GeoEcologies + TechnoScience Conversations

Upcoming 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.  

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. 

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).

Past events:

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 | 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.