Alondra Nelson (Colombia, Sociology)

Monday March 12, 2012

College 8, 301

Time: 12:30-2:00PM

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care.

The Black Panther Party’s health activism– its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination–was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.

Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was practical and ideological and that their understanding of health as a basic human right anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race.

This event is co-sponsored with Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012
4-6:00 PM in Engineering 2, 599

Narratives of scientific progress are often paired with narratives about political progress, suggesting that the expansion of scientific knowledge always—or at least generally—leads to the betterment of humankind as a whole. But many socially disadvantaged and oppressed peoples contend that such “progress” is distributed unevenly and often comes at some cost to them. Alondra Nelson will share some of her research on Black politics and genetic genealogy to open a discussion on whether science can have progressive ends, if there can truly be a “science for the people,” and how science and justice can have paired or oppositional goals.

Herman Gray (Sociology) will be a respondent.

Hannah Landecker (UCLA Center for Genetics and Society)

Thursday January 26, 2012, 3:00-5:00 PM

Engineering 2, Room 399

Epigenetics has turned food and its metabolism into a problem that is not just about how the body turns food its basic components–carbohydrates, fat, protein-but how food acts as a signal of the environment–both biological and political. Hannah Landecker will explore what this transformation of metabolism and epigenetics reveals about food, environmental politics, and the increased salience of metabolism as a sight for biological understanding and political and moral contestation.

Bia Labate

Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 4-6pm

Engineering 2, 599

Beatriz Labate has studied the scientific and social features of psychoactive substances for over 15 years. In this meeting we will discuss the situation surrounding the compound ayahuasca, a psychedelic used in both medical and spiritual contexts throughout the Americas. By exploring the frontiers and limits between “therapeutic” and “religious” uses of ayahuasca (and their complicated legal implications) we will better understand the relationship between diverse forms of knowledge production associated with what have been called “sacred technologies.”

Priscilla Wald (Duke, English and the Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy)

Monday, February 6, 2012

Engineering 2, 599

4:00-6:00 PM

This event is co-sponsored with Cultural Studies, Center for Biomolecular Sciences and Engineering—Research Mentoring Institute, and the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Department.

Another World is Plantable! Part 4

Documentary on Community Gardening and Food Justice in North America 2010

Thursday 10/27, 4:30-6:30 PM, Studio C (Room 150 in Communications Building)

Director: Ella von der Haide

In a series of four documentaries, Ella von der Haide features urban community gardens and their connections to emancipatory social movements in South Africa, Argentina, Germany and North America.

Urban community gardening is a phenomenon that is spreading throughout the world. At the core of the films are gardening activists who explain how and why their gardens are a “green oasis” within the city, as well as projects of resistance that bring “another world” into being. The films also show the critical and ambivalent ways in which the gardening movements can be instrumented by neoliberal regimes.

North America has a vibrant community garden scene that is currently developing into a broad social movement for food justice. Through the local production of ecological food for subsistence and for sale at farmers’ markets, community gardeners not only construct an alternative to the agro-industrial business and “food deserts”, they simultaneously create a new local self-reliance and new discourses on justice.

The community gardens portrayed in this film, in New York, Detroit, San Francisco and Vancouver, are all engaged in different social change processes, from anti-racist resistance and post-colonial healing to indigenous self-determination and queer-feminist environmental politics.

The director will be present for Q&A.

More information on the film and research: www.communitygarden.de

Information on the director:

Ella von der Haide is a Dipl.-Ing. of Urban and Regional Planning, Garden Activist and feminist Filmmaker from Germany.

Contact: post@ella-von-der-haide.de

Sponsored by: SJWG, Film & Digital Media, and Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

Andro Hsu with discussion by Ted Goldstein and Whitney Boesel

November 9, 2011

Engineering 2, Room 599

4:15-6:15 PM

Andro Hsu (VP of Products at GigaGen and former science writer and policy advisor at 23andMe) will join us for a discussion of what we are learning—both about policy/society and biology—as increasing resources are put into turning the ever growing amounts of genomic information into something of value. Ted Goldstein, PhD candidate at the UCSC Center for Biomolecular Sciences and Engineering, will provide a response to Hsu presentation.

