Media and Society: Past lectures
In celebration of Kresge’s 50th Anniversary, we’re thrilled to announce:
When: Oct 14, 2021 06:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Tongo Eisen-Martin, in conversation with Anjuli Verma
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94237203195
A.M. Darke Games and Play as Social Intervention
Winter 2022
Craig Haney Media and Criminal Justice in the U.S.
Spring 2022
Pamela Z
2020-2021
November 17–CREATIVE INTERVENTIONS: Activism, Culture-work and Arts in the Context of Struggle
Moderated by Nicol Hammond (Department of Music, Kresge College Core Faculty)
A.M. Darke is an artist, game designer, and activist designing games for social impact. She created the award-winning card game Objectif, which explores the intersection of race, gender, and standards of beauty. In 2016 she became an Oculus Launch Pad fellow, and shortly thereafter wrote An Open Letter to Oculus Founder, Palmer Luckey in response to reports of Luckey’s alt-right affiliations. The following year, she curated the exhibition Building Code: Developing Mixed Use Space in Virtual Reality as an artist-in-residence at Laboratory. In 2018, Darke joined the NYU Game Center Incubator residency, and is currently a Futurist in Residence with ARVR Women.Darke holds a B.A. in Design (’13) and an M.F.A. in Media Arts (’15), both from UCLA. She is an Assistant Professor of Games and Playable Media, and Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz, and the founding director of The Other Lab, an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist research lab for experimental games, XR, and new media. Her work has been shown internationally and featured in a variety of publications, including Forbes, Kill Screen, The Creator’s Project, and NPR.
T.J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and his essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and catalogues worldwide. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions. He has served on the Art Journal editorial board (2004-08), and currently sits on the editorial board of Third Text, and on the advisory board of Grey Room.Most recently Demos is the author of Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), which investigates how concern for ecological crisis has entered the field of contemporary art and visual culture in recent years, and considers art and visual cultural practices globally. While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, ecology’s visibility has only grown worldwide in relation to the pressing threats of climate change, global warming, and the environmental destruction of ecosystems. To address these intersecting crises—at once economic, socio-political, and environmental—Decolonizing Nature considers creative proposals from speculative realist and new materialist philosophy, Indigenous cosmopolitics, postcolonial theory and climate justice activism, as critical resources for how to model just forms of life that bring together ecological sustainability, anticapitalist politics, and radical democracy.
Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist, and media studies scholar. Since 1998, she has created and presented new audio art and radiophonic works internationally in which radio is often the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also composes atmospheric sound works and sonic installations for theater, dance, film, and solo performance that reflect upon public media culture, media ecologies, political landscapes and infrastructure, time perception, the intimacy of signal space, and speculative fictions. Current projects include We Build Ruins, a large scale sound-focused media art installation expressively considering mining and industrial corridors in the high altitude deserts in northern Chile, and ongoing projects concerning radio beacons, air traffic control, and military monitoring vs. citizen listening. Consistent collaborators include sound and media artists Konrad Korabiewski, Emmanuel Madan, and Jeff Kolar. She also works with the Toronto-based collective Public Studio to create multi-channel film installations and sculptures which critically consider the social politics of landscape, environment and urban systems. Presentations of her work in the past year include Ars Electronica Big Concert Night (Linz, Austria), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), SITE Gallery (Houston), and many others, worldwide. She was one of the core curatorial team for the Radio Revolten International Radio Art Festival held in Halle (Saale) Germany in October 2016, and together with Public Studio, recently completed a City of Toronto commission for a permanent sound installation in the Lee Lifeson Arts Park in Willowdale, Toronto entitled One Hundred and Twenty Mirrors. Her radio art/works have been heard on the airwaves of more than 25 countries, and commissioned by national public radio in Austria, Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, and Mexico. (More info: <http://nicelittlestatic.com/>)
November 10, 7:00pm—JUSTICE (IN)VISIBLE
Police and Prison in Media and Lived Experience
Moderated by Daniel Pearce (Writing Program, Kresge Core) and Megan McDrew (Sociology, Kresge Core)
Lawrence Bartley is the Director of “News Inside,” the Izzy Award-winning, print publication of The Marshall Project which is distributed in hundreds of prisons and jails throughout the United States. He holds an advanced degree in Professional Studies from New York Theological Seminary and a B.S. from Mercy College. Bartley serves on the Board of Directors of the Prisoner Legal Services and Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and on the advisory board for the Parole Preparation Project and Panacea Video. Previously, Lawrence co-founded Forgotten Voices and its successor Voices From Within, which highlights individual stories of redemption through short film. Lawrence is an accomplished public speaker and writer who has provided multimedia content for CNN, PBS, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, the NY Emmy-winning three-part series “Drama in the Big House", NPR’s “All Things Considered,” WNYC’s Death, Sex and Money podcast, TED and more.
