2013-2014 Archive
The 2013-2014 colloquia committee focused on the following three types of events: those in which we share our own research; those in which we invite outside speakers whose work is related to the research interests of the department; and brown-bag professionalization workshops for graduate students.
Fall Quarter
October 7
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Sr. Consultant (Strategic Business Insights), Visitor (Peace Innovation Lab, Stanford), Associate Fellow (Saïd Business School, Oxford)
12:30-2PM College 8, Room 301
IRL = IN RICHER LIFE: RETHINKING BEING ONLINE, OFFLINE, AND ALIVE
One of the most familiar acronyms in the English language is also one of the newest: IRL. "In real life" began its life in the 1990s as a piece of digital jargon, a way to explain why you were slow to answer your email ("sorry, I was dealing with something IRL"). Some argue that the idea of IRL is illusory, and that phenomena like digital sabbaths are a way for elites to broadcast both their busyness and their spiritual superiority. In this talk, I examine how terms like "real life" and "digital life" shape our ideas about technologies, and our sense of what it means to be human. I'll then make the case that we should think less about seeking a "real life" separate from devices, and instead seek a richer life, and describe how the people I interviewed for my recent book THE DISTRACTION ADDICTION pursue it.
"HAPPY EVER AFTER IN THE MARKETPLACE": AN INTRODUCTION TO TRADE PUBLISHING
3-4PM Science & Engineering Library, Ching-Yi Dougherty Reading Room
Graduate students learn a lot about writing for fellow scholars; the world of trade publishing and serious nonfiction is more mysterious. It was for me: after years as an academic and consultant, I learned a huge amount about trade publishing while writing my latest book, THE DISTRACTION ADDICTION. In this presentation I'll talk about the work of trade publishing: the nature of relationships with literary agents, editors and publicists; the art of negotiating advances and contracts; and the craft of writing for general audiences. I'll explain how the expectations and rewards of trade publishing differs from academic publishing. Finally, I'll make the case that writing serious nonfiction offers intellectual and literary challenges every bit as rewarding as those found in academic research and writing.
Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang studies people, technology, and the worlds they make. He is a senior consultant working at the boundary of forecasting, social media, and psychology at Strategic Business Insights. Pang received his PhD in history and sociology of science at University of Pennsylvania. He is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and has held fellowships at Williams College, University of California, Berkeley, and Microsoft Research Cambridge. He spent the last couple of years working on contemplative computing, the effort to use information technologies in ways that help you focus and be more creative, not fractured and distracted. His book about contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul was just published.
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October 14
David Schlosberg, University of Sydney
The New Environmentalism of Everyday Life: Sustainability, Material Flows, and Movements
12:30-2PM College 8, Room 301
David Schlosberg offers an analysis of recent developments in environmental activism, in particular among movements orienting around the reconfiguration of material flows. The desire for sustainability has spawned an interest in changing the very material relationship between humans, other beings, and the nonhuman realm. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with purely individualistic and consumer responses, a growing focus of environmental movement groups is on restructuring everyday practices of circulation – for example, on sustainable food, renewable energy, water, and crafting and making. The shift to a more sustainable materialism is examined using three frameworks: a) Foucault’s conceptions of governmentality and biopolitics, which articulate modes of power around the circulation of things, information, and individuals; b) a move beyond an individualist and value-focused notion of postmaterialism, into a focus on collective practices and institutions surrounding the provision of the basic needs of everyday life; and c) a new ethos around vibrant and sustainable materialism, with a more explicit acknowledgement of human immersion in nonhuman natural systems. This frame allows us to see and interpret common themes across numerous, seemingly disparate, initiatives that are largely missed in the current literature. These movements, focused on replacing unsustainable practices and forging alternative flows, may pose significant challenges to forms of contemporary power.
David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Leader of the Sydney Network on Climate Change and Society, and co-Director of the newly founded Sydney Environment Institute. His work focuses primarily on environmental political thought, environmental and climate justice, and the theory and practice of environmental movements. Professor Schlosberg has held visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, Australian National University, and Princeton University. He is the author of Defining Environmental Justice (Oxford 2007), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford 2011), and co-author of the forthcoming Climate-Challenged Society (Oxford 2013).
