earth ecologies x technoscience

2024 - 2025 Events

This roundtable improv brings together ten UCSC scholars working on social, historical, and cultural studies of science, technology and medicine. The event will be structured around eight open, improvised conversations. Rather than structured around formal talks, each conversation will start with a question from a different panelist exploring emerging practices, speculative transformations, and critical imaginings of technoscience, health and ecology. 

Participants:

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness.  

James Doucet-Battle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center. 

Kat Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor in the History Department. 

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness. 

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center. 

Warren Sack is Professor of the Software Arts in the Film + Digital Media Department. 

Kriti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. 

Matt Sparke is Professor of Politics in the Politics Department and Co-Director of Global and Community Health. 

Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature in the Literature Department.  

Past events

As a conceptual frame to slow and redirect attention, The Lichen Museum invites you to zero in
on inhabitants of slowed, horizontal, colorful and complex worlds while imagining radical
possibilities for human being and relating. This walk invites participants to bend down and look
closely at inhabitants of the planet who are already doing things differently as part of the process
of imagining alternate futures for the rest of us.

A. Laurie Palmer writes, makes art, and teaches art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her
research-based work focuses on undoing and re-crafting human practices of relating with the
material world towards building just, livable, and joyful social and environmental relations.
Her most recent book, The Lichen Museum, explores lichens’ role as an anti-capitalist companion
and climate change survivor. Palmer also works in collaboration with activist groups in solidarity
across socioeconomic and racial difference in campaigns that employ imagination and art to
resist and interrupt social and environmental injustice. Palmer collaborated with the art
collective for twenty years on site-based installation projects, and was a founding member
of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Project (CTJM) from 2010 to 2015 . The work of CTJM
contributed to a broad-based campaign that won the first municipal Reparations for police
violence in the US. After being based in Chicago for 30 years, Palmer moved to Santa Cruz in
2015 where she helped start the new Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program at
UCSC, an innovative, student-centered, graduate program focusing on environmental and social
justice.

A not to miss opportunity to explore the UC Santa Cruz Campus, on and off the footpaths with Professor Jim Clifford. We’ll wander among the trees, down in the ravines, out in the meadows. Pooling our different knowledges of environmental, social, cultural, technological and architectural history, we will try to disentangle the overlapping layers that constitute a unique environment.

Jim Clifford is Emeritus Professor in the History of Consciousness Department. Since his retirement he has photographed the campus, co-curated an exhibition about its history and published a book of Images and texts, In the Ecotone, that evokes the site’s “poetics of space,” its planning/design history, and its utopian potential (PDF found here).

Through a series of 222 photographs and a separate conceptual narration, this intermedial and semi-performative presentation discusses the pervasive, toxic presence of anthropochemicals and the search for alternative substances. 

Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include  Ecological Reparation. Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict  (Bristol UP 2023);  Reactivating Elements. Chemistry, Ecology, Practice (Duke UP 2021);  Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More-Than-Social Movements  (Duke UP 2018). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Substance and its Milieu. Anthropochemicals, Autonomy, and Geo-Ecological Justice and a theory photobook entitled Landscape After the Event. Constructivist Photography and the Vision of Abolition. 

Making Kin: Lynn Margulis in Sympoiesis with Sibling Scientists with Donna Haraway, History of Consciousness Faculty Emeritus Talk co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies Monday January 31, 2024 | 12:15pm PST Humanities 1 Room 210

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