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IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 5, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Crossings + Boundaries, our 2017-2018 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Explore our new lending library. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

RECEPTION: IHC Platform Gallery Exhibition Opening Reception

6th floor of HSSB

Originating from the French word plateforme, meaning ‘ground plan’ or ‘flat shape’, the Platform Gallery is a public exhibition space at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB, that features the work of emerging artists displayed as two-dimensional printed media. The complete Platform exhibition archive is available online. The 2017–18 Platform exhibition engages with the IHC’s public events series theme, Crossings + Boundaries, which considers diverse experiences and phenomena of boundary crossing—institutional, political, cultural, artistic, gendered, psychological, ...

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

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

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars, followed by a reception.   Beth DePalma Digeser (History, UCSB) studies the intersection of religion and philosophy with Roman politics, as well as the procession of “conversion” in Late Antiquity. Her latest book, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Cornell 2012), explores the interactions of Platonist ...

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.

CONFERENCE: The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Western Humanities Alliance

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

What is the significance and power of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the latest form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored in the 2017 convening of the Western Humanities Alliance.

Crossings+Boundaries TALK: Opening the Gates of Heaven: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

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

Religion and philosophy have always been present in human space exploration, in the form of religious rituals practiced during space missions, placement of sacred objects in space, and astronauts’ descriptions of transcendental changes in perspective when looking back on Earth. Space exploration also poses ethical, religious, and philosophical challenges. How, for example, do we protect other celestial bodies from contamination by human space exploration? How do we protect the Earth from contamination by extraterrestrial samples ...

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 ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

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

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Murder and Mattering in Harambe’s House

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

Date change to Tuesday, March 6th at 4:00PM. This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.” Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science ...

Crossings + Boundaries Reading: Of Great Importance

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

The poems in Of Great Importance discuss taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state. The collection has been called “a painfully consistent and uncomfortably accurate analysis of power, economic and social structures and mechanisms which are at the root of the degenerate world in ...

Symposium: Humanities in Prison

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

Why study the humanities in prison? Why teach them?  What is the value of prison humanities programs for communities both inside and outside of prisons?  What humanistic texts and skills do we teach? This day-long symposium, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara, will explore the building of intellectual communities across systemic divides through the humanities. The symposium will include the voices of educators and formerly incarcerated individuals and ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Borderwall as Architecture

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

Ronald Rael’s talk will reexamine what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and ...

Crossings + Boundaries TALKS: Sinan Antoon and Sara Pursley

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

Talk: The Times of Revolution in Jawad Salim’s Monument to Freedom The Iraqi artist Jawad Salim’s famous Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, is usually read as a linear historical narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it produced. Pursley’s talk explores heterogeneous conceptions of time in the work, including depictions of cyclical forms of temporality that reference Khaldunian historical time, Shi`i messianic time, and the time of mourning. She ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 4, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Social Securities, our 2018-2019 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

Social Securities Inaugural Lecture: Social Insecurities: Media Policy and the Fight for Digital Liberties

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

In the US, media policy is designed to protect a host of cultural values, particularly those promoting the public interest and freedom of expression. This talk will explore how these values and their attendant “social securities” have been actively sabotaged by the regulators charged with preserving them, threatening everything from our individual privacy to democracy itself. In such a dire landscape, the humanities offer much needed direction toward reclaiming a brighter future. A reception will ...

Social Securities Talk: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

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

Since 1980, the population of female prisoners has increased eightfold in this country, with women of color disproportionately impacted. In her talk, Ms. Law will examine the structural inequities and injustices behind the rise in the number of incarcerated women and the recurring violation of rights women face inside prison, including lack of access to reproductive and medical health care and pervasive sexual harassment and abuse. Law will also discuss how incarcerated women are challenging ...

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: Embracing Shari’a: Women, Law, and Activism in Somalia

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

Gender equality is a key principle of human rights and political security. But how are gender equality and human security ensured in societies struggling with legacies of civil war and political violence? This lecture reveals how, in a country where many observers presume law and security are absent, women are turning to Islam’s foundational sources—the Qur’an and the Hadith—to promote women’s rights and human and political security.  A reception will follow. Mark Fathi Massoud is Associate ...

Social Securities Talk: Why Can’t Feminists Change the Law? The History and Politics of Welfare Reform in the Modern U.S.

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

In her talk, Kornbluh will reveal how welfare reform is shaped by “intersectional sexism,” the gendered and racialized dimensions of legal activity that are evident, persistent, yet ignored by mainstream policy makers and Washington, D.C.-based intellectuals. Taking as her example the failed passage of a feminist welfare reauthorization bill in the early 2000s, Kornbluh will discuss why the Democratic Party resisted embracing this initiative and explore the crucial role feminist scholars and activists have to play ...

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 ...

Social Securities Talk: Teaching the People: Enlightenment and the American Republic

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

In this talk, David Marshall will illuminate contemporary debates about the value of the liberal arts and sciences and public investment in higher education by examining Enlightenment arguments for both liberal education and public education in the early American Republic, and the 19th-century Land Grant movement, which resulted in the establishment of the University of California as a “public trust” in the California State Constitution. These two Enlightenment moments resonate today as we try to ...

Social Securities Talk: Environmental Justice as Freedom

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

This talk argues that environmental justice movements are freedom struggles. Beginning with the starting point that unjust environments are rooted in racism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism, land theft from Native peoples, and gender violence, the talk frames environmental justice as particularly significant in the moment of danger that we are currently facing. It is drawn from a forthcoming book that examines activism at Standing Rock, in Flint and the Central Valley, and in the wake of ...

2019 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Immigration: A Boon or Burden to U.S. Society?

Campbell Hall Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Thursday, May 2, 2019 / 7:30 PM Participants: Rubén G. Rumbaut Mark Krikorian Moderator: Donald M. Kerwin, Jr. UCSB Campbell Hall FREE Experts on immigration, national security and refugee movements will engage in a debate about the U.S. immigration system, the values and interests it serves and the impact of immigration on the nation. Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is the co-author of Open Immigration: Yea & Nay and the ...

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

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

Read the student veterans' stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. Eight student veterans will read stories about their military experiences.  Following the reading there will be time for questions from the audience. Gio Caballaro | Bradley Fry | Adrian Mejia | Andy Molina-Ochoa | Scott Rothdeutsch | Edward Rutherford | Kyle Shipe | Melissa Weidner Lunch will be provided. Sponsored by the IHC’s Social Securities series and the UC Santa Barbara Veterans Writing Workshop.

Symposium and Staged Readings: The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea

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

Cherríe Moraga’s play, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995), depicts a dystopic future in a fractured América, aggravated by an entrenched patriarchy. It also explores the tenets of the movement that founded what are now thriving Chicana/Latina programs throughout the Southwest, including the UCSB Chicano Studies program, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2019. This symposium will present a timely (re)consideration of a movement in progress, alongside two staged readings of the play. Friday, ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 3, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Critical Mass, our 2019-2020 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

Critical Mass Inaugural Lecture: Plastic’s Tipping Point

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

Plastic production, use, and pollution have been growing steadily for decades, without much public comment or concern. But suddenly, and very recently, there has been strong and widespread backlash against the pervasiveness of plastic. What prompted this sudden change in public opinion?  Did plastic pollution itself reach a tipping point?  Or did public attitudes toward this pollutant undergo a radical shift? Roland Geyer will discuss the history of global plastic production and disposal and will ...

Public Forum: Building a Green New Deal: Community, Coalition, and Organizing for Environmental Justice

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

In communities, classrooms, and protest sites across the country, people have embraced the call for a Green New Deal as a way of recognizing that climate change presents us with an unprecedented historic challenge—and the need for comprehensive and transformational reform. California’s Central Coast has a powerful tradition of grassroots activism to draw on in rising to the challenge, from the wide-ranging environmental movement sparked by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill to the multi-racial ...

