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Working Groups, Research Clusters, Centers & Initiatives

  • Affect Working Group

    The Affect Working Group brings together faculty and graduate students from across the University who are interested in the felt dimensions of social life. Themes that participants are currently addressing include: how race is lived now; the conditions of possibility for political hope and despair; and the affective dimensions of computer games. For further information please contact, Deborah Gould.

  • The UCSC Black Geographies lab

    The UCSC Black Geographies lab is a space for collective study and practice at the intersection of Black Studies and Critical Human Geographies. The Lab in its current form began meeting in the Spring of 2020, and is now co-facilitated by Profs. Camilla Hawthorne, Naya Jones, and Savannah Shange. The work of the Black Geographies Lab encompasses reading groups, writing workshops, symposia, and poetic modes of embodied and artistic inquiry. We undertake rigorous, interdisciplinary, and transnational inquiry about the spatialities of Blackness, always oriented toward collective liberation for all beings.  

  • Campus + Community

    Campus + Community is a center dedicated to supporting ethical and mutually beneficial community-engaged scholarship at UC Santa Cruz. Many colleagues across the university engage with community partners in various ways as part of their scholarship and/or service, and Campus + Community provides support for a campus-wide set of values and support systems to ensure best practices for this community engagement: mutually beneficial, long-term relationships built on mutual trust and strong communication. For further information please contact, Rebecca London.

  • Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES)

    The Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES) is a laboratory for social scientific research on urbanization and the environment in a time of inequality and climate change. CUES supports scholarly and public-facing research and action related to urban culture and political economy, the pursuit of sustainability and social justice, and the many social and ecological “transitions” that the 21st century will require. For more information, visit the project website or contact Hillary Angelo and Miriam Greenberg.

  • Center for Labor and Community

    The UCSC Center for Labor and Community, founded in 2007 as the Center for Labor Studies, is dedicated to the study of working people, the labor movement, and the challenge of the broader global economy as it impacts the working people of California and beyond. Through conferences, workshops, public lectures, and a range of guest speakers, in particular, on the relationship between the labor movement, social movements, and democratic practices; on gender, race, and ethnic dynamics; and on labor activism in international context. For further informationon CLC initiatives, visit the No Place Like Home, Watsonville is in the Heart, and We Belong project sites or contact Steve McKay.

  • The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI)

    The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) analyzes federal environmental data, websites, institutions, and policy. We are an international network of 175 members from more than 30 different academic institutions and 10 non-profit or grassroots organizations, as well as caring and committed volunteers who come from a broad spectrum of work and life backgrounds. We seek to improve environmental data stewardship and to promote environmental health and environmental justice, and we work in collaboration with other organizations and communities concerned about climate change, science policy, good governance, and environmental and data justice. For further information please contact, Lindsey Dillon.

  • Science & Justice Research Center

    The Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a globally unique endeavor that innovates experimental civic spaces and collaborative research practices for exploring today’s most pressing challenges. Biomedical innovation, species extinction, big data and other contemporary matters of concern pose questions that cross multiple intellectual and institutional lines. Science & Justice generates collaborative modes of inquiry and empirically rigorous research that can address these enormous challenges and support a diversity of livable technoscientific worlds. The Center is home to the Science & Justice Working Group, graduate training programs and sponsored research projects. The initiative builds on the UCSC campus’ historic commitments to social justice and strengths in science studies and interdisciplinary research. For further information please contact, Jenny Reardon, James Doucet-Battle or scijust@ucsc.edu.

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