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October 21
Rocio Rosales, University of California San Diego
Stagnant Immigrant Social Networks and Cycles of Exploitation
12:30-2PM College 8, Room 301
Based on over four years of ethnographic research among street vendors in Los Angeles and on interviews with family members of vendors and former vendors living in Mexico, Rocio Rosales examines the influence of a sending community and its social networks on migrant outcomes in the US. These social networks affect migration patterns, ease entry into the fruit vending business but also facilitate exploitation. Furthermore, these social networks do not always function as effective conduits of information because its members, due to feelings of shame or embarrassment, often fail to add to the existing body of knowledge. As a result, international migration patterns, job placement, and exploitative practices do not change or improve for subsequent migrants. This creates a cycle in which social networks become stagnant and successively fail to function as effective conduits of information and resources in ways that might help network members equally and in the aggregate.
Rocio Rosales is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at UCLA in 2012 and received her A.B. in Sociology (cum laude) with a certificate in Latin American Studies from Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Hidden Economies in Public Spaces: The Fruit Vendors of Los Angeles,” examines the social and economic lives of a group of undocumented Latino street vendors. Her research interests include international migration, informal work, immigrant and ethnic economies, Latinos/as in the US, qualitative methods and urban ethnography. Her work has been funded by the American Philosophical Society (2011), John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation (2010), Ford Foundation (2005-2008), and the SSRC Mellon Mays Foundation (2003-2012). Her research appears in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and in Ethnic and Racial Studies (forthcoming).
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October 25
Setsuo Miyazawa, UC Hastings Law
Japan’s Legal Reform and Its Socio-Political Significance and Legal Ramification in Today’s East Asia
2:00-4:00PM College 8, Room 301
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many countries in East and Central Asia have gone through dramatic legal transformations. UC Hastings Law Professor Setsuo Miyazawa will talk about Japan’s recent legal reform and its socio-political significance and legal ramification in East Asia. He has been highly active in the promotion of judicial reform in Japan and is the most prominent proponent of the introduction of the American-style graduate professional law school. Given the recent significant judicial reform in East Asia, he has founded the Collaborative Research Network in East Asian Law & Society, which now has its own journal, Asian Journal of Law & Society, published by Cambridge University Press. He has also been active in the Law & Society Association, twice serving on its Board of Trustees.
Setsuo Miyazawa’s research interests include police and criminal justice, legal ethics, public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate legal practice. He has published and edited more than a dozen books, including Policing in Japan (1992), which received the Distinguished Book Award of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. Professor Setsuo Miyazawa received LL.B., LL.M., and S.J.D. from Hokkaido University and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. He has been a full-time faculty member at Hokkaido University, Kobe University, Waseda University, Omiya Law School, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. He also taught as a visiting professor at the law schools of York University (Canada), the University of Washington, Harvard University (Mitsubishi Visiting Professor of Japanese Legal Studies), UC Berkeley (Sho Sato Visiting Professor), UCLA, New York University (Global Law Faculty), the University of Hawaii, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fordham University.
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October 28
Saru Jayaraman, ROC united
Greatchen Regenhardt, California Rural Legal Assistance
Behind the Kitchen Door in Santa Cruz & across America a book talk by Saru Jayaraman with Gretchen Regenhardt
6:30-9PM Oakes College, Oakes College Learning Center
More Americans are choosing to dine healthy and ethically at restaurants offering organic and fair-trade ingredients. Yet few diners are aware of the working conditions at the restaurants themselves. How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions—discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens—affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, the well-being of restaurant workers is a pressing concern, affecting our health and safety, as well as our local economies.
Ms. Jayaraman’s talk will be followed with a Q&A session along with Gretchen Regenhardt, attorney with the Watsonville-based group, California Rural Legal Assistance, which is launching a survey and research project on low-wage restaurant workers in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties.
Saru Jayaraman is a graduate of Yale Law School and Co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), a national organization with 10,000 members across 26 cities, which organizes restaurant workers to win workplace justice, does research, and partners with responsible employers. She has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, and PBS, among others.
California Rural Legal Assistance, founded in 1966 as a nonprofit legal services program, now has 21 offices, providing more than 40,000 low‐income rural Californians with free legal assistance and a variety of community education and outreach programs.