Screening and Panel Discussion: Surviving Home

Multicultural Center Theater 494 UCen Road, Isla Vista, CA, United States

SURVIVING HOME is an intimate documentary that follows four U.S. military veterans from different generations over an eight year period as they rebuild their lives after war. Interwoven with veterans' voices from across the country, their unique paths of healing and transformation shed light on longterm consequences of war and raise questions about the roots of war and societal cycles of violence. A severely injured Iraq War veteran discovers a new voice that helps heal ...

Critical Mass Talk: Ady Barkan: Love and Death, Hope and Resistance

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

Sitting in that hotel armchair, I realized that my deadly disease was giving me newfound power at the very moment it was depriving me of so much strength. My voice was growing softer, but I was being heard by more people than ever before. My legs were disintegrating, but more and more people were following in my footsteps. Precisely because my days were numbered, people drew inspiration from my decision to spend them in resistance. ...

Critical Mass Talk: Nations in Crisis, People in Crisis: Connecting Upheaval

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

IHC Director Susan Derwin asked Jared Diamond, UCLA Professor of Geography, a few questions about his work in light of the current pandemic. Read his comments here. Nations that successfully navigate crises do so by making selective changes to their identities and actions. When individuals experience crises—mid-life, financial, health, relationship—they may also adopt selective changes to overcome the situation. But some individuals, like some nations, are better at navigating upheaval than others. By drawing on the factors ...

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 ...

Inaugural Lecture: Living Democracy in Capitalism’s Shadow: Creative Labor, Black Abolitionists, and the Struggle to End Slavery

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In the two decades before the Civil War, a new type of capitalism developed in the northern United States that stressed mass education, widespread innovation, and new markets for art and design. For Black abolitionists, the changing northern economy presented new opportunities to highlight the evils of slavery. While continuing to attack slavery’s physical cruelty, Black abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s increasingly highlighted ...

The 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence: Jesmyn Ward

Zoom

Join us online for a conversation between Jesmyn Ward, 2020 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence, and IHC Director Susan Derwin. Audience Q&A will follow. MacArthur Genius and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward has been called “the new Toni Morrison” (American Booksellers Association). In 2017, she became the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award twice—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and ...

Living Democracy Talk: Struggling to Save America’s Cities in the Suburban Age: Urban Renewal Revisited

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Urban Renewal of the 1950s through 1970s has acquired a very poor reputation, much of it deserved. But reducing it to an unchanging story of urban destruction misses some important legacies and genuinely progressive goals. Those include efforts to create more socially mixed communities, to involve suburbs—not just cities—in solving metropolitan inequality, and most importantly, to hold the federal government responsible for funding more ...

Living Democracy Talk: From the Embers of Crisis: Creating Equitable and Deliberative Democracy

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link At a moment when American Democracy was characterized by record levels of political division, inequality, and institutional distrust, it was hit by the perfect storm of the COVID-19 health crisis, an economic crisis of soaring unemployment and economic dislocation, and a civic crisis of reckoning with deep racism and police abuse. What would it take to create from the embers of these crises a ...

Critical Mass Talks and Staged Reading: On Collecting and Hoarding

Zoom

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS: 4:00 - 5:15 PM Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff 7:00 - 8:00 PM Staged Reading: Collections of Nothing Enough is Enough EVENT DETAILS: Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff The Creative Edge of Collecting William Davies King has spent a lifetime collecting nothing in a way he brought to light in his 2008 book Collections of Nothing. His collecting of such things as Cheez-It boxes, “Place Stamp Here” squares, ...

Living Democracy Talk: Making Abolition Geographies: Stories from California

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link This talk explores how visions of abolition guide and connect organizing across a range of social justice struggles. Gilmore will highlight examples relating to environmental justice, public sector labor unions, farm workers, undocumented households, criminalized youth, and community based approaches to prevent and resolve gender and interpersonal violence. The vivid California stories she will present reveal how abolition is a practical program for urgent ...

