 210 |

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper and Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. She is co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (and the Duke University Press decolonial guide series) and the forthcoming Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader.

Living Writers with Joseph Han

May 2 5:20-6:55pm | Humanities Lecture Hall |

Joseph Han, Assistant Professor, English and Creative Writing, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He was selected as a 2022 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and received a Kundiman fellowship in fiction. His novel won the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor and the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. He is an editor for the West region of Joyland Magazine and an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA program. 

Yosimar Reyes’ One-Man Show: “Prieto”

7:30 pm - 10:00 pm  |  Stevenson Event Center

NATIONALLY ACCLAIMED POET, YOSIMAR REYES, BRINGS HIS FULL-LENGTH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ONE-MAN SHOW TO UC SANTA CRUZ
Directed by Kat Evasco and Sean San José, Produced by The Living World Project

CRES 70u – (Un)docu Studies, in collaboration with the Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center (CADrc) and the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) bring the captivating autobiographical one-man show written and performed by renowned artist Yosimar Reyes – “Prieto” to UC Santa Cruz.

Through the playful, lovably naive lens of an 8-year-old Reyes, Prieto tells the story of an overprotective grandmother who recycles bottles to support her family while her grandson wonders why they can’t have money like his friends. It tells the story of chismosa vecinas (gossipy neighbors) who peek through their windows and watch as the neighborhood boys tease young Reyes for “acting like a girl.” To escape from the taunting and the daily toil, Reyes creates an imaginary world for himself — one made up of books and ’90s R&B. Prieto saw its world premiere production at San Francisco’s Brava Theater in October 2022. Now on tour with The Living Word Project, Prieto has seen productions at San Jose Theater, and Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San Jose, CA.

This event is free for UCSC Students, Faculty and Staff with Registration. Doors will open at 7:00 PM, show begins at 7:30PM.

Living Writers Series: micha cardenas

micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press (2022), proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press.

She is a first generation Colombian American. Her solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries and biennials including the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece, Arnolfini Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, the Zero1 Biennial and the California Biennial. Cárdenas is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0; She posts updates on Mastodon at http://eldritch.cafe/@michacard

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine

UCSC Feminist Studies and Faculty for Justice in Palestine present Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine with panelists: Lila Adib Sharif (Arizona State University), Jennifer Lynn Kelly (UC Santa Cruz), and Somdeep Sen (Roskilde University); the editorial collective of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine.

Join us for this panel discussion with excerpts from Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine (Forthcoming, Duke University Press) on Monday, April 8th at 3:00 PM. Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine showcases how Palestinians across Palestine and in the diaspora reshape forms of tourism to their homeland in order to lay claim to it in the midst of Israel’s settler-colonial project.

For more information visit: https://fjpucsc.org/

Border Tech, Embodiment, and Gender

The First Amerasians Book Talk with Yuri Doolan

The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers in US-occupied South Korea to adoptive American homes during the 1950s and 1960s. It explores the Cold War ideologies undergirding this so-called rescue and shows how the process of child removal and placement via US refugee and adoption laws profoundly shaped the lives of mixed race Koreans and their mothers.

Yuri W. Doolan is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and inaugural Chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).

Theorizing Ethnic Studies from Below and to the Left

The Space Between Jenin and El Barranquilo: Using Anzaldua’s Nepantla to Explore Palestinian and Guatemalan Displacement During Times of War

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE

• Public Talk: Digital Arts Research Center 108

• Public Performance: Wednesday, January 17th, 2024 7:30pm | Mainstage

• Workshop: Thursday, January 18th, 2024 *for UCSC community members only

Revisiting the Third World Roots of Ethnic Studies

HSI Equity Talk: The Long Struggle for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Ronaldo Wilson, "Carmelina Figures and Virgil Kills: A Play Date"

Jennifer Mogannam – Gendering Revolution: Palestinian Praxis, Labor, and Decolonization

The Genocide in Gaza in our Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop

with CRES speakers: Jennifer Mogannam, Sophia Azeb, Marisol LeBrón, Jenny Kelly, micha cárdenas

This teach-in is open to all, but will be geared toward those teaching and TA'ing this quarter. We will contextualize the unfolding genocide on Gaza and offer resources for facilitating these discussions in your classrooms.

2:00pm - 3:00pm

Humanities 1, 210 or Zoom (Register Here)

Rana Jaleel "The Work of Rape" Book Talk and Seminar

Institute for the Critical Studies of Zionism Presents: Battling the "IHRA Definition": Theory and Activism

Nick Mitchell – The University in Surplus Perspective, 1945-1968

micha cárdenas – Atoms Never Touch

Join us in celebrating the debut of Atoms Never Touch by micha cárdenas; forward by adrienne maree brown.