(Note: Location and time)
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October 29
Patrick Heller, Brown University
Urban Regimes and Development: Comparing cities in India, Brazil and South Africa
12:00-1:30PM College 8, Room 301
Heller explores questions of development, state capacity and democracy through the prism of urban transformation. Specifically, he draws on the urban regimes literature to argue that despite similar legacies of exclusion and shared pressures of marketization the modal mega city in India, South Africa and Brazil has taken a distinct form. The Indian city is a characterized as a growth cabal, in which economic and political elites have exploited institutional failures to extract enormous rents from the city. This has come both at the expense of inclusion and of the sustainability of growth. Despite tremendous political pressures and significant local capacity for more inclusionary policies, Heller shows that the South African city has become a classic growth machine, supported and sustained by a stable political coalition and relatively effective forms of governance. But in the absence of links to civil society, efforts to promote inclusion have failed and the state now faces a crisis of legitimacy. The Brazilian city has been exposed to same global market pressures on land. But it has also developed new capacities to promote inclusion, earning it the label of the social city. Heller argues that the different urban regimes have emerged from two constellations. On the one hand, Central-local state relations have been critical in determining the capacity and substance of urban transformation. On the other hand, the dynamics of democratization, and specifically the relationship between the local state and civil society (shaped in no small part by extra-local institutional arrangements), largely explains the extent to which the local state can effectively reverse the dynamics of urban exclusion.
Patrick Heller is a professor of sociology and international studies at Brown University and the director of the Graduate Program in Development at the Watson Institute. His main area of research is the comparative study of social inequality and democratic deepening. He is the author of The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Cornell 1999) and co-author of Social Democracy and the Global Periphery (Cambridge 2006). He has published articles on urbanization, comparative democracy, social movements, development policy, civil society and state transformation. His most recent book - Bootstrapping Democracy (Stanford 2011) with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Marcelo Silva - explores politics and institutional reform in Brazilian municipalities. Heller has also done research on urban transformation in South Africa and built a data base on spatial transformation of the post-apartheid city. He is currently in India doing research on urban governance and transformation in India.
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November 4
Graduate Student Workshop: Tips and Tools for Applying to Present at Professional Meetings
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
An important aspect of graduate studentsʼ professionalization is presenting at professional meetings. These meetings are opportunities to: receive feedback on your work, learn about new and exciting research from others, and perhaps most importantly, establish networks with faculty, graduate students, and other professionals in your field. Our workshop panelists will share their experiences applying and presenting at professional meetings. Additionally, we will cover the steps and strategies to preparing your application/s for these upcoming annual association meetings: the Society of the Study of Social Problems (August 15-17, 2014) and the American Sociological Association (August 16-19, 2014), both of which will be held in San Francisco, CA. Letʼs aim to have a strong presence at the SSSPʼs and ASAʼs annual meetings next year!
Panelists: Kati Barahona-Lopez, Yvonne Kwan, and Tracy Perkins
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November 18
James Battle, University of California Santa Cruz
Bioethical Conscription: Ascriptive Inequality, Categorical Inclusion and the Moral Economy of Participation
12:30-2PM College 8, Room 301
Battle examines the ethopolitics of African (American) inclusion in both genomic and pharmacogenomic research. Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork in Northern California, Texas, and North Carolina, he wishes to place in narrative tension the challenges of biopharma efforts to recruit African (American) researchers, with African (American) public sector researchers who see genomic research involvement and knowledge production as a question of social justice. Battle builds on Montoya’s (2007) “bioethnic conscription” to highlight the ways ethnoracial classification as a form of description and attribution reconfigure both the category and the group, and the moral economy of participation such inclusion seeks to mobilize. He suggests that attribution delimits social inequalities embedded within biological samples and data sets used in research. Battle uses the social scientific term ascription rather than attribution to engage the wider hierarchal social system of inequality informing research gleanings of both the biological sample and the data set. His argument rests on the assertion that ascribed social inequality qualitatively inheres to biological samples and data sets, and precedes any quantitative analysis. In making this argument, he seeks to explicate history in locating biovalue as a form of ascribed status marking both heritage and heritability.
