The overarching goal of the Sociology Colloquia Series is to build intellectual engagement and community in our department for faculty and graduate students alike.

For the 2024-2025 academic year, the department will focus on the following types of hybrid gatherings: those in which we share our own research and professionalization workshops for graduate students. Unless otherwise noted, department events will run Thursdays from 12-1:15pm via a hybrid mode (RCC 301 and Zoom).

Suggestions for hosted gatherings can be submitted using this online form, emailed to the department assistant or sociology@ucsc.edu.

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Winter 2025 Quarter

• Book Celebration: The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

  Wednesday, January 23, 2025

  Time: 4:00 - 6:00pm
  Location: RCC Red Room

  Save-the-Date! Join the Sociology Department together with the Science & Justice Research Center, the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and The Black Geographies Lab, in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to celebrate The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).

  About The Black Geographic:

  Co-edited by Associate Professor Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.

  The Black Geographic  is available at Duke University Press.

  Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne

  Graduate Student Dissertation Talks

  Thursday, February 19, 2025

  Time: 11:40 - 1:15pm
  Location: RCC 301 + Zoom

  Join us in RCC 301 or on Zoom for presentations by Sociology Graduate Students. More information to follow.

   

   

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Spring 2025 Quarter

• TBD with Xuefei Ren

  Thursday, TBD, 2025

  Time: 12:00 - 1:15pm
  Location: RCC 301 + Zoom

  Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and WUI Research for Resilience (WRR) scholars, in RCC 301 and over Zoom, for a discussion with Xuefei Ren on on Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press).

  Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist who studies urban governance and the built environment in comparative perspective. She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a fellow in the Humanity’s Urban Future program of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). She has served as a co-editor for Journal of Urban Affairs, City and Community, and on the editorial board of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Urban Studies Foundation, among others. Her new projects include The City after Covid-19, which examines vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto and Johannesburg.