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Talk: Interstellar Crossings: The Image of Exoplanets and the Imagination of Other Worlds

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds animated the scientific discourse and press coverage. Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this discovery was not just about discovering more planets, but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk, Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave the boundary of our world to extend human presence beyond the solar system.

Crossings+Boundaries TALK: Dreamland: America’s Opiate Epidemic and How We Got Here

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Click here to read an article about Quinones' talk. Quinones will discuss the origins of our nationwide opioid epidemic: pharmaceutical marketing, changes in our heroin market, and new attitudes toward pain among American healthcare consumers. He will also discuss cultural shifts that made this epidemic possible. Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. His book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic won a National Book Critics Circle award ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talks: Sayak Valencia and Lorena Wolffer

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Talk: From Queer to Cuir: Geopolitical Ostranenie from the Global South Sayak Valencia’s talk will explore the politics of survival and the alliances of the trans/border/messtizx/sissy/lesbian/dressed/slut-fag/cripple. The word “cuir” represents a defamiliarization—or ostranenie—of “queer,” which challenges automatic reading and registers, through its unfamiliarity, a geopolitical inflection southward and from the peripheries. Countering colonial epistemology and Anglo-American historiography, cuir invokes a space of decolonialized enunciation, at once playful and critical. Sayak Valencia (Cultural Studies, El Colegio de la ...

Social Securities Talk: Money is No Object: Aesthetics, Abstraction, and the Politics of Care

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In his talk, Scott Ferguson will rethink the historical relationship between money and aesthetics in an effort to broaden the politics of care using the alternative conception of money articulated by the contemporary heterodox school of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Mobilizing MMT, Ferguson critiques exhausted dialectical oppositions between money and art and contends that monetary abstraction, rather than representing a private, finite, and alienating technology, is instead a public and fundamentally unlimited medium that harbors ...

Social Securities Talk: Shaping Community Futures Through Policy + Architecture

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

LA-Más is a Los Angeles urban design non-profit focused on empowering lower-income and working class families who struggle to find affordable homes to rent or for whom walking is a primary mode of transportation. This talk will explore the architectural projects of LA-Más that provide accessible affordable housing and support the pedestrian right of way, and that, in doing so, create built environments that address the city’s social instability. Elizabeth Timme is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director ...

Aaron Huey Critical Mass Talk

Critical Mass Talk: Art as Compass and Catalyst for Change

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Amplifier.org is "a nonprofit design lab that builds art and media experiments to amplify the most important movements of our times." In this lecture the Founder of Amplifier will speak on the power of art at threshold moments, recounting visual campaigns like We The People, which flooded the streets for the Women's March and 2017 Presidential Inauguration protests. Amplifier believes that in times of uncertainty—in times like these, when fear and misinformation attempt to divide ...

Clint Smith

Regeneration Talk: Clint Smith

Zoom

Join us online for a conversation between Clint Smith and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the ...

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Regeneration Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales

Zoom

Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales will discuss her new and dynamic body of work presented in the exhibition, Entwined. Rosales’ interweaving of representations from ancient Greek and Yoruba mythologies invites viewers to challenge their ideas about identity and empowerment. Women and people of color, the protagonists of her canvases, assume roles of power and beauty in exquisite imaginings of ancient myths and Renaissance paintings. To learn more about the exhibition Entwined, which is on display ...

Elizabeth Kolbert

Regeneration Talk: Elizabeth Kolbert

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

It is said that we live in a new geological epoch characterized by climate change and other disastrous human impacts on the planet. In her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Should we be seeking technological solutions to the damage humans have caused to the environment, or will such “solutions” only make the problems ...

Heather Houser TMI Event Infowhelm

TMI Talk: The Climate Infowhelm

Zoom

Climate infowhelm is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by too much information about the environmental crisis. Heather Houser will discuss how infowhelm feels, sounds, and looks in various media and how contemporary art manages environmental knowledge and provides new ways of understanding environmental change. Audience Q&A will follow. Heather Houser is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ecosickness ...

Farid - Deep Fakes

TMI Talk: Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes

Zoom

Although varied in their form and creation, deep fakes refer to AI-synthesized image, audio, or video. Deep fakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. In this talk, Farid will provide an overview of how deep fakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how ...

M.G. Lord - Is Barbie Feminist?

Imagining California Talk: Is Barbie Feminist? It’s Complicated

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In 1994, when M.G. Lord interviewed the California-based creators of the Barbie doll, she had no doubt Barbie would be as provocative in 2023 as she was in 1959. But Lord did not anticipate that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, would evolve into a touchstone for understanding feminism—as well as the star of a blockbuster attack on patriarchy. This talk will explore the Greta Gerwig effect and the 64 years of changes in ...

Rosanna Xia Imagining CaliforniaEvent

Imagining California Event: California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us as Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, discuss sea level rise and the challenges looming over the California coast. Xia will draw from her new book, California Against the Sea, in which deeply reported stories braid together science, policy, and the state’s social history. The conversation will explore how the decisions we make today will determine where we go ...

Imagining California Talk: Aesthetic Mobility and Solidarities at Self Help Graphics & Art

Zoom

Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial ...