SPRING 2019

• Precarious Reproduction: Law, Labor, Migration, and Care in Tenuous Time
  • Friday, April 12 | Hart Hall Room 3201| 12:00 – 5:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | Co-sponsored with the 21^st Century Coolies Project
    • From 12-2pm: Join us for a panel with the California Domestic Workers Coalition and Sung Yeon Choimorrow, the Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) on their grassroots work with immigrant womxn workers, and activism on reproductive rights and domestic workers rights.
    • From 2-5pm: Join us for a roundtable discussion on issues of precarious labor, social reproduction, migration, and law, featuring Risa Cromer (Stanford University), Angela Harris (UC Davis School of Law), Lisa Ikemoto (UC Davis School of Law), Tamara Kneese (University of San Francisco), and Darryl Li (University of Chicago).

• Confessions of the Fox: A Writing Workshop and Fiction Reading with Jordy Rosenberg
  • Monday, April 22 | Hart Hall Room 3201| 12:00 – 4:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201
    • • From 12-2pm: HATCH LAB: A Creative Writing Workshop with Dr. Rosenberg.
      • From 4-6pm: A Public Reading of Dr. Rosenberg’s new fiction/creative work.

• Gimme Shelter: Rethinking Animal “Rescue” with Interspecies Intersectionalities
  • Thurday, April 25 | Hart Hall Room 3201| 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | Co-sponsored by the Cultural Studies Graduate Group
    • A public lecture by Harlan Weaver, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Kansas State University
    • Description: Focused in the dynamics of contemporary animal sheltering, this talk examines the work of whiteness and colonialism in what Weaver terms the “saviorist storying” that circulates about, in, and through the bodies of “rescue” dogs.
• Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel
  • Thurday, May 9 | Hart Hall Room 3201| 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | Co-sponsored by the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, ME/SA, and American Studies
    • A public lecture by Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
    • Description: Ross shows how the stones of historic Palestine, and Palestinian labor, have been used to build the state of Israel—in the process, constructing “facts on the ground” – even while the industry is central to Palestinians’ own efforts to erect bulwarks against the Occupation. Looking at the Palestinian -Israeli conflict in a new light, this book, largely based on field interviews in the region, asks how this record of labor and achievement can and should be recognized.
• Queer Directions: New Topics in Queer STS
  • Thursday, May 16 | Hart Hall Room 3201| 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Co-sponsored by the Cultural Studies Graduate Group
    • A discussion with Greta LaFleur, Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University and Dr. Dana Seitler, Professor of English, University of Toronto
• The Anti-Carceral Responses to Sexual Violence Collective
  • Friday, May 17 | | 10:00 – 1:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 and Saturday, May 18 (working group)
    • A two day event that brought together experts in women of color and indigenous feminisms to consider questions of care, justice, sexualized violence on and off college campuses. Attendees included: Dr. Emily Thuma (UC Irvine), Dr. Cristina Perez (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dr. Grace Hong (UCLA), Dr. Neda Atanasoski (UCSC), Dr. Lena Palacios (University of Minnesota), Dr. Sara Matthiesen (George Washington University), Dr. Alisa Bierria (UC Riverside).
    • Description of Events: Discussion on Friday, Closed Workshop on Saturday to plan future collaborative projects and establish an ongoing working relationship.  Among other things, we discussed working together to produce: a special issue for a journal, a co-authored book designed for teaching undergrads, conference presentations and workshops, research collaborations that focus on mapping how transformative justice initiatives around sexual violence are being deployed on campuses, and the formalization of this working group through an online presence/public-facing initiative (one that might, for example, offer syllabi and other resources), as well as creative projects in many genres that might complicate how we understand the relationships between sex, gender, race, indigeneity, and violence.
• His Body of Work, the Work of His Body: On the Legacy and Films of Christopher Lee
  • Thursday, May 16 | Hart Hall Room 3201| 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Co-sponsored by the Cultural Studies Graduate Group
    • A public lecture by Jacob Lau, Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department through the Program for Faculty Diversity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
    • Description: A talk on the life, art, and politics of Asian American trans-artist Christopher Lee.
• Beyond Care: Managing in a Precarious Present, A Graduate Student Conference with Keynote Speaker Dr. Toby Beauchamp
  • Monday, June 3 | Student Multipurpose Room| 9:00 am – 6:00 pm | Co-sponsored by the Queer, Feminist, and Trans Studies Research Cluster
    • Keynote: Binary Explosions: On a Trans Landscape by Toby Beauchamp, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

WINTER 2019

• Metabolic Aesthetics: Anicka Yi’s Revaluing of the Reproductive Immaterial
  • Thursday, February 7 | 4:00-6:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | Co-sponsored with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group
    • A public lecture by Rachel C. Lee, Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Professor of English, Gender Studies, and the Institute of Society and Genetics at UCLA.
      
    • Description:The signature style of Korean-born, NY based artist Anicka Yi—winner of the 2016-17 Hugo Boss Award—involves repurposing materials associated with feminine domesticity–cooking paraphilia, edible ingredients, bath and vanity products—and coassembling them alongside industrial polymers, fiberboard, and metallic components. She has gained some notoriety as a smell portraitist due to her collaborations with perfumers and her incorporation into her work of molds and bacteria often sourced specifically from women’s mouths, arm-pits and vaginas.  Through her fabricating techniques, her thematic riffs on consumption, and her recycling ethos, Yi forwards an intersectional feminist and racialized critique that widens the domain of what we think of as reproductive labor. I attend to the delicate balance whereby Yi both provokes within her viewer, on the one hand, stomach rumblings and distributed visceral feelings of implicatedness in consumption and, on the other, of observation-al distance or narrative reassurance that one is coming out advantaged by one’s metabolic encounters. Yi’s artistry occasions a productive conversation not only with feminism and food studies, but also with critical race studies precisely because of the artist’s engagement with social issues via an aesthetic lexicon indebted to biochemical and sensory insights.