Modelling pigs and humans: Exploring the practices of models across sciences

Wednesday October 19, 2011

Engineering 2, Room 499

PhD Fellow Vibeke Pihl, Medical Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Vibeke Pihl’s research addresses how connections between humans and animals are shaped in contemporary biomedical research on human health. During an ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, Vibeke has followed a group of Danish biomedical researchers working to establish a pig model for human obesity surgery. In biomedicine, the pig is increasingly established as a preferred model organism in biomedical research on human obesity due to an argued biological resemblance between pigs and human anatomy and physiology. The topic of the SJWG event concerns an analysis of how the use of pigs as models for humans does not rest solely on biological connections, but requires social, moral, economical and cultural connections to support the choice of the pig as the appropriate model for obese human bodies. In addition, the presentation will address how models are practised in biomedical science and social science. Drawing upon fieldwork, the presentation will focus on how the analysis of the biomedical researchers’ establishment of a pig model prompt a simultaneous crafting of a social scientific model of human-animal relations. Vibeke asks which connections between humans and pigs are included and excluded in the research practices of biomedical scientists’ and the practices of social scientists like her own. With this presentation, Vibeke wants to provide an opening for a stronger mutual engagement between researchers across sciences working with animals as models of humans.

Comparative Tinkering: A Roundtable

Tuesday, October 25th, 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.

UCSC Campus, Social Sciences 1, Room 261 (Anthropology’s Colloquium Series room)

Speakers: Karen Barad (UCSC, Feminist Studies), Alan Christy (UCSC, History), Lawrence Cohen (UC-Berkeley, Anthropology), Andrew Matthews (UCSC, Anthropology), Danilyn Rutherford (UCSC, Anthropology), Warren Sack (UCSC, Film & Digital Media), Anna Tsing (UCSC, Anthropology)

Facilitators: Peter Lutz (IT University of Copenhagen, Technologies in Practice) and Heather Swanson (UCSC, Anthropology)

Abstract:

Comparisons are utterly pervasive in anthropology and its neighboring disciplines, including science studies and the sciences more broadly. We compare incessantly, yet we rarely theorize explicitly about our comparative practices. For instance, how do we determine the whats and the whos of our comparisons? At this roundtable we hope to unfold these practices by exploring the risks and virtues of comparison, especially those emerging in empirical travels like ethnographic fieldwork. What are the analytical detours of our comparative ventures? What work is required to render objects stable and comparable? What are the natures of the comparable beings we evoke and harness? Stability is arguably one of the most once deeply problematic yet virtually inescapable aspects of scientific comparison. Yet how might we make do with comparisons – themselves knots of relations – to reveal their underlying messy travel from desk to field and back again? Here we are particularly eager to explore the possibilities of tinkering with comparisons so that they might destabilize and move.

Sponsored by: SJWG and the Anthropology Department

Wednesday, October 5, at our normal time and place (Eng 2 599. 4:15-6:15).

John Kadvany will join us to discuss the concept of risk. Oxford University Press recently published John’s book on risk, entitled Risk: A Very Short Introduction. Given that so many of us in the group are interested in thinking well about risk–whether in the context of genomics or the climate or engineering design–we are particularly pleased to have John kick the year off.

Click here for an introduction to some of John’s ideas about risk.

Kadvany often works on project teams organized by an engineering company in charge of a large public works project. His role is to design and help implement a decision process in which engineers, external stakeholders, lawyers and regulators work their collective way through multiple competing options in an efficient, democratic and cooperative manner. He will design an analytical framework that’s useful all around including the measurement techniques which can be used to accommodate relevant models, data, and professional or lay judgment of various qualities. Often these processes lead to a group “opinion survey”, a combined technical-policy document which summarizes stakeholder perspectives. His methods combine the analytical techniques of multiple values decision analysis with the approaches developed in the last two decades through the public participation movement.