James Battle is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A UC Chancellor’s and Ford Dissertation Fellow, he received his PhD from the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology Program. His current project, “Race, Genomics, and Health Disparities: Classificatory Politics and Bioethical Conscription,” examines race and risk as representing not the margins, but rather the center, of biomedical research inclusion and technological development. The preponderance of genomic data originates from populations of European descent although the widest genetic diversity exists in sub-Saharan African descent populations. Genomics researchers term this sub-Saharan diversity, “Africanicity.” His work raises questions about how Africanicity as both genetic metonym for the world and current research impulse rests upon legacies of earlier undemocratic colonial and postcolonial moments, and the bioethical implications of the genomic research promise for a future democratic personalized medicine.
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November 25
Graduate Student Workshop: Preparing for the Job Market
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Preparing for the job market starts soon after you join your graduate program. What is the market like today? How has it changed? What strategies should you consider when “going on the market”? What strategies should you consider as you prepare for the job market? How do you present yourself and link yourself to different fields? Current Sociology graduate students Kevin Cody, Jenifer Gray-O’Connor, and Anthony Villareal will be sharing their experiences as we explore these questions.
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December 4
Graduate Student Workshop: Using Prezi and PowerPoint for Presentations
5:00-6:30 College 8, Room 301
Are you curious about Prezi? Are you wondering how to make your PowerPoint presentations more interesting and effective for your sections? Are you planning to present at a conference or a meeting in the near future? Our colleagues Kevin Cody, Christie McCullen, and Tracy Perkins will share their insights on how to use Prezi and PowerPoint to your advantage! Bring your laptops for an interactive and hands-on experience.
Winter Quarter
January 13
Graduate Student Workshop: SSSP Submission Review
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
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January 27
Graduate Student Workshop: From Revision to Publication
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Join facilitator, Jimiliz Valiente-Neighbours, as three graduate students share their experiences in turning papers into peer-reviewed publications. Yvonne Kwan, Christie McCullen and Tracy Perkins will talk about choosing journals, the submission process, the turnaround time, the paper revision process, working with faculty and peers along the way, and how to respond to reviewer comments. It doesn't matter where you are along your graduate path. This workshop will provide valuable insights for first-years and dissertation-defenders alike. It's time to get ready for publication!
Panelists: Yvonne Kwan, Christie McCullen, Tracy Perkins
Fascilitator: Jimiliz Valiente-Neighbours
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January 29
GIIP/Everett Endowed Chair Colloquium: Ramesh Srinivasan, University of California, Los Angeles
Democratizing Technology? The Power of Local Community in an era of Global Media
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
As technologies migrate to distant corners of the globe, so too do the utopic imaginaries with which they are proselytized. What this constructs is a dynamic all too common in the history of science and technology, where a limited set of practices, values, and ways of knowing end up dominating the discourses by which we understand technology. As a result, many contemporary pundits of media studies either see new media technologies as inherently revolutionary or simply dismiss them as the fetish of Silicon Valley.
My story takes us out of this unfortunate binary. I argue that what is far more interesting is the study of the ways in which local communities on the margins worldwide actively re-purpose, appropriate and subvert new technologies to empower agendas that may radically diverge from their originally intended notions of use. In collaboration with indigenous communities in the United States, rural villages in India, and activists in Egypt, I have explored and uncovered methods by which local creativity and design can empower grassroots economic, cultural and political visions. For us to think globally about new technologies, we must remember the power of the local.
Ramesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor at UCLA in Information Studies and Design-‐Media Arts, is a scholar of media and culture - studying the modes by which new media technologies shape and are shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics. He has worked with a variety of communities ranging from activist bloggers to rural Indian communities to indigenous peoples worldwide.
Dr. Srinivasan's studies of bloggers and activists has focused on participants in recent revolutions in Egypt and Kyrgyzstan. His work in India has involved collaborations with rural and urban disenfranchised populations in India to study how media literacy may shape collective action. And his work with Native American communities considers how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at technological design and deployment.
Dr. Srinivasan's media appearances include several TEDx talks, National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, The Young Turks and Public Radio International. He has also published pieces for Al Jazeera English, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.
