BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Institute of the Arts and Sciences - ECPv6.15.20//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:Institute of the Arts and Sciences X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Institute of the Arts and Sciences REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20240310T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20241103T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20250309T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20251102T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20260308T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20261101T090000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT DTSTART:20270314T100000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST DTSTART:20271107T090000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250905T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20250905T190000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20250829T231553Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250829T232722Z UID:10314-1757091600-1757098800@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:September First Friday: IAS After Hours DESCRIPTION:Join us September 5th\, 2025 at the IAS for First Friday and enjoy an after-hours viewing of Weather and the Whale. \n\n\n\nWeather and the Whale\, a two-year collaboration between the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Bio-Telemetry and Behavioral Ecology Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz\, features immersive displays of data and research and newly commissioned artworks delving into the human and non human experiences of living in times of crisis. \n\n\n\nAdmission is always free. \n\n\n\nImage: View from the exhibition opening\, photo by Daris Jaspar\, @CultureSaving URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/first-friday-ias-after-hours-2/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/September-First-friday-Image.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251003T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251003T190000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20250909T223750Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250916T225928Z UID:10394-1759510800-1759518000@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Student-Led First Friday Craft Night DESCRIPTION:Welcome back Santa Cruz students! \n\n\n\nJoin us on October 3rd\, 2025 at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences for a student led craft night. Explore your connection to the environment through art! Students will be hosting a stamp making and collage workshop inspired by the symbolism of the whale.  \n\n\n\nWeather and the Whale features immersive displays of ocean science research and newly commissioned artworks delving into the human and non-human experiences of living in times of crisis. \n\n\n\nEnjoy refreshments\, a student-led tour\, and an after-hours viewing of Weather and the Whale. \n\n\n\nAdmission is always free. \n\n\n\nAll materials will be provided. \n\n\n\nThe Institute of the Arts and Sciences is pleased to participate in Santa Cruz’s First Friday Art Tour.  URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/student-led-october-first-friday/ CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Youth-Led-Family-Day_072925_064.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251009T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251009T190000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20250909T211004Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250916T093544Z UID:10393-1760029200-1760036400@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Exhibition Celebration: Deep in The Eye and The Belly DESCRIPTION:Join the IAS and the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery to celebrate the opening of Sam Williams: Deep in The Eye and The Belly. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDeep in The Eye and The Belly is an installation of film\, sculpture\, specimens\, and photographs which together probe the violent histories of preserving and displaying whale bodies while also envisioning a future of multispecies flourishing. \n\n\n\nEnjoy refreshments and an after-hours viewing of the exhibitions. This event is free and open to the public.  URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/exhibition-celebration-deep-in-the-eye-and-the-belly/ LOCATION:Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery\, 1156 High St\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95064\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/inside-the-whale.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251022T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251022T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20250926T212722Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251020T222937Z UID:10430-1761156000-1761161400@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Intersections of Climate Change Lecture: Dr José Marin Jarrin DESCRIPTION:Join us for the first in our Intersection of Climate Change lecture series\, with Dr. José R. Marin Jarrin. \n\n\n\nDr Marin Jarrin is the principal investigator for “Improving climate change resilience by increasing capacity for Northern California Tribal fisheries\,” a partnership with Blue Lake Rancheria\, California Department of Fish and Wildlife\, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\, Resighini Rancheria\, Tolowa Dee-Ni’ Nation\, Trinidad Rancheria\, and Wiyot Tribe. The main objective of the project is to improve the climate resilience of Tribally-selected\, culturally-important marine and estuarine fisheries species of the far Northern California coast. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/intersections-of-climate-change-lecture-jose-marin-jarrin/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Jose-Marin-Jarrin-Photo-2.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251101T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251101T150000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20250923T220330Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250923T220331Z UID:10408-1762005600-1762009200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Recorrido en español del Weather and the Whale DESCRIPTION:Júntense con Hayley Sanchez para un recorrido en español del Weather and the Whale. \n\n\n\nWeather and the Whale es un gran proyecto de exhibición presentando pantallas inmersivas de estudios científicos originales y nuevas comisiones de arte contemporáneo. Trabajando con las intersecciones de arte y ciencia para conectar a la gente con los impactos del cambio climático\, este proyecto trae artistas en colaboración con ecologistas marinos del Friedlaender Lab de UC Santa Cruz. \n\n\n\nEste recorrido y admisión a la galería es gratuito y abierto para todos. \n\n\n\nGratis URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/recorrido-en-espanol-del-weather-and-the-whale/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Weather-and-the-Whale__061025_093-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251106T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251106T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20250916T225725Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251110T204329Z UID:10401-1762452000-1762457400@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Deep in The Eye and The Belly: A Conversation on Community & Survival DESCRIPTION:Join us in DARC 108 for a conversation with Sam Williams\, Nicole Seymour\, and micha cardenas focusing on the questions of community\, survival\, and climate change raised by Williams’ multi-chapter\, speculative film\, Deep in The Eye and The Belly. \n\n\n\nPanelists: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSam Williams is an artist with a practice that intertwines moving-image\, collage\, choreography\, sound and writing. His ongoing research focuses on multispecies entanglements\, ecological systems\, bodies-as-worlds and folk mythologies and how they propose possibilities for present and future ways of non-human-centric living. Sam is based in London\, where he has been a resident of Somerset House Studios since 2019. He received his MA in Sculpture/Moving Image from the Royal College of Art (2016) and in 2021 was part of the Wysing Arts Centre Syllabus VI alternative education program. Sam has shown work at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery\, Arnolfini\, Siobhan Davies Dance\, Somerset House and Studio Voltaire (UK)\, Atletika (LT); She Will (NO); Röda Sten Konsthall (SE); Kino Arsenal\, Akademie der Kunst\, Tanzhalle Wisenberg and B3 Biennale (DE) and in Autumn 2025 will have a solo exhibition in Santa Cruz\, California. Sam has been artist in residence at Rupert (LT)\, PRAKSIS (NO)\, Hospitalfield (UK) and JOYA (ES). His work has been supported by Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust and in 2017 he received the Stuart Croft Foundation prize for Moving Image. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNicole Seymour works at the intersection of environmental studies\, queer theory\, and affect studies. Her most recent books are Glitter\, a public-facing cultural and environmental history of that substance (Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series)\, and Bad Environmentalism\, which shows how artists and activists have employed playful modes to combat the gloom-and-doomism of mainstream environmentalism (University of Minnesota Press). She is currently Professor of English and Grad Advisor for Environmental Studies at Cal State Fullerton and is working on a new book project about the right-wing appropriation of camp aesthetics. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nmicha cárdenas\, PhD\, is an artist\, author and Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance\, Play & Design\, at the University of California\, Santa Cruz\, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations\, Duke University Press (2022)\, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is a first generation Colombian American. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/panel-discussion-deep-in-the-eye-and-the-belly/ LOCATION:Digital Arts Research Center (DARC)\, 407 McHenry Rd\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95064 CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/DITEATB-Chapter-2-Still-1-for-web-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251107T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251107T190000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251029T183152Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251029T183153Z UID:10594-1762534800-1762542000@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:First Friday: Letter Writing Night in collaboration with UCSC's Community Herb Garden DESCRIPTION:Join us this Friday\, November 7 at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences for a student led letter writing night. Students will have the chance to attend student led tours\, respond to letters\, drink tea from leaves harvested from the community herb garden\, and enjoy free pastries. \n\n\n\nMaterials will be provided  \n\n\n\nFree! URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/first-friday-letter-writing-night-in-collaboration-with-ucscs-community-herb-garden/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Student-Led-Craft-Oct-3.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251109T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251109T150000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251018T003052Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251104T230039Z UID:10589-1762696800-1762700400@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Scientist-led Tour of Weather & the Whale DESCRIPTION:Please join us for a tour of Weather and the Whale by contributing scientists Dr. Natalia Botero-Acosta and Chloe Lew. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNATALIA BOTERO-ACOSTA\, PhD\, is an affiliated researcher with the Colombian Antarctic Program (PAC). Currently\, she is the General Director of Macuáticos Colombia Foundation\, a non-profit organization that monitors humpback whales in the Gulf of Tribugá on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Her research looks at the behavioral ecology\, habitat use\, and social structure of humpback whales. At UC Santa Cruz\, Botero-Acosta has conducted ground-breaking research on humpback whale population dynamics and demographics in Monterey Bay\, the northern Colombian Pacific and the Antarctic Peninsula. She holds a BS in biology from the University of Antioquia and an MA/PhD from the Brain and Behavior program at the University of Southern Mississippi. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCHLOE LEW is a PhD student in the Bio-telemetry and Behavioral Ecology lab at UC Santa Cruz and a research technician with the non-profit California Ocean Alliance. Her graduate research uses passive acoustic monitoring to analyze the soundscapes of Kotzebue Sound\, Alaska\, grounded in the understanding that sound is vital for marine mammals to perform essential life tasks. Working in collaboration with the Native Village of Kotzebue\, Lew integrates Indigenous knowledge with Western scientific methods to study the call behavior\, acoustic ecology\, seasonal movement patterns\, and habitat use of Arctic marine mammals. The results of this work will inform local marine mammal conservation efforts. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/scientist-led-tour-of-weather-the-whale/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Weather-and-the-Whale-Artists-Retreat-__061025_007.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251116T020000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251116T040000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251110T232540Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251110T233607Z UID:10615-1763258400-1763265600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Visions From Within Exhibition Opening DESCRIPTION:Join us to celebrate the opening of Visions From Within\, a new exhibition of art from people currently and formerly incarcerated in California. Meet the artists\, some of whom will be at the event and some who will call in from their facilities. Enjoy music by local DJs\, and eat free food by Teresa’s Tacos. \n\n\n\nFREE and open to the public. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/visions-from-within-exhibition-opening/ LOCATION:Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos\, 1817 Soquel Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95062\, United States END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251205T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251205T190000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251201T220619Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251201T222622Z UID:10629-1764954000-1764961200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:First Friday Alumni Event DESCRIPTION:Join fellow Banana Stugs past and present on First Friday at the IAS. This alumni-focused event will feature immersive art and science exhibition tours led by current students as well as refreshments\, crafts\, and other entertainment. \n\n\n\nTours of Weather and the Whale\, currently on view at the IAS\, will be offered at 5:30 and 6:30 pm. \n\n\n\nFirst Friday is FREE and open to the public. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/first-friday-alumni-event/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Weather-and-the-Whale__061025_091.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260119T173000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260119T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251210T183017Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251217T194458Z UID:10653-1768843800-1768851000@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:How Long is Long Enough\, Screening and Conversation DESCRIPTION:Quntos Wilson and Layla Roberts were sentenced to life without parole in 1995 at the ages of 18 and 19 for a robbery in which no one was physically harmed and a mere $301 was stolen. Now approaching 50\, they have each become remarkable artists and mentors behind the prison bars of Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola). \n\n\n\nJoin us for a screening of How Long is Long Enough: The Excessive Sentencing of Quntos & Layla\, a short documentary created by Natalie Decena\, Sarina Bozorgnia\, Veler Brown\, and Aiden Olivier from UC Santa Cruz with support from Michael Ademaro from Georgetown Law School as part of the Making an Exoneree initiative. \n\n\n\nIn addition to the documentary screening\, the event will include a conversation with Quntos Wilson and Layla Roberts\, letter-writing\, and collaborative art making. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/how-long-is-long-enough-screening-and-conversation/ LOCATION:Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos\, 1817 Soquel Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95062\, United States CATEGORIES:Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/how-long-is-long-enough.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260124T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260124T164500 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251208T182721Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260113T211131Z UID:10638-1769263200-1769273100@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Like Water: A Participatory Walk from the Edge of the City to the Sea DESCRIPTION:On Saturday January 24th\, 2026\, join the IAS for a participatory walk led by artist A. Laurie Palmer\, in collaboration with Cid Pearlman and Ilia Dolgov. Presented alongside Weather and the Whale\, this event will start at the intersection of Delaware Avenue and Natural Bridges Drive\, two blocks west of the IAS Galleries. \n\n\n\nWater is always in contact\, always touching\, something – air\, earth\, rock\, plant\, fur\, skin\, sand – this is part of its chemistry\, its solvency\, and its ability for modeling deep relation. Water is both collective and molecular\, moving in synchrony and composed of individual parts eager to bond with the world and with each other. \n\n\n\nInspired by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson\, Bruce Lee\, and the Hong Kong protestors in 2011\, we will practice moving together as a body of water through this particular stretch of land\, as a way to enter deep relation with its human and more-than-human histories\, and to consider its potential futures in the context of human-caused climate change. We will experiment in feeling the power of fluid forms of collective action and the intimacy of thoughtful listening and observation as tools for countering the brutality and militarism of the current moment. \n\n\n\nHow might a collective experiment in moving “like water” help us to discover surprising ways to relate with a place\, a social and environmental context\, and a particular historical moment? As one friend said\, there is nothing “like” water\, but as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has so beautifully described\, so much to learn from and with it. \n\n\n\nParticipants are urged to come at the beginning and to stay for the entire walk\, but also welcome to join or leave at different points.   \n\n\n\n2:00 pm. Meet at Natural Bridges Road and Delaware Avenue  \n\n\n\n2:45 pm. Antonelli pond walkway entrance on Delaware  \n\n\n\n3:15 pm. Homeless Garden Project\, Shaffer Road \n\n\n\n3:45 pm. Parking lot at entrance to Coastal Campus \n\n\n\n4:15 pm Younger Lagoon overlook \n\n\n\n4:30 pm Beach at Younger Lagoon \n\n\n\nYou are invited to bring a stone to carry with you to return to the sea. Please also wear comfortable shows\, dress for the weather\, and bring water. \n\n\n\nThis walk will be fully accessible except for one short unpaved section at the east end of Antonelli Pond for which we will provide an alternate paved route. At the end of the walk\, a technically accessible\, but possibly slippery\, trail (depending on the weather) meanders down hill to the beach at Younger Lagoon. Participants are welcome to stay at the Lagoon overlook\, or go down to the water’s level in the company of a guide. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA. Laurie Palmer is an artist\, writer\, and teacher. Her place-based\, research-oriented artworkstake form as sculpture\, public projects\, and artist books\, and she collaborates on strategic actionsthat employ imagination and art in the context of social and environmental justice. Her mostrecent book\, The Lichen Museum (2023) explores lichens’ role as an anti-capitalist companionand climate change survivor. She taught in the Sculpture Department at the School of the ArtInstitute of Chicago for 20 years\, and 10 years in the Art Department at the University ofCalifornia\, Santa Cruz\, where she helped her colleagues build the Environmental Art and SocialPractice MFA program. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCid Pearlman is a choreographer working in the field of visual art and contemporary performance. For many years Pearlman presented her work primarily in theaters\, including ODC Theater\, Joyce SoHo\, Kanuti Gildi SAAL (Estonia)\, the Getty Center\, Stockholm City Hall\, Theatre Artaud and the Museum of Contemporary Art/San Diego. Her recent projects are more likely to take place outside\, or in galleries and public art spaces\, as a way to directly address issues of access\, community\, audience experience. Inspired by the resilience\, fragility\, and resourcefulness of the human body\, Pearlman makes dances about how we negotiate being together in a complex world. Among other honors she is the recipient of the 2021 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship\, a Fulbright Award from the US Department of State\, and has been twice awarded a Djerassi Resident Artist Fellowship.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIlia Dolgov is a plant-grower\, artist\, and writer. Born in 1984 in Voronezh\, Russia\, he left the country in 2022 in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and now lives in Santa Cruz\, California\, on the unceded land of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. \n\n\n\nIlia holds a Master of Fine Art degree in Environmental Art and Social Practice from University of California Santa Cruz\, a B.A. and M.A. in Psychology from Voronezh State University\, and a New Artistic Strategies certificate from the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art. \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience\, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists\, artists\, humanists\, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant\, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/like-water-a-participatory-walk-from-the-ias-to-younger-lagoon-in-3-movements/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Laurie.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260125T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260125T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260120T190452Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260120T190456Z UID:10785-1769360400-1769369400@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Queering Movement: Stories Embodied DESCRIPTION:The IAS\, BBQueer Fest\, and Motion Pacific invite you to attend “Queering Movement: Stories Embodied\,” an evening celebrating short films by local Black\, brown and queer artists and dancers. The screening and Q&A with filmmakers and participants showcases the interplay of activism\, movement\, and performance. Social hour to follow! Light snacks and (non-alcoholic) refreshments will be provided. Films are in English\, with English subtitles. moss time\, crip time includes audio description as voice over. \n\n\n\nMasks encouraged and provided. Please stay home if you are sick or have been recently exposed to a major contagious illness! \n\n\n\nFilms: \n\n\n\nmoss time\, crip time (Cynthia Ling Lee.) \n\n\n\nTaste her Fruit\, Bless the Whore (Diana Mulan Zhu) \n\n\n\nLiberating Movement: Black\, Brown & Queer All Over (Helen Aldana & Megan Martinez Goltz) \n\n\n\nOrganized with: \n\n\n\nBBQueer Fest\, Motion Pacific and the Institute of the Arts and Sciences  \n\n\n\nPlease RSVP here URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/queering-movement-stories-embodied/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/LM-008.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260129T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260129T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251218T231224Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260114T201206Z UID:10674-1769709600-1769715000@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Pesticide Impacts In and Around Monterey Bay DESCRIPTION:One of the research projects currently on display as part of Weather and the Whale documents for the first time the presence of pesticide-derived toxins within sea otters\, California sea lions\, and humpback whales in Monterey Bay. Join us for a conversation with Yanely Martinez\, Katherine Gabriel-Cox\, Adam Scow and Logan Pallin about the short and long-term health impacts of pesticide use for local communities on land as well as in the ocean. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Logan Pallin\, a Post Doctoral researcher with the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) and Ocean Sciences at UC Santa Cruz\, is an ecophysiologist with a primary interest in understanding how wild populations alter their physiology and demography as a response to changes in their environment. To address these questions\, Logan collects minimally invasive tissue samples (e.g.