CRES Events

CRES hosts or co-sponsors a variety of interesting events every year.  Follow the links below to learn more about events planned and past.

    November 21, 2024

  • 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.


  • October 23, 2024

  • 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.


  • September 24, 2024

  • 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!


  • August 23 - August 25, 2024

  • 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!


  • Event Postponed Until Further Notice

  • 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. 

    Jenny Kelly is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. A central tenet of Falwell's Moral Majority, founded in 1979, was unequivocal support for Israel and by 1983 he began his first of many "Friendship Tours to Israel," which included meetings with government officials and tours of Israeli military installations. Today, Christian Zionism tours follow this template, pairing pilgrimage with celebrations of Israel's sustained displacement of Palestinians. And, during this current genocidal war on Gaza, Christian Zionists across the U.S. are once again calling for unchecked Israeli control over all of Palestine. In this paper, she shows both how tourism is never a thing apart from colonial state violence and how central Christian Zionist tourism is to Israel's ongoing Nakba. 

  • May 23 and 24, 2024

  • 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.


  • May 2, 2024

  • Living Writers with Joseph Han

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

    Joseph HanAssistant 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. 


  • April 26, 2024

  • 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.


  • April 11, 2024

  • Living Writers Series: micha cardenas

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

    Imaginaries)Un(bound: Race, Justice, Writing: The Living Writers Series, the Center for Racial Justice, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) present poets, theorists, fiction and hybrid artists working at the nexus of creative-critical practice in the struggle for justice with the imperative of imaginatively undoing the academic and disciplinary strictures that bind critical scholarship.

    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


  • April 8, 2024

  • Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine

    3:00 pm - 5:00 pm  |  Humanities 1, Room 210

    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/


  • March 12, 2024

  • Border Tech, Embodiment, and Gender

    Join the UCSC Feminist Studies Department for the Border Tech Event: a roundtable conversation on Border Tech, Embodiment, and Gender with Diana J. Montaño (Washington University in St Louis), Irina Córdoba Ramírez (Universidad Nacional Autonoma of Mexico), and Iván Chaar López (University of Texas at Austin), moderated by FMST/CRES Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. These three authors will give lightning talks on their recently published/forthcoming books. Lunch will be served following the event.

  • February 21, 2024

  • 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).


  • January 18, 2024

  • Theorizing Ethnic Studies from Below and to the Left

    During a time when ethnic studies is under highly coordinated, powerfully funded attack, this workshop focuses on the theoretical foundations of ethnic studies in order to clarify the stakes of the field as a socially transformative arena of thought and action. This workshop gives us an opportunity to collectively study theorizations of racism central to the field and to begin to consider the role of theory in the liberatory practices of ethnic studies. In small discussion groups, we will examine and analyze examples of ethnic studies theory from below and to the left.

  • January 17, 2024

  • 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


  • December 14, 2023

  • Revisiting the Third World Roots of Ethnic Studies

    In a moment of broad statewide implementation of ethnic studies in response to AB 101, this workshop revisits the field's origins in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) struggles led by students at Bay Area universities. Among other questions, we will explore how returning to the roots of ethnic studies enables us to understand its relevance to anticolonial and anti-racist struggles today. We will ask: how was the internationalist concept of the "Third World" vital to the field's formation? Why did the state unleash war and police power against striking students? By delving into digital archives together, we will collectively examine select materials and discuss incorporating them into teaching, in both classrooms and community spaces.

  • November 30, 2023

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

    The HSI Equity Talks are a place for regular discussion on topics relevant to UCSC as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. We seek to engage speakers from across campus as we welcome the attendees to engage critically with the content presented at these talks. Together we will unpack complex topics centered on the praxis equity and servingness.

  • November 16, 2023

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

    Ccccome to play across love, place, memory and form, with me and my Mom, Carmelina C. Wilson, who inspired my works Carmelina: Figures (Wendy's Subway, 2021) as she volleys much into Virgil Kills: Stories (Nightboat Books, 2022). Please bring a photograph of a younger you, your fave loved one, and/or a note, playing, or at play; and you're invited to add this to our "Live, Down the Line Collage of Beings," linking us ALL together through the space of the poetic line, sentence, paragraph, and picture. Get Ready to be where you are, and to play with us, all, together in our match of shared room/s, courts and fieldzzZ....!    –Ronaldo V. Wilson

  • November 1, 2023

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

    As a population of exile – transnational, stateless refugees struggling to return to their lands and rebuild their communities lost since 1948 – the Palestinian people built a grassroots trajectory of decolonization that peaked in the 1970s. Through oral histories and cultural text, this presentation analyzes gendered labor, value, and the intersections of national and popular struggles in the Palestinian liberation movement at the time. It juxtaposes the use of iconography with women’s narratives of participatory quotidian resistance to illuminate what is absent from masculinist histories and to interrogate the significance of pride for women and gendered labor in revolution. Lastly, this talk offers possibilities for alternative views of gendered labor, the consumption of femininity in revolution, and prospects for more sustainable and equitable revolutionary praxis.