His work bridges cultural studies from anthropological and sociological perspectives with key topics in design and computer sciences. He is currently working on a book that looks at power, voice and identity in an era where digital media technologies are increasingly ubiquitous. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/
Co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department
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February 3
Alison Alkon, University of the Pacific
Black, White and Green: Food Justice, Farmers Markets and the Green Economy
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Red Room
Farmers markets have become essential to the movement for food-system reform and are a shining example of a growing green economy. Black, White, and Green brings new energy to this topic by exploring dimensions of race and class as they relate to farmers markets and the green economy. With a focus on two Bay Area markets—one in the primarily white neighborhood of North Berkeley, and the other in largely black West Oakland—Alison Hope Alkon investigates the possibilities for social and environmental change embodied by farmers markets and the green economy. Alkon describes the meanings that farmers market managers, vendors, and consumers attribute to the buying and selling of local organic food, and the ways that those meanings are raced and classed. Black, White, and Green is one of the first books to carefully theorize the green economy, to examine the racial dynamics of food politics, and to approach issues of food access from an environmental-justice perspective.
Alison Hope Alkon is assistant professor and co-chair of sociology at the University of the Pacific where she teaches and does research on food, the environment and inequalities of race, class and gender. Alkon’s books include Black, White and Green: Race, Farmers Markets and the Green Economy and Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability (co-edited with Julian Agyeman). These works have helped to establish the growing field of food justice studies, which explores how inequalities affect food and agricultural systems and how communities and policy makers are responding to these inequalities.
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February 10
Larry Rosenthal, University of California, Berkeley
The Tea Party, the Shutdown, and Obamacare
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Obamacare has been the bête-noire of the Tea Party movement since its founding in February 2009. Beyond its bombastic rhetoric and tactics, the Tea Party’s view of Obamacare is part and parcel of a theory of the U.S. Constitution, one that emerges from the “state-rights” tradition in U.S. history. Tea Party constitutionalism is understood as “popular originalism.” This view rests on a fundamentalist reading of the Constitution and the conviction that the U.S. Supreme Court should not enjoy a monopoly on constitutional interpretation. Objection to Obamacare is based on a notion that both social benefits, like health insurance, and political rights themselves are zerosum commodities. This theory at once interprets the Tea Party’s fierce sense of dispossession, and forms a constitutional principle that justifies extreme measures such as government shutdowns.
Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal is a sociologist who is Executive Director and Lead Researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. He was a Visiting Scholar at UCB's Institute for the Study of Social Change for a dozen years before founding the Center in 2009. He has taught at UC Berkeley in the Sociology and Italian Studies Departments and was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Naples in Italy. He has studied the Right in the United States and in Italy and is currently working on a study of the contemporary American Right in comparison to movements of the Right in 20th century Europe. He is the co-editor (with Dr. Christine Trost) of Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party (University of California Press, 2012).
Co-sponsored by the Politics Department
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February 24
GIIP/Everett Endowed Chair Colloquium: Joyojeet Pal, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Between incrementalism and radical change: Reciprocal advancement in technology and development
12:30-1:45PM College 8, Room 301
A recent wave of design and critique on technological tools and global development has brought together academics and technologists from a range of disciplines, professionals from government and industry, and a large number of citizens and community groups. The community coalescing around this space, referred to Information and Communications Technology and Development (ICTD), interrogates questions on global development and the production of technology, long important in the social sciences and humanities. However the ICTD community also actively participates in the co-production and deployment of technology tools. A rich range of contemporary work from the design of web-based tools to critical studies of mobile technology and society that fall within the vast umbrella of ICTD offers a unique opportunity for engaged learning and practice.
And yet, multidisciplinary approaches are not without challenges. Between the contesting motivations to build and to deliberate, this recent wave of ICTD has not carefully examined the ways marginality is operationalized within the contexts of technology deployments. This in turn has led to a homogenizing of the users of technology and of desirable use, and a flattening of how impacts and ‘successes’ are measured. In this talk, I use examples from research on adaptive technology use among blind people in India and Peru, and engaged learning work in co-design of Human Rights and Disability policy portals to make two points about the ICTD movement. First, I argue that understanding how social and economic marginalizing works is critical in explaining if and how technology can immediately impact the lives of people who are intended as beneficiaries. While adaptive technology in itself increases the individual’s ability to participate in the workplace, its use must first contend with the marginalizing factor -- i.e. the social construction of disability in society and in the individual. Second, I use examples of international field projects to argue that ICTD opens up an array of possibilities for thoughtful student engagement with the communities where these technologies are embedded.