Living Democracy Talk: Land Grab U: Land-Grant Universities and Indigenous Peoples

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation. The creation story told around this event is that land-grant universities were given the gift of free land. But the truth is much more complicated: The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher ...

Living Democracy Talk: Strongmen: From Mussolini to Trump

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link What do strongman leaders across a century have in common? Why do people continue to follow them, despite the destruction they cause? Drawing on her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the playbook of corruption, virility, propaganda, and violence they utilize, how people have resisted authoritarians over a century, and what we can do to strengthen democracy in America and ...

Living Democracy Talk: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, 19 million U.S. adults estimated ...

CANCELLED | Living Democracy Talk: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass

Zoom

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED Artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, and writer and curator, Mark Nash, will screen excerpts from Julien's film "Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass" in a presentation that will explore the importance of looking to history and biography to articulate contemporary cultural movements. Isaac Julien's moving image practice draws from and comments on a range of artistic disciplines including film, theatre, photography and performance. Julien is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts ...

Living Democracy Talk: What We Can Do For Each Other

Zoom

One of the greatest threats against democracy and justice is indolence--defined as a form of militant indifference based on the lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Cristina Rivera Garza will explore how taking part in and contributing to transnational emotional communities in Mexico and the U.S., many based on shared experiences of social suffering and the grieving that comes with it, may help us leap out of ourselves and into the heart of the bond we share ...

2021 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Taming Titans: How Should We Regulate Big Tech?

Zoom

Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Participants: Sonia Katyal, The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Kate Klonick, St. John's University, School of Law Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago, The Law School Moderator: Michael J. Burstein, Yeshiva University, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Experts on law and technology will debate how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be regulated. Are they 21st-century trusts? Guardians of free ...

Reading: UC Santa Barbara Student Veteran Writers

Zoom

Read the student veterans’ stories in The Santa Barbara Independent. UC Santa Barbara student veterans will read stories about their military experiences, followed by audience Q&A. Presenters: David Guerrero, Robert Hickman, Michael Ramirez, and Nick Tash David Guerrero served in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry rifleman from 2003 to 2007. He earned his AS in Criminology and Liberal Arts from Santa Barbara City College. David transferred to UCSB in the Fall of ...

Inaugural Lecture: Environmental Justice as Regeneration

Zoom

The grassroots environmental justice movement and the field of environmental justice studies have evolved in creative and inspiring directions over the years. Recent work focuses on the challenges of envisioning and realizing abolition, confronting anthropogenic climate change/disruption, and articulating transformative approaches to achieving ecologically healthy and socially equitable policy-making for a “just transition.” This presentation considers what each of these areas of scholarship and politics could signal for the future of environmental justice and for ...

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

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 ...

Regeneration Talk: Maintaining Life, Repairing the World: Ethics, Philosophy, and Literature

Zoom

The COVID pandemic appeared as a threat to human life, both in the vital sense (a risk to biological life) and in the social sense (a risk to social life: disruption from the suspension of activities, lack of public transport, closure of schools, etc.). It has revealed radical vulnerabilities: of institutions, the species, and the planet; of fragile populations, workers “on the front line,” and each individual. The importance of caring for others and for ...

Regeneration Talk: Infrastructures of Collective Life: A Formalist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis

Zoom

  Free to attend; registration required to receive Zoom webinar attendance link Join us online for a talk by Caroline Levine. Audience Q&A will follow. What do scholars of literature and the arts have to offer in response to the climate crisis? The aesthetic humanities have long traditions of insisting on open-endedness, negation, and inaction. Levine argues that in this moment of rapid and destabilizing change, this tradition has reached its political limit. She makes ...

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 ...