\, blood/skin) and then uses molecular and endocrinological markers to answer specific questions about population health and growth. He works on multiple species of large marine predators worldwide and continuously advocates for ethical animal research and effective conservation and policy. Most of Logan’s work is focused along the Antarctic Peninsula and the coast of California. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYanely Martinez is an organizer for the Monterey and Santa Cruz regions\, empowering local Safe Ag Safe Schools members for climate change solutions and pesticide reform while developing the next generation of leaders. The daughter of farm workers from the Salinas Valley\, Martinez served on the Greenfield City Council from 2016-2024 and is a proud mother of four. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAdam Scow is a Public-Interest Advocate\, Violinist\, and Music Teacher. Adam has helped win environmental campaigns in the Monterey Bay region including the efforts to ban fracking in Santa Cruz\, Monterey\, and San Benito Counties. He is a co-founder of the Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture\, a grassroots group working to transition agricultural fields away from toxic pesticides to organic in the Watsonville area. He has served on the boards of Regeneracion Pajaro Valley Climate Action\, Watsonville Wetlands Watch\, and the Sierra Club. He previously served as a Board Trustee for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District\, where he helped win one the largest salary increases for teachers and staff in the history of the district and protected vital arts and music programs.    \n\n\n\nAs a violinist Adam performs with the Santa Cruz Symphony and is the founder of Mariachi Libertad. Adam teaches both orchestra and mariachi through the award-winning El Sistema program in Watsonville. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Katie Gabriel-Cox is an OBGyn physician serving Santa Cruz county for 17 years. She is a volunteer and board member for the Center for Farmworker Families. She is also a wife and proud mom to 4 young men. She currently serves as the Director of Obstetrics\, Midwifery and Gynecology at Salud Para La Gente. She is a board member of the Pajaro Valley Healthcare District and on the board of Hospice of Santa Cruz County.  She is deeply committed to uplifiting and supporting the farmworker community with kindness and advocacy.  \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience\, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists\, artists\, humanists\, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant\, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/pesticide-impacts-in-and-around-monterey-bay/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/An-Aesthetics-of-Resilience-Retreat_062424_101.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260205T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260205T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251208T212415Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260106T212811Z UID:10643-1770314400-1770319800@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Climate Justice and the Moss Landing Battery Fire DESCRIPTION:On January 16th\, 2025\, a fire started at the world’s largest Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Moss Landing\, 20 miles from UC Santa Cruz. The fire burned for at least two days\, creating a plume of smoke that drifted above the nearby estuary of Elkhorn Slough and the surrounding agricultural fields. \n\n\n\nWhat were the impacts of this fire on the local ecosystem and communities? What can be learned about energy storage safety? And what is (or should be) the role of BESS technologies in moves towards a just transition? Join us for a panel discussion with marine geologist Dr Ivano Aiello and environmental studies scholars Dr. J. Mijin Cha and Dr. Dustin Mulvaney focused on the climate justice issues raised by the Moss Landing BESS fire. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Ivano Aiello is a marine geologist and Chair of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories\, part of San José State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sedimentology from the University of Bologna and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. Dr. Aiello’s research focuses on marine sediments\, silica diagenesis\, and the geological and chemical processes that shape both deep-sea and coastal environments. He has sailed on multiple international ocean-drilling expeditions (IODP) investigating subseafloor life and hydrothermal systems and has led studies on coastal sediment dynamics and environmental change in the Monterey Bay region. At MLML\, he directs projects that integrate marine geology\, geochemistry\, and mapping technologies to understand how natural processes and industrial impacts affect seafloor and wetland ecosystems. His work bridges field observation\, laboratory analysis\, and data-driven environmental monitoring.  \n\n\n\nFollowing the Moss Landing battery fire in January 2025\, Aiello and his team documented several-fold increase in soil concentrations of battery-derived metals (nickel\, cobalt\, and manganese) relative to pre-fire baseline levels in Elkhorn Slough wetlands\, this study provides the first evidence of toxic metal fallout caused by a fire at one of the world’s largest battery energy storage systems. His findings point to an urgent need for baseline environmental monitoring before future energy storage projects break ground. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJ. Mijin Cha is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. She is also a fellow at Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute\, a faculty advisory board member for the UCSC Center for Labor and Community\, and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. Her book\, “A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future\,” was published by MIT Press in Dec. 2024. Dr. Cha is on the board of Greenpeace Fund and a member of the California Bar. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDustin Mulvaney is a Professor in the School of Policy\, Planning\, and Environmental Studies at San José State University (SJSU). He is a Fellow with the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines\, and also a Fellow with the Climate + Community Institute. His research includes work on just transitions\, solar energy commodity chains\, natural resource development\, and circular economy. He is author of Solar Power: Innovation\, Sustainability\, Environmental Justice published by the University California Press in 2019 and Sustainable Energy Transitions: Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Decarbonization with Palgrave-MacMillan in 2020\, and Energy\, Society\, and the Environment: A Critical Perspective\, that will be out with Wiley-Blackwell in 2026. Dustin’s areas of expertise and research are on land use change\, life cycle assessment\, recycling & waste\, and the environmental justice impacts of energy technologies\, supply chains\, and infrastructures\, with extensive emphasis on the life cycle impacts of solar photovoltaics and lithium-ion batteries. Find more about that research here:  www.dustinmulvaney.com  \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience\, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists\, artists\, humanists\, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant\, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund. \n\n\n\nImage: Fire at Moss Landing Battery Energy Storage System (BESS)\, 2025. Photo by Mike Tataki URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/climate-justice-and-the-moss-landing-battery-fire/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/C7A8973.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260206T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260206T200000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251219T230735Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260120T194409Z UID:10696-1770397200-1770408000@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Lunar New Year First Friday DESCRIPTION:Celebrate the Year of the Horse on Friday\, February 6\, at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences for a night of student-led craft activities and (beginner-friendly) mahjong play hosted by the Santa Cruz Mahjong Club. Craft materials and light refreshments will be provided at this family friendly event. \n\n\n\nPhoto by Mickey Ta. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/lunar-new-year-first-friday/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/FF-lunar-new-year-2026-copy.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260211T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260211T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251216T200553Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260106T212733Z UID:10666-1770832800-1770838200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:The California Firefighter Cancer Research Study with Dr. Shehnaz Hussain and Fire Captain Jamie Gabriel DESCRIPTION:Cancer is the leading cause of death among California firefighters\, yet the precise determinants as well as their mechanisms of action are poorly understood\, and effective preventive interventions remain elusive. The California Firefighter Cancer Research Study (CAFF-CRS) is a large\, well-characterized\, longitudinal cohort of firefighters across California established in 2024 to advance knowledge on understudied cancer risk factors in firefighters. CAFF-CRS uses a community-based participatory research framework and is collaboratively led by an academic/fire service partnership. Dr Shehnaz Hussain and Captain Jamie Gabriel of LA County Fire will present initial observations and discuss implications for firefighter health.  \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShehnaz Hussain\, PhD\, is a Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California (UC) Davis School of Medicine. She serves as Associate Director for Population Sciences and Director of the Office of Population Health at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Hussain’s research stems from a long-standing interest in the intersection of infections and cancer. As a molecular epidemiologist\, she brings together a mindset for maximizing public health impact and scientific curiosity to orchestrate research in cancer etiology\, pathogenesis\, chemoprevention\, and early detection. A common thread of her ongoing research is the identification of biomarkers that relate to\, or modulate\, the immune response including serum immune markers\, intestinal microbiome\, immunogenic microbial components and metabolites\, and environmental toxins. Currently\, she is utilizing this immunoepidemiology lens to lead investigations of the disease continuum from metabolic associated fatty liver disease to liver cancer. Most recently\, she has catalyzed a multidisciplinary research program focused on the carcinogenic impacts of wildfires. Dr. Hussain completed an Sc.M. in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University\, and Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of Washington\, Seattle. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden\, and a second fellowship at the University of California\, Los Angeles. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJamie Gabriel is a Fire Captain with the Los Angeles County Fire Department\, where she serves in operational leadership roles including emergency response\, safety oversight\, and coordinating in-service training for all fire personnel. Her work is grounded in protecting firefighter health and safety\, with a particular focus on occupational exposures and long-term health outcomes. Her research interests broadly focus on firefighter cancer risk\, integrating occupational and environmental exposures with lifestyle and psychosocial factors such as sleep\, diet\, physical activity\, and mental health. Drawing on 18 years of frontline fire service experience\, she contributes to cancer research efforts aimed at reducing cancer burden among fire service personnel through advancement of departmental policies that support cancer prevention\, risk reduction\, and improvements in modifiable risk factors. Jamie recently completed a Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies\, expanding her clinical training and strengthening her ability to bridge public safety\, clinical medicine\, and occupational health research. \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience\, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists\, artists\, humanists\, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant\, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund. \n\n\n\nImage: Still from Ashley Hunt’s Kaleidoscope\, 2025\, featured in Weather and the Whale. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/firefighter-cancer-research-study-with-dr-shehnaz-hussain/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Hussain-and-Gabriel-smaller.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260226T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260226T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251218T231738Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260106T212845Z UID:10676-1772128800-1772134200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Electroacoustic Performance and Artist Talk with the Whale Liberation Front DESCRIPTION:Whale Liberation Front members Peter Johnson Bowling and Cory Diane will perform a live\, electro-acoustic piece in relationship to their installation Untitled\, or\, They’ve been singing since the gulf was born. This piece is rooted in their long term sonic practices in solidarity with the Gulf Whale and broader Gulf of Mexico ecosystems. Utilizing zither\, synthesizers\, voice\, water\, and rare Gulf recordings\, this performance will imagine a sonic reclamation of waters monopolized by sounds of oil extraction\, centering Gulf Whale song in an immersive\, evolving\, spatialized soundscape. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeter Johnson Bowling (left) is a multi-instrumentalist improviser\, composer\, music producer\, sound designer\, arranger\, music technologist\, & collaborator based in New Orleans. Bowling works primarily in live music performance\, group/collaborative devising\, and experimental live composing\, in addition to scoring and sound design. His interests include live electroacoustic music\, multichannel spatial speaker compositions/installations\, electronic improvisation\, and multidisciplinary collaboration. \n\n\n\nCory Diane (right) is a composer\, performer\, researcher\, and sound artist based in New Orleans. Much of their practice explores sound and vibration as ways of knowing\, connecting climate justice\, marine science\, gravitational wave astronomy\, and lived experience. Their long-term practice\, “Reverie\,” engages the soundscape of the Gulf of Mexico in relation to and in solidarity with Gulf Whales. Their broader work spans chamber orchestral composition\, installation\, creative technology\, and electroacoustic performance. An active collaborator\, they are a member of Wit’s End Brass Band and New Orleans Musicians for Palestine\, performing regularly throughout New Orleans. \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience\, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists\, artists\, humanists\, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant\, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/performance-and-artist-talk-with-the-whale-liberation-front/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Ripple-Attack-0_02_27_13.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260304T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20251219T225329Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260106T212919Z UID:10694-1772647200-1772652600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Unexpected Returns: The Historic Entanglements of Fire\, Settlement\, and Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains DESCRIPTION:Wildfires are an increasing feature of contemporary life in California. Media and scientific accounts tell us that we are in a new age of “megafires”. What combination of human settlement\, land use and climate change propels these fires? What drives people to make their homes in increasingly flammable landscapes\, and with what effect? In this event Miriam Greenberg and Andrew Matthews present the findings of UCSC researchers who have spent three years studying the ecological\, social\, and political economic processes that have set the stage for contemporary wildfires\, in what has become known as the “Wildland Urban Interface” (WUI).  \n\n\n\nCome and learn about the deeper histories of indigenous burning\, settler ranching\, fire suppression\, extractive industries and urbanization that have produced fire prone landscapes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We will share new maps of logging-fueled 19th century megafires; historical photographs of early twentieth century orchards and vineyards planted in the burn scar; and oral accounts of how fire and ranching cleared the land for subsequent waves of rural homebuilding and population growth. Further we explore how today\, in the context of climate change\, and as WUI growth draws more people into the beauty of rural living and possibility of affordable housing\, it builds upon these land use legacies to spark the return and increasing destructiveness of megafire.  Yet\, we also are learning from these histories\, and the recent experience of the 2020 CZU Fire\, to reshape our relationship with fire\, plants\, land\, and housing. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMiriam Greenberg is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz\, and co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center\, and is the author of Branding New York:  How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (Routledge\, 2008); Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford\, 2014)\, co-authored with Kevin Fox Gotham; and The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Tactics in an Urban Age\, co-edited with Penny Lewis (Cornell\, 2017).  She has also undertaken engaged\, public-facing research projects exploring urban and environmental justice issues in California\, including the Critical Sustainabilities project\, which can be found at: https://critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu/\, and (with Steve McKay) the project No Place Like Home\, on the experience of the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County\, which can be found at: http://noplacelikehomeucsc.org/. \n\n\n\nShe is currently P.I. on the project WUI Research for Resilience:  Addressing California’s Climate\, Conservation\, and Housing Crisis\, which is part of the UCOP Climate Action Research Initiative.  A recent publication in PNAS lays out the conceptual framework for this project: “Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change.”(2024). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAndrew Mathews is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. He holds a joint Ph.D. in forestry and anthropology from Yale University. He has studied relationships between people\, plants\, and landscape in Mexico\, Italy\, and California. His interests range from ethnoecology\, STS\, political ecology\, and environmental history\, in publications on Indigenous forest management in Mexico (Instituting Nature\, MIT Press\, 2011)\, to environmental humanities\, human plant relations\, historical ecology\, and landscape ethnography\, in Italian landscapes (Trees are Shape Shifters Yale\, 2022). He is now studing the relationship between fire\, grazing\, and the political geomorphology of landscapes in California and in Italy.  \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience\, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists\, artists\, humanists\, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant\, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund. \n\n\n\nImage by Raty Syka. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/unexpected-returns-the-historic-entanglements-of-fire-settlement-and-stewardship-in-the-santa-cruz-mountains/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/unexpected-returns-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260306T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260306T190000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260112T212705Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260125T051433Z UID:10775-1772816400-1772823600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Weather and the Whale Book Launch and Closing Party DESCRIPTION:Join us to celebrate the release of the Weather and the Whale catalog with an after-hours viewing of the exhibition and a conversation with three of the exhibition collaborators and catalog contributors: Guillermo Delgado-P\, Kailani Polzak and Zac Zimmer. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDistributed by University of Minnesota Press\, Weather and the Whale is an exciting interdisciplinary catalog combining artworks\, critical and creative texts\, and new scientific research about whales and other marine mammals to both sound a warning of the irreversible consequences of the collapsing climate and offer alternative possibilities for living during these challenging times. \n\n\n\nArtists: Imani Jacqueline Brown\, Carolina Caycedo\, Sharon Daniel\, Yolande Harris\, Christine Howard Sandoval\, Ashley Hunt\, Courtney Leonard\, John Jota Leaños\, Libia Posada\, Mia Eve Rollow\, Whale Liberation Front\, Sam Williams\, Suné Woods. \n\n\n\nScientists: Natalia Botero-Acosta\, Chloe Lew\, Logan Pallin. \n\n\n\nOther contributors: Guillermo Delgado-P.\, Cory Diane\, Mirra-Margarita Ianeva\, LuLing Osofsky\, Kailani Polzak\, Şebnem Susam-Saraeva\, Zac Zimmer. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKailani Polzak (Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture) is an art historian who focuses on European visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular attention to histories of science\, aesthetic philosophy\, race\, colonialism\, and intercultural contact in Oceania. Her current book project\, Difference Over Distance: Visualizing Contact between Europe and Oceania\, examines the graphic and printed works created in relation to so-called “Voyages of Discovery” conducted by Britain\, France\, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand\, Australia\, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were mobilized in arguments about the origins of human difference in Europe and the United States. Her research and publications also emphasize the methodological questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGuillermo Delgado-P is an anthropologist\, Quechua linguist\, and cultural journalist. He taught in the Anthropology and LALS Departments. As a Latin Americanist his research focuses on Indigeneities and Andean biome relationalities with special attention to the anthropogenic detritus of extractivism in underground and surface mining (think e.g. of lithium\, rare earths). His most recent article “Genomics\, Indigeneity\, Bio-Prospecting\,” is in L. Lorusso and R.G. Winther\, (Eds.)  Remapping Race in a Global Context (2022) \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nZac Zimmer (Associate Professor of Literature) is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature\, culture and technology in the hemispheric Americas. His book First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of technosystems\, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group\, part of UCSC’s Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department\, he teaches classes on Latin American literature\, science fiction\, ethics & technology\, and the poetics of California infrastructure.  URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/weather-and-the-whale-book-launch-and-closing-party/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/WW-Cover.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260308T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260308T203000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260214T001920Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260226T194402Z UID:10846-1772992800-1773001800@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:The Cigarette Surfboard DESCRIPTION:Join Banana Slug alumni filmmaker Ben Judkins (Kresge ’17\, film and digital media) and “ciggy board” creator Taylor Lane for a screening of their award-winning documentary\, The Cigarette Surfboard (runtime 93 minutes) followed by an audience Q&A. This event is taking place at Media Theater M110\, 453 Kerr Road on UC Santa Cruz campus and light refreshments will be provided. \n\n\n\nABOUT THE FILM \n\n\n\nAfter a young designer realizes that a surfboard – which he crafted from thousands of littered cigarette butts picked up off California beaches – could captivate the eyes of millions across the globe\, he decides to use it as the impetus to do something more. The Cigarette Surfboards become a platform to spark ocean stewardship and the symbol of a campaign to hold Big Tobacco accountable for their toxic\, plastic waste. Surfing is the medium\, but the message is universal. \n\n\n\nSmall decisions and actions\, like littering a cigarette butt\, cumulatively can have a large impact\, for better or for worse. This immersive documentary provides viewers an up close experience of the ocean through surfers’ eyes\, to amplify a message of urgency and possibility regarding the ocean’s well being. As our ocean faces mounting threats\, and surfing continues to grow\, we as surfers have a responsibility to protect it. