Media & Society
Kresge's Media and Society series presents lectures and public conversations on the role of media and popular culture in contemporary society, and now partners with City on a Hill Press to host events with print, digital, TV, and radio journalists. Media & Society also partners with Writers House, a themed housing floor and accompanying speaker series that brings local poets, novelists, journalists, and other writers to Kresge.
Each series lasts a full academic year, but the fall quarter of the series is also a component of Kresge 1: Power and Representation, the core course at Kresge College. The series as a whole uniquely serves the UC Santa Cruz community in a vital function of the liberal arts: to cultivate dialogue in the context of public dialogue, and to guard our freedoms in expressing and debating that knowledge.
"Media" is a euphemism, often imagined as the frame, or lens, through which culture and politics are made fit for public consumption. But a new regime of public dialogue combines professional journalism, "citizen" journalism, traditional and non-traditional news presenters and producers, and social media, in a dynamic environment that often evades clear understanding or criticism. And yet critical thinking about this environment has never been more crucial to our pursuit of justice and equity. Media and Society provides a forum in which to launch critical views of that landscape, and in which to imagine more productive, ethical, and impactful futures for it.
Kresge College, the University Library, and The Humanities Institute work together each year with an interdisciplinary group of faculty, staff, and students, to build a series of conversations that help fulfill a charge of media literacy and media engagement at UC Santa Cruz. In this year's series — celebrating Kresge’s 50th year — we focus on creative media, the visual and aural spectacle of race and racism, and dialogues on abolition and transformative justice.
Kresge's Media & Society Series presents
2024-2025
COLIN WINNETTE
Thursday May 22, 2025 // 7pm
Kresge College A Ground Lounge
Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including Coyote Haints Stay, The Job of the Wasp, and most recently Users, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Winnette’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review Daily, among many others. This is a Writers House event.
JAZMINE HUGHES
Tuesday May 6, 2025 // 7pm
Namaste Lounge
Jazmine Hughes is a writer and editor. Hughes was a longtime member of the editorial team at the New York Times, where she penned profiles of cultural figures including Lil Nas X, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny DeVito, Viola Davis, and Judge Judy. She is also the recipient of two National Magazine Awards.
TARA DORABJI
Wednesday, April 23, 2025 // 7pm
Kresge College A Ground Lounge Tara Dorabji is an award-winning filmmaker and the author of the novel Call Her Freedom, winner of the Books Like Us Grand Prize. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and the acclaimed anthologies Good Girls Marry Doctors and All the Women in My Family Sing. She is a Kresge/UCSC alum.
JOE ESKENAZI
Tuesday, Feburary 18th, 2025 // 7pm
Humanities 1 Room 210
Joe Eskenazi is the managing editor of Mission Local and has written for the Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Public Press, San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly.
2023-2024
2022-2023
Anna Friz
Thursday, June 1, at 5:30pmAnna Friz, UCSC Professor of Film and Digital Media, will be leading a soundwalk. This excursion asks participants to become mindful of their sonic environment, or soundscape. The small group walks together while listening closely to their surroundings, considering all sounds as phenomena worthy of attention. As historian Emily Thompson notes, the soundscape is “simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment.”E. Tammy Kim
Wednesday, May 3, at 5:30pmNamaste Lounge (College Nine)New Yorker writer and co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye E. Tammy Kim will be giving a talk on the state of labor activism and organizing, followed by a panel discussion with writer, organizer, and doctoral candidate in Sociology Sarah Mason and Unite Here member and organizer Martha Hernandez.Richard Jean So
Tuesday February 21, 2023 // 5:00pm-6:30pm
HUM 1 - Room 210
Richard Jean So is associate professor of English and Digital Humanities at McGill University. He uses computational and data-driven methods to study contemporary culture, from the novel to Netflix to social media. He has published academic articles in PMLA and Critical Inquiry and public-facing pieces in The New York Times and Atlantic. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP, 2021) and he is currently working on Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Race and Writing in the Digital Age.
Joe Thompson
Tuesday, January 31 // 7-8pm
Kresge Seminar Room 159
UCSC undergrad Joe Thompson, former candidate for California State Assembly and lead organizer of the recent unionization effort at Starbucks in Santa Cruz. We'll talk with Joe about their work on the Starbucks campaign, what it takes to unionize a workplace, and the role of labor activism in today's politics.
Media and Society