Joyojeet Pal is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current research examines the role of adaptive technology in the social and economic inclusion of blind and low-vision populations in low- and middle-income countries. Within the broader ICTD (Information and Communications Technology and Development) space, his work focuses on the role of technology in mediating the tension between marginality and aspiration.
He is the lead faculty member on the GRID project (http://ictd.si.umich.edu/). His current research sites on disability and technology are India, Peru, Costa Rica, Colombia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Jordan, and South Korea. In addition, he also heads the Digital Colombia project that examines the growth and appropriation of social media in Colombia, and manages the Global Information Engagement program, an initiative that matches groups that specify certain technical or information tool needs with students with requisite skills and consciousness of global practice.
Joyojeet received his PhD in City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. He has an interest in cinema, and in addition to academic work on the portrayal of technology and software engineers in Indian cinema, he has recently completed the filming of his first feature-length documentary on fan clubs of movie stars in south India. His website is available at http://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/
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February 26
GIIP/Everett Endowed Chair Colloquium: Chris Benner, University of California, Davis
Knowing Together, Growing Together: Equity, Growth, and Community in a Changing Economy
12:30-1:45PM College 8, Room 301
Efforts in the U.S. to address the dual crisis of growing inequality and long-term economic stagnation are hindered by a parallel crisis in political leadership. The political problems are most evident in heightened partisanship, but this partisanship is underpinned, at least in part, by a growing fragmentation in the very information and knowledge base that underpins public life. Meanwhile, a growing body of research, both domestic and international, is investigating ways that social inequality and the economy are linked, and in the process documenting that greater social equity may actually contribute to economic growth. There remains limited research, however, on the underlying processes that lead to this connection between social inclusion and economic vitality.
In this talk, Dr. Benner will discuss his collaborative research that helps address this gap through a study of the relationship between growth and social equity over the past 30 years in metropolitan regions in the U.S. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this research argues that different trajectories can be explained, at least in part, by the relative strength and diversity of regional information sharing networks where data is shared and common understandings developed across diverse constituencies. When such “diverse epistemic communities” fully form, people are united not by a shared set of values or interests, but rather by a sense of a shared future destiny within the region. This does not mean the end of tensions or social conflict. But it does mean that conflicts are attenuated by a recognition of a common future in the region, and so tension can become an important learning opportunity. While the conclusions at this point remain preliminary, if confirmed they have important implications not only for strategies of promoting growth with equity, but also for theoretical understandings of the micro-foundations of the economy.
Chris Benner is Professor of Community and Regional Development, and Chair of the Geography Graduate Group, at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structures of labor markets and economic opportunity. His work has direct implications for strategies for promoting regional and social equity, workforce development policy and the structure, dynamics and evaluation of workforce intermediaries. Dr. Benner’s recent book, co-authored with Manuel Pastor, is Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in America’s Metropolitan Regions, which helps uncover the subtle and detailed processes, policies and institutional arrangement that help explain how certain regions around the country have been able to consistently link prosperity and inclusion. He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000.
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February 28
GIIP/Everett Endowed Chair Colloquium: Revi Sterling, University of Colorado
Development(al) Challenges: women, agency and technology
12:30-1:45PM College 8, Room 301
There are evident contradictions in global development discourse. For decades, we’ve heard that the most effective way to “do” development is to empower women. On the technology side, however, most ICT initiatives do not look specifically at gendered access and use issues. Intel’s recent Women on the Web study, along with other research, confirms that ICT for Development is rife with digital inequities. Even when we try to design ICT specifically for women’s unique development needs, we run into larger cultural and policy currents that require more than an application to work through – such as the ban on women using mobiles in certain communities.
This talk is motivated by specific efforts in ICT for Development to lower rates of violence against women (VAW) worldwide. The New Delhi rape and aftershocks of Arab Spring have inspired new anti-rape and anti-harassment ICT. These technologies raise interesting questions about design, agency and ethics. These technologies also meet at the intersection of trauma, mental health and entrepreneurship. This discussion introduces these challenging issues as areas for future research and development.