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRaised in Northern California\, at age eight\, Ben Judkins found an old camcorder and discovered the medium to explore and create. After years of videotaping friends skateboarding and surfing\, Ben landed at the University of California\, Santa Cruz\, majoring in Film & Digital Media. His senior film “Marshall” earned the Dean’s Award\, and also won “Best Locally-Produced Work” at the 2017 Santa Cruz Film Festival. Ben is an avid surfer who believes in the power of visual storytelling to move people to action. The Cigarette Surfboard documentary is an opportunity to inspire a generation of surfers to be stewards of the sea. \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is presented in collaboration with the California Coastal Commission‘s Whale Tail Grant. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/the-cigarette-surfboard/ LOCATION:Media Theater M110\, 453 Kerr Road\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95064\, United States CATEGORIES:Art + Science ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Photo-2-Ben-Judkins-and-Taylor-Lane-in-Production.-Photo-by-Hanna-Yamamotosmall.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260410T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260410T200000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260223T230855Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260401T022221Z UID:10870-1775840400-1775851200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Celebration of Spring Exhibitions DESCRIPTION:Join us for light refreshments and to celebrate the openings of our three new exhibitions. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRedwoods Rasanblaj: Origins and Disentanglements by Gina Athena Ulysse is a multisited public art project and series of creative gatherings and offerings at the Institute for Arts and Sciences and across sites at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz. The exhibition builds on a large-scale installation at the Dakar Biennale (2024) and marks a decade since Gina Athena Ulysse’s call for rasanblaj. This decolonial organizing principle takes its meaning from a Haitian creole term translated as the assembly\, compilation\, enlisting and regrouping of ideas\, things\, people\, and spirits. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States\, Everything is Going Right\, new and existing artworks from the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor emerge within a vernacular and aesthetic of disease and infection\, symptoms and treatments. With maps made of medical gauze\, prison uniforms sewn with delicate surgical thread\, and crutches blooming with plastic flowers\, the exhibition renders bodily the current conditions in which everything seems to be going wrong and moving right. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPoet and visual artist Ronaldo V. Wilson’s multimedia exhibition poetically and viscerally explores modes of blurring verbal and nonverbal languages to push against the boundaries of perception where notions of race and identity take shape. Emerging at the intersections of Black poetics\, performance and art\, the works in There Are No Words\, But Melodies move between freestyling (improvised voice/rap/lectures)\, drawings\, song\, writing\, and video in a kind of dance—a melodic and embodied critical resistance to oppression and lived realities of pain\, exile\, and loss. Critical histories and experiences of death\, life\, blood\, family memory\, and psychic loss are navigated in form and composition. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/celebration-of-spring-exhibitions/ CATEGORIES:Exhibition opening,Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Ulysse-Option-1-smaller-edited.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260410T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260607T170000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260324T192312Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260408T194141Z UID:10928-1775840400-1780851600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Visualizing Abolition Screening Series: Beyond Access DESCRIPTION:Curated by Visualizing Abolition Visiting Faculty Pooja Rangan \n\n\n\nRun time: 49 minutes \n\n\n\nPrisons deny and censor the access of those trapped inside them—to information\, to intimacy\, to community\, to meaningful work\, to nourishment of all kinds\, and perhaps most cruelly\, to care. This program assembles a series of films\, including works by filmmakers incarcerated in California as well as others without that lived experience. Together\, these works confront the debilitating impacts of these restrictions and reveal how the disabling logic of the prison is extended to other institutional spaces (the hospital\, the university)\, turning access into a scarce commodity by enclosing what should be held in common. Questioning the carceral and state-sponsored productions of disability and accessibility\, the short films together reveal the courage of people working despite limitations to produce collective access for one another\, described simply and beautifully by disability justice activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha as “revolutionary love without charity.”  \n\n\n\nThanh TranDying in Prison\, 2022HD Video (color\, sound)\, 3 minutesCourtesy of the artist \n\n\n\nCarolyn LazardPre-Existing Condition\, 2019HD video (color\, sound)\, 6 minutesCourtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth3 \n\n\n\nAnthony AlejandrezAnother Rainy Day\, 2023Phone video (color\, sound)\, 3 minutesCourtesy of the artist \n\n\n\nJordan LordAfter…After… (Access)\, 2018HD Video (color\, sound)\, 16 minutesCourtesy of the artist \n\n\n\nRahsaan “New York” ThomasFriendly Signs\, 2023Video (color\, sound) 21 minutesCourtesy of Tommy Wickerd\, Empowerment Ave & System Impact Media \n\n\n\nImage credit: Carolyn Lazard\, Pre-Existing Condition (still). ID: [A scanned document of a table of information pertaining to medical experiments conducted in a prison in 1963. The scan is an inverted image: white\, type-written text on a black background speckled with white dots and a white margin on the left side of the frame. The information presented includes the dates of these experiments\, the University of Pennsylvania doctors who facilitated them\, the number of inmates who participated in the experiments\, and the amount that inmates were paid\, ranging from one to fifteen dollars per study. Brief descriptions of each test is listed\, including “To obtain data on tolerance of Myagen\,” “To determine effectiveness of drug\, Grisactin” and “To determine toxicity of drug\, Wy-713”. At the bottom of the frame is a yellow subtitle\, “they classify people.”] URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/beyond-access/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Screenings,Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/017–CLS_Pre-ExistingCondition_2019_02-e1774380409661.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260417T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260417T210000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260224T202046Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260406T193204Z UID:10874-1776445200-1776459600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Night of Ideas 2026 DESCRIPTION:Enlightenment\, Now! \n\n\n\nJoin us for a nocturnal celebration of art\, philosophy\, and activism!  \n\n\n\nEnlightenment\, Now! \n\n\n\nAs the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence\, the 2026 Santa Cruz Night of Ideas invites us not to celebrate the Enlightenment\, but to interrogate it. Long associated with democracy\, progress\, and universal reason\, the Enlightenment’s legacy remains deeply ambivalent – coexisting with enduring forms of exclusion\, colonial violence\, and economic exploitation. These unresolved tensions\, strikingly visible today\, demand renewed scrutiny. \n\n\n\nRather than treating the Enlightenment as a closed chapter or shared inheritance\, this edition centers young local voices and civil society to ask urgent questions: whose reason matters\, whose freedoms are secured\, and whose futures are denied?  \n\n\n\nThrough conversations\, workshops\, performances\, and visionary talks\, Enlightenment\, Now! becomes a space for lived experience and collective experimentation. Featuring contributions from local performers Crista Berryessa and Beati Quorum\, Alex Olwal’s audiovisual collaborations with AL-EK\, and Juan Ospina\, flautist and composer with Olemano\, our event will also bring together Thomas Sage Pedersen\, Ronaldo V. Wilson\, Gina Athena Ulysse\, and many other guests. The aim is not consensus\, but momentum: rethinking progress and imagining new political\, ethical\, and cultural possibilities under radically changed conditions. \n\n\n\nJoin us on Friday\, April 17 at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences to explore what remains of the Enlightenment\, and what it might become! \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\nNight of Ideas 2026 Schedule:\n\n\n\nMAIN HALL5:00pm: Crista Berryessa and Beati Quorum + introductory remarks by Jeanne Proust5:30pm: Thomas Sage Pedersen\, Staying with Discomfort. Why Our Capacity for Uncertainty Shapes the Systems We Create6:00pm: Community Soundscape with Beati Quorum and Sarah Cruse6:30pm: Gina Athena Ulysse\, Ronaldo V. Wilson & Libia Posada\, artist performances and remarks7:30: Juan Ospina & Olemano live performance8:30: AL-EK & Enahena Live Performance + Participatory Dance with Brigitte Wittmer \n\n\n\nCONFERENCE ROOM (Room 1)6pm: Kyle Robertson\, Contesting the Rule of Law7pm: Adela Najarro\, From Body to Word: Finding Enlightenment Through Poetry8pm: Iris Oved\, Mind the Gap: Masks\, Goggles\, and the Search for Authenticity \n\n\n\nWEST ROOM (Room 2)6pm: Jean-Paul Gazzaneo-Duarte\, Identity Under Oppression: Lessons from Latin American Philosophy 7pm: Sam Kahn\, Moving Beyond the Standard Story of the ‘Attention Crisis’8pm: Ethics Slam! Workshop for collective debate \n\n\n\nONGOINGPhilo-booth: “Ask a philosopher a question!” \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThomas Sage Pedersen is a writer\, consultant\, and public speaker whose work focuses on culture\, leadership\, and the human capacities required for meaningful social change. He works with organizations and communities navigating complexity\, uncertainty\, and transformation\, helping people strengthen dialogue\, trust\, and collective responsibility. Thomas is the founder of Everyone’s Music School\, Speak For Change Podcast\, and co-founder of Ignite Nexus\, and has served in leadership and advisory roles across arts\, education\, and community-based organizations. His work bridges personal reflection with systemic thinking\, grounded in the belief that our institutions reflect how we relate to one another. \n\n\n\nStaying With Discomfort: Why Our Capacity for Uncertainty Shapes Our SystemsThe ideals of the Enlightenment gave us things like freedom of expression\, reason\, and democracy\, values that were originally practiced through debate\, disagreement\, and the willingness to be challenged. In our current moment\, shaped by polarization\, cultural reactivity\, and social media systems that reward certainty and anger\, those ideals feel increasingly fragile. This talk explores what it actually takes to live these values now by looking at an often overlooked dimension: our capacity to stay present with discomfort\, ambiguity\, and not knowing. Many of our most persistent systemic problems are sustained not only by policy or ideology\, but by how quickly we retreat into fear or defensiveness when uncertainty arises. By examining our relationship to discomfort at personal\, professional\, and collective levels\, this talk asks what capacities we must cultivate if Enlightenment ideals are to remain alive\, adaptive\, and capable of supporting real dialogue and systemic change. \n\n\n\nThomassagepedersen.com  \n\n\n\nIgnitenexus.co \n\n\n\nPodcast: Speak For Change \n\n\n\nInstagram: Instagram.com/thomassagepedersen \n\n\n\nLinktree: Linktr.ee/thomassagepedersen \n\n\n\nLinkedin: Linkedin.com/in/thomassagepedersen \n\n\n\nVideo: Titan Award 2024Video: Homeless Garden Project Keynote \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeati Quorum is a hybrid vocal ensemble featuring emerging professional and auditioned volunteer singers dedicated to bringing a distinguished choral experience to the South Bay Area. With a focus on a cappella choral music\, Beati Quorum’s repertoire spans the gamut of choral music from medieval to contemporary. The group additionally brings experimental music-making to the table by creating sonar-scapes. Beati Quorum was founded by artistic director and conductor\, Crista Berryessa\, B.M. Vocal Performance\, M.M. Chorał Conducting. Crista brings a unique blend of traditions in her approach to choral directing. Hailing from Los Angeles with a background in Estonian runic song\, she approaches her directing by way of the intersection of mind and spirit. She also directs the community chorus Pacific Voices which specializes in community engagement\, and  the San Francisco Estonian Choir. If you are interested in singing or joining in any of these endeavors\, please email her at cristaberryessa@gmail.com \n\n\n\nFor Night of Ideas 2026\, Beati Quorum will feature guest artist Sarah Cruse as they collectively explore what it means to engage in enlightenment in today’s uncertain world.