  • October 24, 2023

  • 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)


  • October 19 and 20, 2023

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

    Rana M. Jaleel is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. There, she is a 2022-2025 Chancellor’s Fellow and a 2021-2024 College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow. She is the Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, and Faculty Advisor for the Sexuality Studies Minor. Her book, The Work of Rape received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was co-winner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently serves on the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

  • October 13, 2023

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

    We are thrilled to announce the first convening of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism in October 2023! This inaugural gathering will bring together ICSZ’s community of scholars and activists to build and share knowledge about how “the IHRA definition of antisemitism” both amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.

    This is a working meeting for scholars and activists of ICSZ’s community, particularly those engaged in researching and confronting the repressive use of “the IHRA definition” to foreclose critical discussion and scholarship on Zionism. A selection of papers and videos of presentations will, however, be published after the event.

  • October 11, 2023

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

    Is it possible to historicize higher education without taking its basic categories for granted? In this talk, I aim to provide a historical and theoretical framework for the emergence of mass higher education in the twentieth century U.S. framed by the problem of surpluses—population, labor, and governance capacity. Faced with the prospect of mass unemployment in the wake of the second world war, U.S. state-making found in the university a means of putting wartime budget surpluses to work in an effort to absorb demobilized population and labor surpluses. The category of the college student emerges in this period as a means of anticipating and managing the potential crises attendant to modern warfare. But as it develops, it does not remain there. The university as a site for the absorption of surplus emerges as a site for the struggle over how and toward what ends surplus time—time free of and freed from the wage—might be used

  • October 16, 2023

  • 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.


  • August 14, 2023

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

    A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an AirportFor 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, A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport. Register Here.

  • June 17th 2023

  • 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.


  • May 22nd 2023

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

    Contesting Race and Citizenship explores the politics of Blackness and citizenship in Italy. It examines the ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency. The book represents one of the first ever in-depth studies of Black Italian political mobilizations in Italy. Associate Professor Marisol LeBrón (feminist studies) will provide a welcome, Graduate Student Theresa Hice-Fromille (sociology) will provide introductions, and Associate Professors Debbie Gould (sociology) and Savannah Shange (anthropology) will serve as discussants.

  • May 3rd, 2023

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

    Please join FMST/CRES professor Felicity Schaeffer for a discussion of her newest book, in conversation with Jennifer Gonzales and Kat Gutierrez. Felicity Schaeffer is a UCSC Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is also the author of Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas, and co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship.

  • April 26th, 2023

  • micha cárdenas

    micha cárdenas: Poetic Operations and Trans Ecologies

    In this talk, Dr. micha cárdenas, Associate Professor of Performance, Play and Design, and Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, will discuss her new book Poetic Operations (Duke 2022), as well as her augmented reality artwork about climate justice and her forthcoming book After Man: Fires, Oceans and Androids.

  • April 25, 2023

  • Nick Mitchell

    Distinguished Teaching Award Lecture with Nick Mitchell

    Please join us for the Distinguished Teaching Award Lecture by Nick Mitchell, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and recipient of the DTA award for 2021-2022. Hosted by the Academic Senate, this event will take place in the Alumni Room at the University Center, or on Zoom, at 4:30pm.

  • March 23, 2023

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

    fahima ife will perform on an independent artist panel as part of the "Sites of Memory: A Symposium on Toni Morrison and the Archive" at Princeton University with JJJJJerome Ellis, Ja'Tovia Gary, and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (in real life)

  • March 18, 2023

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

    fahima ife will be the open mic night feature at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco (virtual)

  • March 11, 2023

  • "Stay Woke" Featuring fahima ife

    fahima ife will present a workshop called "stay woke" at the BSCU conference on teaching creative practice and process in cres at ucsc in undergraduate and graduate courses on black aesthetics + marijuana aesthetics (in real life)

  • March 9, 2023

  • 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.


  • March 2, 2023

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

    Invited to Witness draws from participant observation of solidarity tours across Palestine and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists to explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism by extending deliberately truncated invitations to visit Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. The book shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Saids words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.