• Making Kin, Not Population
  • Wednesday, February 20 | 2:00-4:00 pm | Art Annex, room 107 | Co-sponsored with STS and Anthropology
    • A conversation with Adele Clarke, Professor Emerita of Sociology & History of Health Sciences, UC San Francisco; and Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department, UC Santa Cruz
    • Description: The discussion will be based on the authors’ essay collection, Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations (2018). We will use a modified Food For Thought format, combining short presentations from our speakers with active audience discussion. The authors have requested that participants read three chapters (they are short!): Adele Clarke’s introduction, Donna Haraway’s chapter, “Making Kin in the Chthulucene,” and a third chapter of the reader’s choice.Copies of the book can be purchased online for about $12 and a sample chapter is available on request. Food will be provided. Please use this form to RSVP and to request a chapter.  Book description: As the planet’s human numbers grow and environmental concerns proliferate, natural scientists, economists, and policy-makers are increasingly turning to new and old questions about families and kinship as matters of concern. From government programs designed to fight declining birth rates in Europe and East Asia, to controversial policies seeking to curb population growth in countries where birth rates remain high, to increasing income inequality transnationally, issues of reproduction introduce new and complicated moral and political quandaries. Making Kin Not Population ends the silence on these issues with essays from leading anti-racist, ecologically-concerned, feminist scholars. Though not always in accord, these contributors provide bold analyses of complex issues of intimacy and kinship, from reproductive justice to environmental justice, and from human and nonhuman genocides to new practices for making families and kin. This timely work offers vital proposals for forging innovative personal and public connections in the contemporary world.

• Women of Color Feminisms, Queer of Color Critique, and the Politics of Knowledge Production
  • Thursday, February 21, 2019 | 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | Co-sponsored with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group
    • A conversation with Roderick Ferguson, Professor of African American and Gender and Women’s Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, and Grace Kyungwon Hong, Professor of Asian American Studies and Gender Studies at UCLA

• After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice
  • Thursday, March 13 | 4:00 – 5:30 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | Co-sponsored with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group
    • A public lecture by Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz

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FALL 2018

• Disability & Queerness with Eli Clare 
  • • Wednesday, October 10th | 12:00 pm | LGBTQIA Resource Center | student workshop
      • Title: At the Intersection of Queerness and Disability
        Description: What issues do disabled LGBTQ peoples face? What are the connections among ableism, homophobia, and transphobia? How do issues around queer disability identities fit into a broader intersectional social justice framework? Join Eli for an interactive workshop about these questions and more.
  • Thursday, October 11th | 12:00 pm | Hart 3201 | graduate student lunch & workshop
    
    • Title: The Ableist Construction of Defectiveness
      Description: Join Eli Clare in an interactive exploration of how the concept of defectiveness is used to strengthen many systems of oppression.
      Reading to circulate: Chapter 2 of Brilliant Imperfection
  • Thursday, October 11th| 4:00 pm | Hart Hall 3201 | public lecture
    • Title: Cautionary Tales: Environmental Injustice, Disability, and Chronic Illness.
      Description: Using storytelling and critical analysis, Eli Clare explores the conundrums presented by a disability politics that values disabled and chronically ill people placed alongside environmental activism that works to prevent many kinds of chronic illness and a progressive vision of liberation that often equates justice with the absence of disability.

• Speculative Futures Symposium with Ruha Benjamin, Aimee Bahng, and Lisa Ikemoto & Special Performance by Praba Pilar (examining how bodily “facts” and “fictions” shape, enable, or frustrate social justice ends, within and beyond the university)
  
  • Wednesday, October 31st | 12:00pm – 5:00pm | Student Community Center, Multi-Purpose Room | public symposium
  • Wednesday, October 31st | 5:30pm | Arena Theater, 120 Wright Hall | THE NO!!!BOT by Praba Pilar

SYMPOSIUM & PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

• 12:00-12:15pm: Welcome & Introductory Remarks
• 12:15-1:45pm: Panel 1: Emerging Work in Speculative Futures
  • Speculative Media Visions, Scientific Futures | Katherine Buse (English) & Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (English)
  • Eradication and Speculation: Malaria | Anne O’Connor (Anthropology)
  • Afrofuturist Activisms | Jasmine Wade (Cultural Studies)
• 1:45-2:00pm Break
• 2:00-4:00pm: Panel 2: Speculation and Social Reproduction
  • Aimee Bahng |Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, Pomona College
  • Ruha Benjamin | Associate Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
  • Lisa Ikemoto | Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis
• 4:00-5:00pm: Experiments in speculation (Group Writing Lab)
• 5:30-7:00pm: NO!!!BOT by Praba Pilar, Arena Theater, Wright Hall
  

• So Sick with Porochista Khakpour and Sini Anderson (is lyme disease a feminist issue? on chronic illness and healthcare in a climate crisis)
  
  • Tuesday, November 13 | 4:00 pm | Hart 3201 | film screening and discussion

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