Revi Sterling is the founding director of the first Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) professional master’s program in the United States, a program that places equal emphasis on technology, methodology, and development studies. Sterling also consults extensively for the United Nations, development agencies and high technology companies interested in utilizing technology for societal benefit. Previously, Sterling worked at Microsoft for 10 years where she spearheaded Microsoft Research’s efforts in gender equity in computer science, as well as working as a software engineer and program in the Emerging Technologies division. She is most concerned on the “hidden” barriers to ICTD use and access. Dr. Sterling has active field projects in Africa, India, and South America, as well as underserved communities in the United States. She is the recipient of the 2012 Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award for Social Impact.
Dr. Sterling is the Founder and Director of ICTD Graduate Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Dr. Sterling received her PhD in Technology, Media and Society from the ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder 2008.
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March 3
Michael Mendez, University of California Berkeley
Climate Change from the Streets: Community Action for Global Environmental Health Impact
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Michael Mendez's research identifies whether and how governments are considering the needs of the most socially vulnerable populations, particularly communities of color in climate change decisions and actions. Drawing on case studies in California, he traces the methods environmental justice groups are using to contest global scientific practice in the localization of climate change interventions. In particular, this study analyzes how multiscalar strategies for reducing GHG emissions are being linked to address health disparities from climate change impacts in three interrelated policy initiatives: (1) The City of Oakland’s Climate Action Plan; (2) Statewide Carbon Pricing revenue for a Climate Change Community Benefits Fund and; (3) International Carbon Offset projects (forest carbon management in the developing world) allowable under California’s market-based climate change law.
Michael Mendez has over 10 years of legislative and governmental relations experience in the public and private sectors, including working for the California State Legislature as a Senior Consultant to the Assembly Select Committee on Environmental Justice. Michael most recently served as the Legislative Director for the University of California, Office of the President, focusing on environmental policy, academic and biomedical research, and University-industry relations. He holds two degrees in environmental planning and community economic development, including a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Michael has served on several local boards and commissions, including as Vice Chair of the Sacramento City Planning Commission. He is currently a Ford Foundation and UC Chancellor's Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate at UC Berkeley in the Department of City and Regional Planning focusing on science and technology studies (STS), environmental policy and community economic development.
Spring Quarter
April 07
Jane McAlevey, Organizer, Author, and Scholar
Book Talk: Beating the Attack on Workers by Building High Participation Unions
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Jane will discuss the lessons learned from ten years of building strong local unions that win collective bargaining and political gains based on deep and extensive membership involvement, particularly in the context of the right-to-work state of Nevada and in the face of intensive union-busting efforts of for-profit hospital employers. She will shed light on the ongoing debates over how to rebuild union power in the face of austerity, growing inequality, and Conservative parties' attacks on the basis of union organizational security.
Jane McAlevey’s first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), published by Verso Press, was named the “most valuable book of 2012” by The Nation Magazine. She has served as Executive Director and Chief Negotiator for SEIU Nevada, as National Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns of the Healthcare Division for SEIU, and she was the Campaign Director of the one of the only successful multi-union, multi-year, geographic organizing campaigns for the national AFL-CIO (in Stamford, Connecticut). She has led power structure analyses and strategic planning trainings for a wide range of union and community organizations and has had extensive involvement in globalization and global environmental issues. She worked at the Highlander Research and Education Center as an educator (and as Deputy Director) in her early 20’s. McAlevey is a contributing writer at The Nation magazine.
For a sense of Jane's take on these matters, see her interview with Laura Flanders or visit janemcalevey.com. Copies of Jane's book will be available at the talk for $20.
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April 14
Rick Baldoz, Oberlin College
Book Talk: The Strange Career of the Filipino 'National': Race, Immigration and the Bordering of U.S. Empire
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
This talk will explore the incorporation of Filipino immigrants in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the interplay of colonialism, racial boundaries and citizenship policy. The influx of Filipinos to the United States that followed the annexation of the Philippines confounded American authorities tasked with enforcing traditional racial checkpoints in American society. This talk will illustrate how the geo-political imperatives of U.S. imperial expansion repeatedly collided with domestic practices of racial exclusion forcing American policymakers to recalibrate the administrative boundaries of the national polity to address the status of colonial migrants. Contestation over the socio-legal status of Filipinos in the United States offers important insights into the contingent and contested nature of America’s ascriptive hierarchies and the interlocking politics of immigration, race and U.S. statecraft.