  • March 2, 2023

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

    Attend to learn the experiences of Filipina Migrant Workers from labor rights activist Felwina Opiso-Mondina, a representative of PAWIS San Jose. This event was organized in collaboration with the student coordinators of CRES 45: Pilipinx Historical Dialogue.

  • February 10, 2023

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

    fahima ife will participate as a respondent in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Working group "Visions of Slavery: Histories, Memories, and Mobilizations of Unfreedom in the Black Atlantic"  in response to doctoral student Tiara Jackson's working paper at Emory University 

  • February 8, 2023

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

    A conversation with scholar Jarrod Shanahan about the history of prisons and jails in New York, the present arrangement of the carceral state, and the 2020 rebellion. 

  • November 9, 2022

  • Protecting Mauna Kea: Grand Opening of the Kūkula Arts Exhibition

    Kūkula: Santa Cruz in Solidarity with Mauna Kea features art, music, and messages from the movement to protect Mauna Kea and all Indigenous People’s sacred places.

  • November 1-2, 2022

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

    We are proud to welcome and sponsor two talks by Natalia Barrera-Francis, an award-winning journalist and anti-racist activist from Lima, Perú. She will deliver two talks at UCSC on Nov. 1st and 2nd, one in Spanish and one in English, respectively, to share her experiences as a youth activist and inspire the audience to take action against racism in Latin America.

  • October 7, 2022

  • 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.


  • August 10-12, 2022

  • 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.


  • Monday, April 11, 2022 @ 5:00PM

  • No alternative text

    Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media

    at the Cowell Provost House

    Author micha cárdenas (CRES/DANM) will present on her new book  Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University Press, March 2022)

    With responses by fellow UCSC faculty members Gerald Casel (Performance, Play & Design) and Nick Mitchell (CRES/FMST)

    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

    Dessert reception to follow


  • Friday, April 1, 2022 @ 12:00PM

  • 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


  • Tuesday, February 22 @ 10:00AM

  • 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


  • Friday, February 18, 2022 @ 12:00PM

  • 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:

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


  • Wednesday, January 26th @ 12:15PM

  • 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.


  • Thursday, January 20th @ 10:00AM

  • 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


  • Wednesday, November 10, 2021 @ 12:00PM

  • 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. 


  • Wednesday, December 8, 2021 @ 2:00PM

  • 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.


  • Tuesday, November 9, 2021 @ 12:00PM

  • Webinar: “Precarity and Belonging” Book Launch

    Join us for a webinar book launch event with UCSC co-editors and CRES principal and affiliated faculty: Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Juan Poblete, Steven C. McKay, Catherine S. Ramírez, and Sylvanna M. Falcón, of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021)

  • Friday, November 5, 2021 @ 3:00PM

  • 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.


  • Thursday, October 28, 2021 @ 5:00PM

  • 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 


  • Thursday, October 14, 2021 @ 7:00PM

  • Media and Society Series: Tongo Eisen-Martin

    CRES is co-sponsoring the keynote Plenary of the Media and Society Lecture Series at Kresge College. This event features San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, in conversation with Kresge faculty, including novelist-poet Daniel Pearce UCSC Writing Program) and Associate Professor Anjuli Verma (Politics / Legal Studies); they will discuss language and media in the history of slavery and policing, and will including readings of Eisen-Martin’s newest works.

  • Friday, May 21, 2021 @ 11:00AM

  • 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.


  • Friday, May 14, 2021 @ 11:00AM

  • Reflections on Movement and Movement-Building

    Join us for talk number two in the Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective lecture series.

  • Monday, May 10, 2021 @ 5:00PM

  • Cops Off Campus/COLA Reunion!

    Come for the food and drink--stay for the community!

  • Monday, May 10, 2021 @ 2:40PM

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

    Join us for a discussion with documentary filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem and Kim Stoker, a leading activist for adoptee rights with Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) about the rise of Korea’s global adoption program and around the broader issue of transnational adoption.

  • Friday, May 7, 2021 @ 11:00AM

  • Borderland Regimes & Resistance in Global Perspective Roundtable

    This discussion celebrates the launch of the Critical Ethnic Studies special issue “Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective.”

  • Wednesday, April 14, 2021 @ 1:00PM

  • Publishing in Critical Ethnic Studies Workshop

    In this webinar, we will hear from the current co-editors and managing editor of Critical Ethnics Studies on the process of publishing in academic journals. We hope you can join us!