Jumping to alternate realities sounds great, if you’re in control. But what if you’re not? What if you’re propelled away from the people and places you love the most in the blink of an eye? And what if these involuntary journeys happen because your neurochemistry is different, and your brain works differently?

Beautiful, compassionate, and resourceful as she is, this is Rea’s problem. A latina trans woman and an academic, she is beloved by a tight circle of friends, who fully accept her without knowing the cause of her disappearances. But she is haunted by the lovers and family that she cannot trace back to, and fears she might be separated from them forever.

Each time she transits into a new time and space, everything shifts—even the films and writing Rea produces readjust their molecules to match her new quantum reality. But Rea, a brilliant lay scientist, is determined to crack the code, and end her quest for lasting connections and home.

Slugs and Steins: What Can We Learn from the Airport?

For many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flights. But airports are fascinating sites that can tell us a lot about the places where they are situated. Among other things, they are complex infrastructures where people, the built and natural environments, and different kinds of networks come together. Airports are also sites of accumulated power in a given region. Looking at the history of an airport, then, can provide a useful lens for examining some of the complex, interconnected forces that have influenced the development of its region over time. Exploring that history can also help us understand how differently positioned people in that place have abided, resisted, and otherwise negotiated the powerful forces that have shaped their lives. In this talk, Eric Porter will discuss San Francisco International Airport (SFO) as a site whose history reveals important perspectives on a wide range of phenomena that have helped to make the Bay Area. Along the way he will read excerpts from his recent book, 

membra(I)nes - 12th Annual Conference of the Gender Studies Association and Public Program

There will be a Gender Studies conference June 15-17, 2023, with DGS interpretation of many presentations and cultural contributions. We welcome Deaf students, scholars* and interested parties to attend the conference.   

The conference is entitled membra(I)nes: Membranes. Combined with brain (brain) and the I (I). For example, the eardrum (a membrane) and the importance of the brain for perception and ego formation. Among other things, we are concerned with the un/permeability of various relations of domination. And about developing visions and alternatives.

With contributions by: Hongwei Bao, Ama Josephine Budge, micha cárdenas, Heather Davis, Kara Keeling, Prof. Dr. Okan Kubus, Sabine Mohamed, Helen Pritchard, Rahul Rao, Karen Tongson, Jeremy Wade, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Lissy Willberg a.o.

Book Launch! Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land Book Talk and Celebration

micha cárdenas: Poetic Operations and Trans Ecologies

Distinguished Teaching Award Lecture with Nick Mitchell

Sites of Memory: A Symposium on Toni Morrison and the Archive

Open Mic Night at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco

"Stay Woke" Featuring fahima ife

The Indigenous BorderLands: An exploration of the border/lands from indigenous perspectives across the Americas

• 4:00pm–Teresa Gregor: Aa'a Mat Tipaay Ak'wee, Bringing Her/Voice Back to the Land: Incomplete Repatriations in "The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero"

  Dr. Gregor is Kumeyaay from the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel and also Yoéme. Her research focuses on California American Indian Women, sovereignty, literary and cultural repatriation, and tribal resiliency and revitalization.

• 6:00pm–Harsha Walia: Abolish Border Imperialism: Migration, Racial Capitalism and Empire

  Harsha Walia is the author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Her work addresses how current migrant and refugee crises are the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change, generating mass dispossession worldwide.

CRES/FMST Book Talk and Celebration– Invited to Witness by Jennifer Kelly

The Crisis in the Caregiving Industry: The Gendered and Racial Exploitation of Filipina Migrant Workers

Visions of Slavery: Histories, Memories, and Mobilizations of Unfreedom in the Black Atlantic

Rebellion, Reform, and the U.S. Punishment System, featuring Jarrod Shanahan

Protecting Mauna Kea: Grand Opening of the Kūkula Arts Exhibition

Stories of Action: Community Activism in the Face of Racism in Latin America

UC Ethnic Studies Council Meeting (Public Session)

UC Ethnic Studies faculty members will present the latest report on the University’s Area H admissions requirement and the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. A coalition of university faculty, K-12 educators, and students will speak on their experiences fighting for the implementation of Ethnic Studies university admission requirements and high school graduation requirements. Presenters will give updates on the progress of the campaign, share blocks to the campaign coming from within and outside the University of California, and end with a call to action for all attendees.

This session is public, and open to all who are interested in the future of Ethnic Studies in California K-12 and higher education.

CRJ Summer Institute

The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) at UC Santa Cruz will host its inaugural Summer Institute, “Political Education and Liberatory Knowledge,” from August 10-12, 2022.