Regeneration Talk: The Only True Reader Is a Re-reader

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

"I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me." What Vivian Gornick did not say when she wrote these sentences was how often the book in her hands was one she had read a number of times before. It became her habit as life went on to re-read the books that had repeatedly seemed important ...

Regeneration Talk: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress’s Court Gown

Zoom

Objects talk to us over time and space, transmitting in their colors, shapes, textures, and materials insight into other lives and ways of living. Some we wish to preserve for their sheer beauty, others for the people, times, or places they represent. Of the items that are central to our daily lives, textiles are among the most perishable: if not used until they are rags, they still degrade naturally over time, prey to insects, mold, ...

Regeneration Talk: Afghanistan: The Forever War Ends

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

After twenty years, the end of the American war in Afghanistan was ugly and chaotic, with terrible scenes of friends and allies being left behind and of the Taliban sweeping away everything America built. Did it have to be this way? Dexter Filkins, who began covering the country before the 9/11 attacks, will discuss how the Afghan state, built at such great expense, crumbled so fast, why America’s withdrawal turned out so badly, and how–whether ...

Regeneration Talk: The Tulsa Race Massacre: Causes, Cover Up, and the Fight for the Past

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

The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, unpacks the story of the massacre and the challenges it ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, September 29, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Too Much Information, our 2022-23 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

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

For a long time, information was scarce. Messages and letters were transmitted at the speed of human or equine legs. The materials upon which information was inscribed were either too heavy or too perishable to circulate. But by the end of the eighteenth century, as machines took over, not only the means of transmitting information but what counted as information had changed. Knowledge and experience now yielded to the objectivity of information, grounded, for example, ...

TMI Talk: Make a Poem Cry: Creative Writing from California’s Lancaster Prison

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

Make a Poem Cry is an anthology from one of California’s high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays, stories, and more mined from the depths of familial, racial, and economic violence. They are imaginings for how to address trouble and crime without punishment, dehumanization, and violence in return. ...

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 ...

TMI Talk: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Zoom

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy. ...

TMI Talk: GPS for the Brain: Networks, Urbanisms, Algorithms

Zoom

Laura Kurgan will talk about her recent work involving network science and urban theory. She will present work from the Center for Spatial Research on the Urban History of Algorithms: Homophily and Weak Ties, a history which not surprisingly lies dormant in its use in network science. She will also present new work on navigation theory in neuroscience, which revisits and asks questions about the canonical urban theory of Kevin Lynch (1970) and Fred Jameson's ...

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 ...

IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 5, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Imagining California, our 2023-24 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

Imagining California Inaugural Talk: Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

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

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga will present journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors. Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the ...

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 ...

TMI Talk: How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

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

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users' posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early- and mid-20th-century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese-American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis. A reception will follow. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Institute, which was launched ...

Imagining California Talk: The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

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

In this talk, journalist Mark Arax will discuss how California's capture of land and water is the story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders and devastation it has wrought. It's a tale of magic and madness in the arid West, of genocide and endless extraction, of redirected rivers and ever higher dams and deeper wells, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth made to give more even ...

Imagining California Talk: Writing Our Californias

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

For decades, America has imagined California novels as placed in locations like Hollywood or San Francisco. But, as Susan Straight will discuss in her presentation, other geographies are as beautiful, tragic, and full of narratives set in remote canyons, inland citrus groves, ancient ranchos, and hidden deserts. Straight's characters, who might be seventh generation Californian or people just arrived, live in the places she's known forever, hidden kingdoms of love and redemption amid the sycamore ...

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 ...

2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Is Housing a Human Right?

Campbell Hall Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The dramatic housing shortage in California affects millions of residents and leads thousands to homelessness. The 2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate will address this issue by asking, “Is Housing a Human Right?” If so, our state faces a massive undertaking. Experts with diverse specialties and experiences will wrestle with some of our biggest challenges. How, for example, can we build low and moderate income housing when construction costs are high and community opposition is ...

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 ...

Imagining California Discussion: Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future

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

What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an ...