Camilla Hawthorne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, whose interdisciplinary work touches themes of justice, the geography of race and racialization, migration, citizenship, activism and social movements, work that “sits at the intersection of critical public policy studies, diaspora theory, Black European studies, and postcolonial/feminist science and technology studies.” She earned a PhD in Geography at UC Berkeley in 2018, and is a principal faculty member in UCSC's Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, and is affiliated with the Science & Justice and Legal Studies Programs. She is Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and is project manager and faculty member of the Black Europe Summer School, a two-week intensive course on citizenship, race, and ethnic relations held each summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Hawthorne writes “I continue to collaborate with activist collectives in the United States and Europe working at the intersection of anti-Blackness and xenophobia”; her current book manuscript promises to be “the first ever in-depth study of Black youth political mobilizations in Italy,” exploring the politics of Blackness and citizenship, and “ways in which the Italian-born children of African immigrants have mobilized for a reform of Italian citizenship law in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis and the southern European refugee emergency.”
Anjuli Verma is an Assistant Professor of Politics and teaches in the Legal Studies Program at UC Santa Cruz. Her research examines legal reform, social inequality, and the governance of crime and punishment from an interdisciplinary perspective using multiple methods. Anjuli holds a Ph.D. in Criminology, Law and Society from UC Irvine and a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia. Before joining UC Santa Cruz, she spent two years at UC Berkeley School of Law as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, where she extended her research on the legal reform of California’s historically overcrowded prisons and jails to examine the aging demography of incarceration, federal-state cost shifts under healthcare reform, and the imposition of monetary sanctions resulting in widespread legal debt by the 21st century.
Prior to her academic career, Anjuli worked as a policy advocate and communications strategist on drug policy and criminal justice reform issues at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in community affairs at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
Her ultimate goal is to use the power of research to help shape a world without mass incarceration, human caging, and carceral confinement. In her view, this means producing high-quality research that intervenes in social theory as much as public policy, and research that creates powerful platforms of representation for showing institutional, social, and political worlds—and lives—otherwise unseen.
Megan McDrew, moderator —Megan teaches a wide range of sociology courses including Death and Dying, Family and Society, and on social justice. Megan also instructs courses at Hartnell College where her main responsibility is teaching sociology in two prisons. In her free time, she works with the Santa Cruz Public Defenders office investigating juvenile defense cases and runs her own organization: The Prison Transformation Project. Besides teaching and advocating for the incarcerated, she loves to spend time raising her children and training for triathlons.
Daniel Pearce, moderator— Daniel is a fiction writer, critic, musician, and teacher. He received his MFA in fiction from Columbia University and is a 2020-2021 Steinbeck Fellow. His writing has appeared in several publications, including The Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Bookforum, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to teaching at UCSC, he has taught at Columbia University, University of San Francisco, and San Quentin State Prison. His academic interests include human rights, narrative theory, and the sociology of policing.
2019-2020
Teju Cole
October 10, 2019
3:00 PM | Baskin Auditorium 101
"This is a time for protest and activism, but it is also a time for subtlety, ambiguity, and nuance." Teju Cole is a photographer, novelist, art historian, the Gore Vidal Professor of Creative Writing at Harvard University, and he was the New York Times Magazine photography critic. He co-authored a book on refugees and displaced people, titled Human Archipelago, and several of his recent pieces for the New York Times focus on the visual depiction of human suffering and its purpose ("A Crime Scene at the Border" and "When the Camera was a Weapon of Imperialism (and still is)"). Co-sponsored by Kresge College, the University Library, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, The Humanities Institute, EOP, the office of Student Achievement & Equity Innovation, Porter, Merrill, and Cowell Colleges, the African American Resource and Cultural Center, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, HAVC, and SOMeCA.