Reflecting CRJ’s core commitment to political education–namely, study aimed at fostering not just learning but, more critically, collective liberation–the CRJ Summer Institute brings together community-based activists and organizers, ethnic studies practitioners, and students in a three-day thematically organized series of presentations, workshops, and reading seminars around the role of political education in racial justice struggles, past and present. 

By centering political education within the space of the university, the CRJ Summer Institute foregrounds modes of liberatory study developed in settings outside formal sites of education, such as activist groups, racial justice organizations, and worker collectives. In so doing, the CRJ Summer Institute aims to raise consciousness about, and develop critical approaches to, inequality and exploitation from the perspectives of those who have organized in the service of a more just world. By highlighting the linkages between racism and imperialism, the CRJ Summer Institute aims to foster a critical space of study from which solidarity can be imagined and enacted.

Each day of the CRJ Summer Institute features 2-4 hours of teaching sessions, shared dialogue, and workshops framed by a particular political educational approach to racial justice.

• Register for Day One
• Register for Day Two
• Register for Day Three

Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media

CRJ Series: Transforming Structures of Whiteness in University Leadership

Day 2: Calling out Whiteness in University Structures of Leadership

Register Here (UCSC only): https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpcu6urzoqEtPv8psrEq46Bk29RHe7SfqY

Centering the voices and lived experiences of faculty of color (FOC) is critical for exposing and transforming problematic structures of university leadership. From a brief research talk, audiences will learn how FOC navigate and reform structures of Whiteness in leadership. Interactive discussion with divisional deans will follow, with goals of understanding how to bolster the leadership efforts of FOC and undo structures of Whiteness.

Featuring:

• Rebecca Covarrubias, Assistant Professor psychology

• Katherine Quinteros, Graduate Student, Department of Psychology

Read their research paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cUQCFl1ov776qD3isTJ9k_LZMM4I6Ajy/view?usp=sharing

Poetry and Protest: Writing Amidst Chaos with poet Alan Pelaez Lopez

In this poetry reading and community conversation, Alan Pelaez Lopez will reflect on what it means to create art in the middle of legal and political violence. They'll read from their book, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, and a manuscript-in-progress tentatively titled trans*imagination in the hope that the work can invite questions about abolition, migrant futures, and the radical trans imaginary.

You can sign up for this event via Zoom

CRJ Series: Transforming Structures of Whiteness in University Leadership

Day 1: Enacting Solidarities: Faculty/Staff Affinity Groups Report Back

Register Here (UCSC only): https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEucO2ppjsjEtKFsgWSQEmRPBa-9g9P8qvK

The Faculty Community Networking Program was created to provide DEI arenas of community, development, and support for faculty from historically marginalized communities on campus. In this forum, leaders of these groups will present the issues and recommendations that emerged from their collective discussions, and report back on their groups’ experiences in trying to improve faculty community, development, and support. Discussion will focus on how to move this work forward.

Featuring:

• African-American/Black/Caribbean (chaired by Courtney Bonam, cbonam@ucsc.edu)

• Asian American/Pacific Islander (chaired by L.S. Kim, lskim@ucsc.edu)

• Disabilities & Chronic Illness (chaired by Megan Moodie, mmoodie@ucsc.edu)

• Indigenous (chaired by Katie Keliiaa, ckeliiaa@ucsc.edu)

• Latinx/Chicanx (chaired by Kirsten Silva Gruesz, ksgruesz@ucsc.edu)

• Women in STEM (chaired by Rebecca Braslau, rbraslau@ucsc.edu)

Read the groups 2018-2019 reports here: https://academicaffairs.ucsc.edu/faculty-community-networking-program/2018-19_group_reports.html

Safe Houses? Queerness, Performance, and the Land Question in South Africa with Xavier Livermon

During the height of COVID restrictions in 2020, a group of Black queer artists in Cape Town occupied a ritzy home that had been converted into an Air B and B. They intended to overstay their original booking in order to bring attention to the issue of inequitable housing policy in South Africa, and the particular ways that the continuation of apartheid urban planning created disproportionate vulnerabilities for Black queer folk in Cape Town. In this talk, I will consider the political implications of joining queerness with the land question in post-apartheid South Africa through direct political action and performance. RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 26th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium. To RSVP for the entire Winter 2022 series, please fill out this form.

The CRJ Presents: A Screening of Halmoni with Immigrant Rights Organizer, Ju Hong

In 2013, Ju Hong a Bay Area immigrant rights organizer, emerged onto the national scene when he challenged President Obama on his mass deportation record during a speech in San Francisco.  He was covered by major media outlets, and his writings subsequently appeared on Politico, Huffington Post, and The Korean Times. 