Rick Baldoz is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Oberlin College. He is the author of the award winning book, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (NYU Press). He is currently working on a book project about the 1965 Hart Celler Immigration Act, examining this historical legislation against the backdrop of Cold War politics, anti-colonial upheaval, and domestic civil rights mobilization.
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April 21
Graduate Student Workshop: Postdoctoral Fellowships
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Are you curious about postdoctoral fellowships? Join us for a panel on postdoctoral fellowships with James Battle (Sociology), Chelsea Blackmore (Anthropology), and Olga Najera-Ramirez (Anthropology), who will share their experiences in applying for these fellowships as well as working as a postdoc. They will also share successful strategies on when and how to start the application process since postdoctoral fellowship applications are due in the fall!
For more information, please contact Jimi Valiente-Neighbours: jvalient@ucsc.edu
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May 12
Ruth Müller, Lund University
On using your elbows. Care, critique and the normative structure of science.
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Care as an aspect of scientific practice is rarely a focus of attention in science & technology studies (STS) and the sociology of science. Care work is connected with the routine and the mundane, the necessary, but the not the exciting. Care as a value and practice is traditionally, among other things, deeply gendered, reflecting the habitual, dichotomous splitting of labor into productive and reproductive work and unevenly distributed by class and race.
This talk will examine care as integral part of scientific practice from an empirical perspective. It draws on interviews with life scientists in Austria and the US to discuss which tasks are perceived as care work and which value is assigned to performing these tasks within contemporary life science research culture. It goes on to diagnose first a widening of what is perceived as care work (or a narrowing of what is perceived as productive work) and second a marginalization and progressive devaluation of the tasks associated with care. The paper concludes with a discussion of what are possible consequences of this, particularly regarding the heavily belabored but hardly achieved goal of science as an inclusive, merit-based and transparent institution.
Dr. Ruth Müller is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Policy Group, Lund University, Sweden and lecturer in Gender Studies, Biology & Science-Technology-Society, at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the relations between research policy, institutional frameworks and scientific work practices, currently in the fields of climate science and epigenetics. Her (inter)disciplinary background in science & technology studies, sociology, molecular biology and gender studies allowed her PhD work to explore how academic career rationales in life sciences shape the social and epistemic relations of postdocs in research labs in Austria. Müller’s methodological expertise is qualitative, with a particular emphasis on interview work, focus groups and participant observation. She is interested in critical reflection of contemporary academic work practices and social movements in this area, such as e.g. the slow science movement. Dr. Ruth Müller joins UC Santa Cruz for a second Visiting Scholarship with the Science & Justice Research Center.
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May 19
Lora Bartlett, University of California, Santa Cruz
Migration Teachers: How American Schools Import Labor
12:30-2:00PM College 8, Room 301
Migrant Teachers investigates an overlooked trend in U.S. public schools today: the growing dependence on overseas trained teachers, as federal mandates require K-12 schools to employ qualified teachers or risk funding cuts. A narrowly technocratic view of teachers as subject specialists has led districts to look abroad, Lora Bartlett argues, resulting in transient teaching professionals with little opportunity to connect meaningfully with students.
Highly recruited by inner-city school districts that struggle to retain educators, approximately 90,000 teachers from the Philippines, India and other countries came to the United States between 2002 and 2008. From administrators’ perspective, these instructors are excellent employees—well educated and able to teach shortage subjects like math, science and special education. Because they depend on the school system for their visas, they are cooperative with authority. But all of this comes at a price. As Bartlett shows, American schools are failing to reap the possible benefits of the global labor market. Framing teachers as stopgap, low status workers, schools may cultivate a high turnover, low investment workforce that undermines the conditions needed for good teaching and learning. Bartlett calls on schools to provide better support to both overseas-trained teachers and their American counterparts.
Lora Bartlett is an Associate Professor in the Education Department at UC Santa Cruz and author of Migrant Teachers: How American Schools Import Labor (Harvard Press). An interview with Lora appeared in Education Week last month.