Creative Inventors
November 12, 2019
7:10 PM | Media Theatre
The first annual Creative Interventions panel, a joint production of Media and Society and the Kresge Core course, is an opening, from the Kresge College liberal arts experience to a larger world of research and creative work in computational, sonic, visual, scholarly, activist, and social media. Four Kresge Faculty Fellows — Gerard Casel (Theater/Dance), A.M. Darke (Computational Media), T.J. Demos (History of Art and Visual Culture), and Anna Friz (Film and Digital Media), will address the challenges of justice, environment, culture, and power in society that they strive to engage in their creative research.
Manohla Dargis
Date, Location, and Time TBD
Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of the New York Times since 2004. As part of the Feminist Media Histories Initiative, Dargis will speak at UCSC this Winter.
Puerto Rico: Filming Resistance and Survival
March 3, 2020 | DNA Comedy Club, 7:00-9:30pm
Join us for an exciting evening with filmmaker Juan C. Dávila Santiago and activist Marisel Robles Gutiérrez. There will be a screening of a short film as well as a work-in-progress about Dávila's new upcoming long-form film project, which follows the resistance movement #SeAcabaronLasPromesas (The Promises Are Over), a movement that was born in 2016 in opposition to the new colonial measures imposed by the U.S. Congress over Puerto Rico.
Sponsored by the Research Center for the Americas, and with co-sponsorship from The Humanities Institute, Santa Cruz Institute, College Nine, College Ten, Kresge College, Environmental Studies Pepper-Giberson Endowed Chair, Sociology Department, Politics Department, Latin American and Latino Studies Department, and Film and Digital Media Department.
Ellen Horne: Tales, Tips and Takeaways from Radio and Podcasting
October 26, 2018
7:10 PM | Kresge Seminar Room
Through a series of stories, Ellen Horne discusses principles of audio narrative and journalism, and her varied journalism and production work with Radiolab, On the Media, Audible, and audio Ted Talks. A co-production of UCSC's Kresge College, Merrill College, Feminist Studies, Film & Digital Media, and the Science & Justice Research Center
Martha Mendoza: Why Journalism Matters
November 6th, 2018
7:10pm | College 9, 10 Multipurpose Room
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Martha Mendoza (Kresge '88) will discuss how news reporting can hold the government accountable, inform the public and, rarely, free slaves. More details here. Co-sponsored by Oakes College and Colleges 9 & 10
Reyna Grande
February 19, 2019
7:10 PM | Kresge Town Hall
Telling My Truth: Creative Writing and Journalism Reyna Grande (Kresge '99), winner of the American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the International Latino Book Award, recently published her second memoir, A Dream Called Home. In this talk, she'll discuss how creative writing helped her find true representation, a voice, and a sense of
Sally Lehrman: Can We Build a Trustworthy and Trusted Press?
March 5, 2019
7:00 PM | Kresge Town Hall
We all think we can tell the difference between information designed to deceive and journalism designed to inform. But how do we really know? Join Sally Lehrman in a discussion of this critical question in a climate of mistrust and misinformation. Lehrman, an award-winning journalist and Visiting Science & Justice Professor, founded and leads the The Trust Project, a consortium of top news companies that are developing publicly accessible standards for assessing the quality and credibility of the news you see online.
Co-Sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Science and Justice Research Center
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
March 12, 2019 | 7:00pm
Kresge Town Hall
In this talk, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble will discuss her new book, Algorithms of Oppression, and the impact of marginalization and misrepresentation in commercial information platforms like Google search, as well as the implications for public information needs.
Dr. Noble is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies, and a visiting faculty member to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in Department of Media and Cinema Studies and the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she will join the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press).