You can sign up for this event via Zoom

Science & Justice Graduate Training Program Informational Meeting

The Science and Justice Research Center will host an Informational Meeting on their internationally recognized interdisciplinary Graduate Training and Certificate Program.  The Science and Justice Training Program (SJTP) is a globally unique initiative that trains doctoral students to work across the disciplinary boundaries of the natural and social sciences, engineering, humanities and the arts. 

Against Muerto Rico Virtual Book Launch for Marisol LeBrón

Part of EEE's reVolucionA series, this bilingual book shows that the protests of the Verano Boricua were important not just because they resulted in the resignation of Ricardo Rosselló, the first time a democratically elected Puerto Rican governor vacated their post. They were also important because they indexed a political praxis rooted in the idea of truly living in Puerto Rico—that is, living a life of dignity and respect free of degradation and violence. Against Muerto Rico illustrates how, in a context where colonial capitalism creates conditions of vulnerability, harm, and death in the lives of many Puerto Ricans, the Verano Boricua drew from a long radical tradition of feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organizing in Puerto Rico and its diaspora in order to promote conditions that affirm Puerto Rican life. Register Here.

Webinar: “Precarity and Belonging” Book Launch

Unbound: The Life and Legacy of Asian American Community Historian Judy Yung

Through this event we aim to honor and celebrate Judith "Judy" Yung’s tremendous work legacy as a UCSC emerita professor of American Studies, community and public scholar of Chinese American history, pioneer of oral history methodology, prize-winning author, teacher, supportive colleague, and cherished mentor.

Poetic Operations: a conversation with micha cárdenas and Susan Stryker

Presented by We Are The Voices and the Mills College Trans Studies Speaker Series. micha cárdenas, author of Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (forthcoming from Duke University Press), and Susan Stryker will discuss cárdenas’s new book and trans of color poetics. Register here: https://performingarts.mills.edu/2021/10/poetic-operations.php 

Media and Society Series: Tongo Eisen-Martin

PhD+ Publishing Workshop

Join us for the fifth year of PhD+ Workshops, hosted by The Humanities Institute. We meet monthly to discuss possible career paths for PhDs, internship possibilities, grants/fellowships, work/life balance, elements of style, online identity issues, and much, much more.

Reflections on Movement and Movement-Building

Cops Off Campus/COLA Reunion!

Geographies of Kinship: A Conversation with Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem and Adoption Rights Activist Kim Stoker

Borderland Regimes & Resistance in Global Perspective Roundtable

Publishing in Critical Ethnic Studies Workshop

Queering the Undocumented Archive: A Conversation with Yosimar Reyes and Julio Salgado

Challenging State Surveillance of Muslims in the Biden/Harris Era

CRES Faculty micha cárdenas Gives Talk at Major Art Festival in Berlin

In this talk, cárdenas considers the relevance of trans operations of trans studies for thinking through environmental media art.

A Virtual CRES Book Talk and Celebration with Christine Hong

not in, of, along, or relating to a line

Sansei and Sensibility

Karen Tei (KT) Yamashita, Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing and CRES principal faculty will be presenting from her latest book, Sansei and Sensibility, a collection of short stories, this Thursday evening at 7 p.m. Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz invite you to join us for a free online event.

Humanities Happy Hour – Freedom & Race in the Time of Pandemic

Join us for our first virtual Humanities Happy Hour exploring Questions That Matter in the Time of Pandemic. This week will focus on “Freedom & Race” and feature Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall in conversation with associate professors Alice Yang, Christine Hong, and Noriko Aso.

CRES Faculty Book Celebration: Savannah Shange

CRES Work in Progress: micha cárdenas & Krizia Puig.

"She Stood There by Him with a Gun"

CRES Works In Progress: Demonized and Devalued: Marginalized Bodies Made Kill-able

All Power to the People II: Filipino Activism in the Third World Liberation Front

All Power to the People! Asian American Radicalism and the Third World Liberation Front Strike: An Intergenerational Activist Dialogue

Indigenous Agency in Visual Culture

Yve Chavez, President's Postdoctoral Fellow, will talk about their research on Indigenous contributions to California’s Franciscan missions and Native agency in early modern global exchange networks.

CRES Works in Progress: Invitation and Object - Reframing the Study of Palestine

Assistant Professor Jenny Kelly and Graduate Student Noya Kansky will present their works in progress on Palestine.

Friday Forum: Angela Nguyen

“Mom, can you help me with my homework?” Identifying Tools and Conditions for Intergenerational Dialogue Among Southeast Asian Refugees and Their Children

CRES Works in Progress: Felicity Amaya Schaeffer and Chrissy Anderson-Zavala

Graduate student Chrissy Anderson-Zavala presents work on "Delinquency as Labor," and Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer presents her work on "BioRobotics: Surveillance at the Borders of AnimalHumanInsect."

Comparative Empires

Steven Salaita: Reading Seminar & Public Talk