  • Monday, February 22, 2021 @ 2:30PM

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

    Please join us for this wonderful event organized by the teaching team of (un)docu studies and hosted by the Center for Racial Justice and CRES!!

  • Tuesday, February 16, 2021 @ 9:00AM

  • Challenging State Surveillance of Muslims in the Biden/Harris Era

    CVE - Countering Violent Extremism - is a counter-terrorism framework that claims to prevent people from becoming terrorists by partnering with community group, schools, law enforcement, and health providers. Initiated by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration, CVE has expanded across the US through local institutions.

  • Wednesday, February 10, 2021

  • 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.


  • Friday, January 22, 2021 @ 2:00PM

  • A Virtual CRES Book Talk and Celebration with Christine Hong

    Christine Hong is Associate Professor of Literature and the current director of CRES. Her political commentary has appeared in The Nation and on Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera. We hope you can join us as we discuss her recently published book,  A Violent Peace.  You can register here.

  • Wednesday, January 20, 2021

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

    Assistant Professor micha cárdenas (AGPM and DANM) is prinicipal faculty in CRES and her game Redshift and Portalmetal is in an exhibit hosted by the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery that will run from January 20 - July 10, 2021.

  • Thursday, August 13, 2020 @ 7:00PM

  • 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.


  • Thursday, May 14, 2020 @ 5:30PM

  • 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.


  • Monday, January 13, 2020 @ 3:30PM

  • CRES Faculty Book Celebration: Savannah Shange

    Savannah Shange is a Black diaspora scholar who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was most recently a postdoctoral associate in Black Bodies at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. She holds a joint PhD in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has been featured in Women and Performance, The Feminist Wire, and Anthropology News. Her research interests include Black femme gender, queer of color critique, and the afterlife of slavery.

  • Wednesday, November 20, 2019 @ 2:00PM

  • CRES Work in Progress: micha cárdenas & Krizia Puig.

    micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz & the founding director of the Critical Realities Studio. micha cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technologyKrizia Puig is a Feminist Studies doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz, where they also work as the Program Coordinator at the Disability Resource Center, and as a researcher-artist for the Critical Realities Studio.

  • Tuesday, October 29, 2019 @ 1:00PM

  • "She Stood There by Him with a Gun"

    CRES is very pleased to be bringing Jasmin Young, a president's postdoctoral fellow, to campus for a visit early next week. As a part of her visit, she will be giving a public lecture--see attached flyer and announcement.

  • Friday, May 10, 2019 @ 4:00PM

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

    Dr. Courtney Bonam and Christine Rosales will be sharing their work around this topic.

  • Tuesday, May 7, 2019 @ 1:30PM

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

    Lilian Fabros who was a Filipino activist during the Third World Liberation Front, will be speaking about her experiences as an organizer at this time. Please join the conversation, the event is open to the public.

  • Thursday, February 21 and Friday, February 22, 2019

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

     “All Power to the People! Asian American Radicalism and the Third World Liberation Front Strike: An Intergenerational Activist Dialogue,” features three Asian American activists who were vital to the TWLF struggle, Vicci Wong, Bruce Occena, and Emil de Guzman and who will share their experience and create an intergenerational panel with student activists on campus. 

  • Monday, December 5, 2018 @ 1PM

  • 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.


  • Thursday, November 29, 2018 @ 3PM

  • 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, June 2, 2017 @ 12:30PM

  • 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


  • Friday, May 26, 2017 @ 2:30PM

  • 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."


  • Tuesday, October 16, 2015 @ 10:00AM

  • Comparative Empires

    Histories of empire have been tethered over-determinedly to singular histories of nation-states, temporalities and/or geopolitics. Rather than locate empire as a stable or temporal concept, the colloquium attends to the imaginative possibilities offered by a turn to a more comparative relationship to empire within a south-south framework. To do so, we turn to two clusters of critical attachments that are rarely configured through and against the language(s) of empire (1) How do we understand empire delinked from locality, and locality delinked from geopolitical territory? (2) How do we attend to a politics of comparative empires that would be less about given political identities and geographies and more about vernacular epistemologies shaping, social and human collectivities? To attend to these issues, the colloquium foregrounds south-south engagement and brings together work on empire from South Asia, African diaspora studies and aboriginal/indigenous histories.

  • Friday, February 20, 2015 @ 10AM

  • Steven Salaita

    Steven Salaita: Reading Seminar & Public Talk

    Two events on February 20, 2015: Reading seminar at 10am, and public talk at 2pm.