Jose Antonio Vargas
November 30, 2017
7:10 PM | Colleges 9 & 10 Multi-Purpose Room
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas' investigative work (Washington Post, Rolling Stone, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times) covers AIDS & HIV, cultures of the tech industry, U.S. politics, gay rights, race, and immigration in America. Since 2011, he has achieved international attention for his activism and documentary work on issues facing undocumented Americans.
Co-sponsored with Student Resource Centers, Colleges 9, 10, and Oakes, UCSC Libraries, the Educational Outreach Program, and the UCSC Foundation.
Carrie Kahn: Latin America and the Caribbean: A Correspondent's Perspective
November 26, 2017
5:30 PM | Kresge Seminar Room
As NPR's international correspondent based in Mexico City, Carrie Kahn covers Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. She will address political and economic challenges facing Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and evolving U.S. relationships with those and other regions. Co-sponsored with UCSC's Science Communication Program.
Matthew Renda: Investigative Reporting in Santa Cruz and Beyond
February 13, 2018
5:30 PM | Kresge Town Hall
Matthew Renda is a journalist known both locally and nationally for his investigative work on criminal justice, poverty, and homelessness. He is a freelance writer who has contributed to The Atlantic, CNET, and he is a frequent contributor to the Santa Cruz-based Good Times Weekly. Renda's Atlantic article "The Betrayal of Student Activism" (May 18, 2015) covers national and local responses to the 2015 blockage of Highway 17 by six UC Santa Cruz students.
Conn Hallinan: Stumbling Around Freedom: A History of the Press
March 6, 2018
5:30 PM | Kresge Seminar Room
A former Provost of Kresge College, and shepherd of the legacy of journalism and media criticism at UC Santa Cruz, Conn Hallinan has written for The Nation and Foreign Policy in Focus. He joins Media and Society to re-tell the history of journalism and the provision of a free press in the United States, and to invite students to a new critical inquiry into their relationship with the news.
Amy Goodman in conversation with Daniel Ellsberg
Moderated by Kresge Faculty Fellow Madhavi Murty, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSC
May 17, 2018
7:30 PM | Colleges 9 & 10 Multipurpose Room
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national daily news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide. Democracy Now! provides independent coverage of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, war and peace, and struggles for social, racial, economic, gender and environmental justice in the U.S. and abroad. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official who followed his conscience and leaked secret information about the U.S. government's lies on the war in Vietnam—the so-called Pentagon papers. Both are recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, the "Alternative Nobel."
Co-sponsored by the Common Ground Center, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, and the UCSC Foundation.
Julie Snyder
October 22, 2016
10:30 AM | Kresge Town Hall
This year's UCSC Alumni Achievement awardee chats with students about her roots at Kresge College, her career in broadcast journalism, her work as producer of This American Life, and her award-winning podcast SERIAL. Co-sponsored by University Relations
Mimi Lok
November 17, 2016
7:10 PM | Media Theater, UCSC
Activist and advocate for undocumented Americans Mimi Lok discusses her acclaimed oral history series Voice of Witness, co-founded by Dave Eggers and published by McSweeney's. Co-presented with co-editor Corinne Goria.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester: Data and Society
November 22, 2016
6:30 PM | Kresge Town Hall
With journalism ranging from election analysis to food systems to prison justice, FiveThirtyEight's Anna Maria Barry-Jester offers perspectives on this year's politics, media, and the future of electoral journalism. Co-sponsored with Porter College.
Robert Irion
April 11, 2017
6:30 PM | Kresge Seminar Room
National Geographic contributor and UC Santa Cruz Science Communication faculty member Robert Iriion discusses the stakes of contemporary science journalism, his collaborations with Neil Degrasse Tyson, and the early history of our solar system. Co-sponsored with Porter College.
Ian Sherr: Tech Evolution, Media Revolution
May 2, 2017
6:30 PM | Kresge Seminar Room
What do the Syrian refugee crisis, a bunch of Apple lawyers, and President Donald Trump have in common? Reuters and The Wall Street Journal contributor Ian Sherr—also a Kresge College and City on a Hill Press alum—discusses the evolving role of technology in society and social dialogue, and its impacts on his current leadership of CNET News. Co-sponsored by Porter College
2021-2022
2018-2019
2017-2018
2016-2017