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSarah Cruse has learned to come home to the moment.  As a young repressed and depressed adult\, trying to find her way out of patterns of personal and familial trauma\, she found poetry and discovered the healing power of embodied truth\, authentic voice and creative expression.  Sarah now supports people and communities in activating their own inner creative pathways.  She is currently a practitioner of energetic medicine\, sound healing and trauma repatterning as well as host to ‘Yaya’s Kitchen’; a monthly community music event dedicated to the emergent freestyle. Follow her at @infiniteyayah \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJuan Ospina is a Colombian flautist\, producer\, composer\, and educator\, and the creative director behind Olemano. Originally from Bucaramanga\, Colombia\, Juan uses the flute as a lead voice\, blending Latin American roots\, improvisation\, and electronic textures to create an energetic and contemporary sound.  \n\n\n\nJuan has performed internationally in concert halls\, festivals\, and multimedia productions. He holds a Bachelor of Music from the National University of Colombia and a Flute Performance degree from Texas Christian University\, and has performed with major orchestras including the Dallas Opera and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Bogotá.  \n\n\n\nAs an educator with El Sistema Santa Cruz\, Juan integrates performance\, music production\, and social-emotional learning. He is currently focused on composing\, recording\, performing original music with Olemano\, and collaborating with multidisciplinary artists.  \n\n\n\nlive performance \n\n\n\nOlemano \n\n\n\nOlemano Spotify \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAL-EK is an audiovisual collaboration creating visceral experiences through synchronized soundscapes\, and eclectic-sourced visuals. The project features a dynamic foundation of synthesized electronic sound interwoven with live music. The soundscape fuels a varied background energy expressed through imagery and motion. AL-EK inspires curious dialogue through warped perceptions and sensory provocations. \n\n\n\nInstagram: @al_ek_com \n\n\n\nOn April 17\, AL-EK will be joined by Enahena\, a distinctive and unique vocalist\, singing in English\, Italian\, Spanish\, and Portuguese. Enahena is also a prolific songwriter\, composer\, and an innovative drummer and percussionist\, with a technique that has helped him forge a style of his own. Enahena has performed extensively in both the U.S. and Europe\, sharing the stage with artists such as Lee Ritenour\, Black Uhuru\, Spyro Gyra\, UB40\, Steel Pulse\, Tina Turner\, and Joan Baez\, among others. Enahena leads a couple of bands in Santa Cruz while also collaborating with other local groups. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGina Athena Ulysse (b. 1966\, Haiti/United States) is an artist-scholar\, Professor of Humanities\, and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. Working at the intersection of art\, writing\, and critical inquiry\, her practice explores geopolitics\, historical representation\, aesthetics\, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday Black diasporic life. Central to her work is rasanblaj — a methodology of gathering ideas\, things\, people\, and spirits. \n\n\n\nOver the past two decades\, Ulysse has performed internationally at venues including the British Museum\, Brooklyn Museum\, Cabaret Voltaire\, Gorki Theatre\, Haus der Kulturen der Welt\, and MoMA Salon. She has held residencies at the University at Buffalo\, Oregon State University\, the University of Zurich\, and the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. She participated in the Biennale of Sydney (2020)\, the Biennale de Dakar (2024)\, and is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow. Her publications include Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (2015)\, Because When God is Too Busy (2017)\, and A Call to Rasanblaj (2023)\, along with the forthcoming A Year and A Day (2025). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRonaldo V. Wilson is a poet\, interdisciplinary artist\, academic\, and the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man\, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object\, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry\, Prose\, Other\, and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. He is the editor of three special issues of hybrid and experimental work in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has shown work and performed most recently at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics\, and The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. The recipient of numerous fellowships\, including Cave Canem\, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown\, MacDowell\, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation\, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz\, where he directs the Creative Writing Program\, and serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLibia Posada is a multidisciplinary artist\, trained as a physician and surgeon at the University of Antioquia. Posada’s art is influenced by her medical training\, going beyond a fascination with representations of the purely organic or biological to think of the body as a site for the staging of human experience\, both individual and collective\, and a territory closely connected to the geographical one. In Posada’s artwork\, the individual body who passes through clinical spaces—hospitals\, asylums—bears the evidence\, and the symptoms\, of broader social illness: collective\, historical\, cultural\, political. \n\n\n\nLibia Posada’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her solo exhibitions include Definición del Horizonte (Definition of the Horizon)\, a review of her last twenty years of work\, Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; Pasado Tiempo y Futuro: Arte en Colombia siglo XXI (Past\, Present and Future: Art in Colombia in the 21st Century); Medellín una historia colombiana (Medellín: A Colombian Story)\, Musée Les Abattoirs\, Toulouse\, France; Evidencia Clínica: Retratos (Clinical Evidence: Portraits)\, National Museum of Colombia (2009) and Museum of Antioquia (2007); as well as her nomination for the Premio Luis Caballero (Luis Caballero Prize\, 2011) and Signos Cardinales (Cardinal Signs\, 2009). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAdela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide\, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime\, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. The Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Collaborative selected Variations in Blue for publication in 2025. She is the author of four additional poetry collections: Split Geography\, Twice Told Over\, My Childrens\, and Volcanic Interruptions\, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. The 2024 Int’l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category. The California Arts Council has recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow. \n\n\n\nFrom Body to Word: Finding Enlightenment Through PoetryDiscover how poetry contributes to our understanding of gripping societal issues\, such as immigration and intimate partner violence\, and how the transformative power of language leads to healing and empowerment. Join Adela Najarro for a reading and discussion of poems from Variations in Blue (Red Hen Press\, 2025). The poems in this collection reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape and address the aftermath of domestic violence.  As Fred Arroyo states\, “Adela’s poems are alive\, elemental\, and they set us on fire\, burn down the foundations of our being\, to help us experience what it’s like to be alive.” Poetry reading and discussion\, followed by Q & A.marketing@redhen.org \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKyle is a Continuing Lecturer in Philosophy at UCSC\, where he regularly teaches topics in moral and political philosophy\, logic\, and the philosophy of law. He is also an active public philosopher with the Center for Public Philosophy. His work includes running programs for elementary school children\, founding and directing the Norcal high school ethics bowl\, consulting with businesses and foundations\, and teaching incarcerated students. Outside of work\, in addition to helping to raise two children on the Westside of Santa Cruz\, he enjoys singing with the Santa Cruz Chorale. See him speak as part of TEDX Santa Cruz here. \n\n\n\nContesting the Rule of LawNo Enlightenment concept has been more in the U.S. public mindset recently than ‘the rule of law.’ Many believe that the rule of law is under profound threat from a corrupt\, lawless administration. At the same time\, others voted for this administration because of a desire to see laws\, particularly immigration laws\, more rigidly enforced. I will present a philosophical account of the rule of law\, as an essentially contested concept\, to try to make sense of these divergent viewpoints and to distinguish between regular democratic political disagreements and existential democratic threats. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Iris Oved is the founder and director of The Paradox Lab\, a San Francisco-based educational center that brings the joys and tools of philosophical inquiry to kids and kids at heart. She is also an active researcher in philosophy and cognitive science\, specializing in learning in children\, scientists\, and robots. Learn more about her work at ParadoxLab.org.  \n\n\n\nMind the Gap: Masks\, Goggles\, and the Search for AuthenticityThis session will explore our mental representations of the world and each other in this increasingly virtual/AI age. After a brief talk by philosopher and cognitive scientist Iris Oved\, participants will engage in a salon-style discussion about the masks that we wear and the perceptual\, linguistic\, cognitive\, and digital devices that filter our access to the people and world around us. When do these filters facilitate authentic connection and when do they interfere? Together we will explore the value of authentic connection and how we can create a future that brings us closer to each other and to reality. \n\n\n\nhttps://philpeople.org/profiles/iris-ovedhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069821315401&mibextid=wwXIfrhttps://www.instagram.com/theparadoxlab \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJean-Paul Gazzaneo-Duarte is a first year Ph.D. student at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. He is currently interested in Metaphysics\, Latin American Philosophy\, and especially the intersection between the two.  \n\n\n\nIdentity Under Oppression: Lessons from Latin American Philosophy. One of the promises of the Enlightenment was liberty. Three hundred years later\, what can we make of liberty in the United States if the government continues to take it away? I propose that we look to 19th- and 20th-century Latin America for lessons in resistance and self-identification. In particular\, the writings of Venezuelan philosopher Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla on identity provide us with a way to find hope in the face of oppression. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSam Kahn is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at UC Santa Cruz. In his philosophical research\, Sam asks about the nature of human social subjectivity\, including our essential interdependence\, historical situatedness\, and the psychological mechanisms that embed us in social contexts. Before coming to UCSC\, he taught middle school humanities for five years in Dallas\, TX and East Palo Alto\, CA. In addition to his role as a TA at the university\, Sam still teaches Philosophy for Children (P4C) at the local elementary school (supported by the Center for Public Philosophy). \n\n\n\nMoving Beyond the Standard Story of the ‘Attention Crisis’There is much talk about how smartphones and social media apps are harming our attention. The standard story—inherited through an “Enlightenment” conception of what it means to be human—says that the harm of the ‘attention crisis’ is in how our technology causes us to lose our autonomy; attentional decisions are no longer up to us. Without completely abandoning this familiar picture\, this talk strives to move beyond the standard story. We will ask questions like: Can we ever really have ‘attentional autonomy’? What even is attention? What if instead of theorizing about the sources of attentional decisions\, we focus on its situatedness\, habituation\, and phenomenology? What are the deeper moral harms that the standard story obscures? I will make the case that a deeper harm of the ‘attention-crisis’ is a collective distortion about the world and its value. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBrigitte Wittmer is a facilitator\, performer\, and movement visionary whose work investigates how bodies think\, how images move us\, and how technology can become a partner rather than a tool. With over two decades of experience across cultures and disciplines\, she approaches movement as a form of inquiry\, a language that bridges the sensory\, the relational\, and the philosophical. \n\n\n\nAs the pioneer of Liquid Leading\, she reimagines partner dance beyond fixed roles\, inviting fluid authorship and shared perception. Her interdisciplinary collaborations – including projects with the Rio-based tech‑art collective Kinetic.Lab and performances for Swissnex Brasil – explore how digital environments and human presence co-create meaning in real time. \n\n\n\nIn her workshop-performance formats\, she invites audiences into a living dialogue of embodied intelligence\, mutual attunement\, and relational presence. \n\n\n\nwww.instagram.com/b_moving \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Jeanne Proust studied Humanities\, Philosophy\, and Visual Arts in Bordeaux\, Berlin\, and Paris and has taught philosophy in the U.S. for more than fifteen years. She currently serves as Vice President of the Public Philosophy Network and Academic Coordinator at UC Santa Cruz’s Crown College\, leading tech ethics education. A former director of the Center for Public Philosophy\, she spearheaded and manages the Santa Cruz Night of Ideas program. Her work spans ethics\, feminism\, and aesthetics. She also runs a philosophical counseling practice and organizes immersive philosophical retreats in the Santa Cruz mountains. \n\n\n\nPhilosophical Counseling \n\n\n\nPhilosophical Retreats \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is brought to you by the Center for Public Philosophy\, with support from the Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, The Humanities Institute\, the Marc Sanders Foundation\, Villa Albertine\, and the Institut Français. \n\n\n\nNight of Ideas returns this year with nocturnal arts and culture marathons in cities across the U.S. Events will feature late-night discussions addressing major global issues\, plus live music\, screenings\, performances\, and more\, all centered around this year’s theme\, “Enlightenment\, Now!.” Exploring the expression’s literal and metaphorical interpretations\, Night of Ideas will prompt participants to question the value and memory of the Enlightenment.  \n\n\n\nLearn more and sign up for updates at nightofideas.org. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/night-of-ideas-2026/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/VA_NOI26_LOGO_LONG_SUNSET_RVB-03.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260423T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260401T234022Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260403T154358Z UID:10946-1776967200-1776972600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Artist Talk with Federico Cuatlacuatl DESCRIPTION:Artist Federico Cuatlacuatl will join us to screen and discuss his short film QUEMAR LAS PATAS DEL IMPERIO (to burn the feet of the empire). \n\n\n\n\n\nFederico Cuatlacuatl – Shower of Fire exhibit at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland\, Ohio – Photo © Bob Perkoski\, www.Perkoski.com\n\n\n\n\n\nFederico Cuatlacuatl (b. San Francisco Coapan\, Cholula\, Puebla -México) is Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia and currently a research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Cuatlacuatl’s aesthetic oeuvre addresses Nahua Indigenous immigration\, social art practice\, and cultural sustainability. Building on his own experience as formerly undocumented immigrant and DACA holder\, his creative practice collides Indigeneity\, immigration\, and temporalities. At the core of his most recent research and artistic production is the intersection of transborder Indigeneity\, Nahua diasporic resilience\, and Nahua futurisms. His work has been featured in international film festivals and exhibitions globally including: the Max Ernst Museum\, the Kode Museum of Art in Norway\, the KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin\, the BFI London Film Festival\,  the Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus\, the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City\, the Museum of Art Såo Paulo in Brazil\, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art\, the Sculpture Center in Ohio\, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans\, and the Tucson Museum of Art. Cuatlacuatl is a co-founder of the UNDOC+Collective and the founder of the Rasquache Artist Residency in Puebla\, México. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/artist-talk-with-federico-cuatlacuatl/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Still-from-FC.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260425T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260425T150000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260325T180831Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260325T180832Z UID:10933-1777125600-1777129200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Artist Tour with Libia Posada DESCRIPTION:Join us for a walk through of Everything is Going Right with artist Libia Posada. \n\n\n\nAbout the Artist:Libia Posada is a multidisciplinary artist\, trained as a physician and surgeon at the University of Antioquia. Posada’s art is influenced by her medical training\, going beyond a fascination with representations of the purely organic or biological to think of the body as a site for the staging of human experience\, both individual and collective\, and a territory closely connected to the geographical one. In Posada’s artwork\, the individual body who passes through clinical spaces—hospitals\, asylums—bears the evidence\, and the symptoms\, of broader social illness: collective\, historical\, cultural\, political. \n\n\n\nLibia Posada’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.Her solo exhibitions include Definición del Horizonte (Definition of the Horizon)\, a review of her last twenty years of work\, Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; Pasado Tiempo y Futuro: Arte en Colombia siglo XXI (Past\, Present and Future: Art in Colombia in the 21st Century); Medellín una historia colombiana (Medellín: A Colombian Story)\, Musée Les Abattoirs\, Toulouse\, France; Evidencia Clínica: Retratos (Clinical Evidence: Portraits)\, National Museum of Colombia (2009) and Museum of Antioquia (2007); as well as her nomination for the Premio Luis Caballero (Luis Caballero Prize\, 2011) and Signos Cardinales (Cardinal Signs\, 2009). \n\n\n\nGroup exhibitions include Weather and the Whale\, Institute of Arts and Science\, UC Santa Cruz; En y entre Geografías (In and Between Geographies)\, Museum of Modern Art of Medellín; MDE 2015\, Museum of Antioquia\, Medellín; I Bienal Internacional de Cartagena (I International Biennial of Cartagena\, 2014); Face Contact / FOTOESPAÑA\, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art\, Madrid (2011) and Beijing (2012); Máquinas (Machines)\, Oí Futuro Media Center\, Belo Horizonte\, Brazil (2011); Skin\, Wellcome Trust\, London; MDE 07\, Museum of Antioquia\, Medellín; Otras Miradas (Other Views)\, International Itinerant Exhibition\, 2004–2006; and the VIII Bienal de La Habana (VIII Havana Biennial)\, Wifredo Lam Center\, Havana\, Cuba (2003). \n\n\n\nHer work is held in public collections including the National Museum of Colombia (Museo Nacional de Colombia)\, the Banco de la República Art Collection (Colección de Arte del Banco de la República)\, the Museum of Antioquia (Museo de Antioquia)\, and the Gilberto Álzate Avendaño Foundation (Fundación Gilberto Álzate Avendaño)\, as well as in private collections in Houston\, Paris\, London\, Amsterdam\, among others. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/artist-tour-with-libia-posada/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/avif:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/f5b269_16b9d0e769204409be64979531928824mv2.avif END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260427T000000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T235959 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260407T015759Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260407T024654Z UID:10970-1777248000-1778716799@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Podcast Miniseries: Unmaking the Prison Image DESCRIPTION:Unmaking the Prison Image is a three-episode podcast series from Visualizing Abolition exploring the role documentary can play in imagining a world without prisons. Hosted by Pooja Rangan\, author of Immediations and The Documentary Audit\, and co-author with Brett Story of the forthcoming Why Look at Prisons?\, the series brings together filmmakers\, scholars\, and system-impacted artists and organizers who are rethinking how prisons are represented\, with an eye toward collective liberation. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEpisode One\, Film Pedagogy as Abolitionist Practice\, explores how abolitionist filmmaking can teach us to unlearn dominant ways of seeing and knowing the prison. \n\n\n\nEpisode Two\, …But What About the Rapists and Murderers?\, addresses one of the most common questions encountered by abolitionists\, by asking instead how rape functions as a way of seeing the prison. \n\n\n\nEpisode Three\, Against the Carceral-Entertainment Complex\, challenges collaborations among law enforcement\, prisons\, and corporate media\, and considers how documentary might refuse these partnerships. \n\n\n\nJoin us as we examine the challenges and possibilities of abolitionist media practice\, and ask what it would mean to unmake the prison image. \n\n\n\n\n\nUnmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition\, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California\, Santa Cruz\, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. \n\n\n\nImage credit: Christopher Harris\, still/here\, 2000. Photo courtesy the artist. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/podcast-miniseries-unmaking-the-prison-image/ CATEGORIES:Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Podcast-for-web.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260502T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260502T153000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260409T172342Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260410T191731Z UID:10976-1777730400-1777735800@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:In Conversation: Sister Warriors DESCRIPTION:Join us to learn about the important work of Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition\, a group of women and gender expansive folks who have been incarcerated and are building a movement to support each other\, shift power\, and lead systems and policy change. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNiki Martinez is a leading social justice advocate and organizer dedicated to ending mass incarceration and dismantling systemic injustices and the criminalization of women\, gender expansive and trans people. Since her release in 2019\, she has mentored countless individuals\, been a leader in the Credible Messenger movement\, while also working on key propositions and policies and continuing to advocate for folks inside of the women’s facilities. Currently\, Niki serves as the Administrative and Organizing Director of Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition and continues to build Sister Warriors Chapters throughout the state. While incarcerated\, she co-founded a youth-centered advocacy organization and holds certifications in trauma-informed care\, relapse prevention\, and restorative justice. Charged as an adult at 17 and sentenced to 45 years to life\, Niki served 25 consecutive years inside the carceral system—experiences that drive her commitment to healing\, justice and the continued fight against systemic gender-based violence and ending mass incarceration. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElizabeth Lozano is a Latina artist who was born in Harbor City\, CA and currently resides in Riverside\, CA. In 2012 Elizabeth received her A.A. in Behavioral and Social Science with Honors from Feather River College. Elizabeth’s art was first exhibited in Central California Women’s Facility’s visiting store\, the facility where she resided for 30 years serving a sentence of Juvenile Life without Parole. In 2024 the facility requested Elizabeth paint affirmations on the sidewalks and other spaces to uplift the community. Elizabeth has participated in several exhibitions and projects including: Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship\, EFA Gallery NY\, (2023); The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art and Poetry\, Museum of the African Diaspora\, CA (2023); Work Assignments: Forced Prison Labor in the Land of the Free\, several Bay Area locations(2023 & 2024); and the Involuntary Servitude Digital Billboard campaign for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children\, California\,(2024) \n\n\n\nCurrently Elizabeth works for The Institute of the Arts and Sciences as a Prison Education Advisor where she develops art workshops and education programs for the women prisons in California and formerly incarcerated individuals\, supports the reentry transition back to the community and aids in the development and promotion of art exhibitions and outreach programs. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJulissa O. Muñiz\, PhD is an assistant professor of education in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California\, Los Angeles. Broadly\, her scholarship examines how people and communities of color –specifically Latinx and Black communities– navigate\, negotiate\, and resist racialized organizations and systems of power such as the education\, criminal legal\, and juvenile legal systems. More specifically\, Dr. Muñiz examines the conditions that both enable and constrain teaching\, learning\, and identity development in carceral contexts\, with an interest in better understanding how youth\, girls\, women\, and gender expansive individuals live and learn while confined. Importantly\, her work uplifts the various ways individuals are always co-creating fugitive liberatory learning environments for themselves and others in spite of the carceral institutions they exist in. Most recently\, Muñiz was an assistant professor of psychology with affiliation in education and the Visualizing Abolition Program at UC Santa Cruz. \n\n\n\nDr. Muñiz earned her Ed.M. in prevention science and practice from the Harvard Graduate School of Education; her M.A. in human development and social policy from Northwestern University; and her B.A. in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. Her training and research have been generously supported by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans\, Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education\, Social Science Research Council\, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. Dr. Muñiz is a first-generation borderlands scholar from San Ysidro\, California. In 2021\, she founded the San Ysidro Rising Scholar Award\, a scholarship and mentorship program that supports first-generation college students from her alma mater\, San Ysidro High School. Before entering graduate school\, Muñiz was a middle school academic counselor for TRIO Talent Search in Oakland\, California\, and a GED co-instructor for the Adult Peer Education Project at San Quentin State Prison. \n\n\n\n\n\nThis event is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Everything is Going Right and as part of Visualizing Abolition\, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/in-conversation-sister-warriors/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-07-at-10.40.46-AM.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260507T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260507T193000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260331T225830Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260402T204536Z UID:10942-1778176800-1778182200@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Rasanblaj as Spirit Turn: Gina Athena Ulysse in Conversation with Jennifer González DESCRIPTION:Please join us for a conversation between Gina Athena Ulysse and Jennifer González\, discussing Ulysse’s solo exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGina Athena Ulysse (b 1966) Haiti/United States is an artist-scholar\, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California\, Santa Cruz. Concerned with the visceral in the structural\, her questions engage geopolitics\, historical representations\, aesthetics and the spiritual in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. In the last two decades\, her rasanblaj approach (the gathering of ideas\, things\, people\, and spirits) to her multidisciplinary art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts\, humanities\, and social sciences. She has performed at The British Museum\, the Brooklyn Museum\, Cabaret Voltaire\, Gorki Theatre\, House of World Cultures\, LaMaMa\, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall\, MoMA Salon\, among other venues. She has held residencies at the University of Buffalo\, Oregon State\, University of Zurich\, as well as the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. In 2020\, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney. In 2024\, she was invited to participate in the Biennale de Dakar. She is a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Her major publications include the forthcoming A Year and A Day. Leonore Mau and Haiti (Oct 2025\, editor with Dora Imhoff and U5)\, a polyphonic inquiry into the photographs Leonore Mau (1916-2013) took in Haiti during the 1970s; Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (2015); Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti\, me & THE WORLD (2017) – long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award – and  A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics(2023). She was the invited editor of e-misferica’s Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015)\, the Hemispheric Institute’s Journal for Performance and Politics. Her visual art has appeared on the covers of Feminist Formations\, Feminist Studies\, Frontiers\, and Meridians Journals. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJennifer Gonzalez\n\n\n\n\n\nJennifer González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation\, digital and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space\, public space\, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically\, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation\, the American Association of University Women\, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture\, Frieze\, Bomb\, Diacritics\, Archives of American Art Journal\, Camera Obscura\, Open Space and Art Journal. Her second book\, Pepon Osorio\, received an International Latino Book Award. She served as chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology which was listed among the best art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020. González also writes numerous exhibition catalog essays\, most recently for the exhibitions Diego Rivera’s America (2022)\, Amalia Mesa Bains: Archeology of Memory (2023)\, and Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (2025). She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program\, New York. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/rasanblaj-as-spirit-turn/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Gina-and-JAG-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T093000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260513T170000 DTSTAMP:20260414T040056 CREATED:20260217T193201Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260413T172845Z UID:10854-1778664600-1778691600@ias.ucsc.edu SUMMARY:Carceral Media Ecologies—and How to Break Them DESCRIPTION:Organized by Pooja Rangan\, Visiting Scholar\, Visualizing Abolition at University of California\, Santa Cruz \n\n\n\nCarceral Media Ecologies—and How to Break Them is the culminating in-person event in a series of conversations examining how contemporary documentary forms participate in both the making and unmaking of carceral power. This symposium brings together organizers\, filmmakers\, scholars and artists—both with and without experiences of mass incarceration—for a daylong conversation on disrupting the carceral state and its media ecologies across multiple scales of intervention: from feminist organizing and prisoner-initiated programs to incarcerated media production\, participatory defense\, counterforensic art\, and legal advocacy.  \n\n\n\n\nRSVP\n\n\n\n\nSymposium Program\n\n\n\n9:30 am onward – Coffee + Pastries10:00–10:15 – Welcome (Rachel Nelson + Pooja Rangan)10:30–11:30 – Conversation: Adamu Chan + Gilda Sheppard\, moderated by Gina Dent \n\n\n\n11:30–11:45 – Break \n\n\n\n11:45–1:15 – Panel: Fugitive Media (Keisha Knight\, Thanh Tran\, Anthony Tafoya)\, moderated by Rachel NelsonA panel on media produced behind bars and the activism involved in building oppositional circuits of visibility and solidarity \n\n\n\n1:15–2:15 – Lunch \n\n\n\n2:15–3:45 – Panel: Counterforensic Advocacy (Ashraf Hamdan\, Silicon Valley Debug\, Sharon Daniel)\, moderated by Pooja RanganA panel on decarceral legal and policy interventions\, including participatory defense\, exoneree media\, and counterforensic art \n\n\n\n3:45–4:00 – Break \n\n\n\n4:00–4:30 – Concluding Reflections – Gina Dent \n\n\n\n4:30–5:30 – Reception \n\n\n\nSpeakers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAdamu Chan is an award-winning filmmaker\, writer\, and community organizer from the Bay Area whose artistry is rooted in relationships and lived experience. His film What These Walls Won’t Hold\, filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic in San Quentin State Prison\, chronicles the organizing and connections that emerged despite incarceration. His work invites viewers into conversations about social justice\, resilience\, and community. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSharon Daniel is a media artist and innovator in interactive documentary whose online artworks and multimedia installations examine social\, racial\, and environmental injustice. For over two decades\, her creative research has focused on the criminal legal system\, often in collaboration with incarcerated people and other impacted communities. Her work has been exhibited internationally and supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation\, Fulbright Program\, and Rockefeller Foundation. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGina Dent is Professor of Feminist Studies\, History of Consciousness\, and Legal Studies at UC Santa Cruz and Faculty Research Director of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. A longtime prison abolitionist scholar and advocate\, she is the principal investigator and co-director with Rachel Nelson of Visualizing Abolition\, an initiative that uses art and education to shift social attachments to prisons. Dent is co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now. and has written extensively on race\, feminism\, popular culture\, and visual art. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAshraf Hamdan is an architect and researcher working within Forensic Architecture’s Gaza research programme. His work focuses on the built environment\, collective networks\, and Palestinian spatial formations under Israeli colonialism. He previously worked with the Sakiya Foundation\, researching ecological systems and human settlements. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRaj Jayadev is co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug\, a San José-based organization focused on community organizing\, advocacy\, and multimedia storytelling. Through De-Bug’s Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project\, he helped develop participatory defense\, a community-driven model that supports families with loved ones facing the criminal legal system and works to shift power and influence case outcomes in the courts. Jayadev received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018 for his community-based justice work. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKeisha Nicole Knight is a researcher and cultural organizer based in Los Angeles. She previously served as Director of Funds and Advocacy at the International Documentary Association and was a Warhol Curatorial Fellow. Knight founded Sentient.Art.Film\, a creative distribution initiative\, and Solidarity Media Network\, a hub for anti-carceral\, anti-racist media production and organizing. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRachel Nelson is Director and Chief Curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and co-director with Gina Dent of Visualizing Abolition\, an initiative that uses art and education to shift social attachments to prisons. She has curated numerous group and solo exhibitions and writes widely on contemporary art and geopolitics for publications such as Journal of Curatorial Studies\, Brooklyn Rail\, and Third Text. Nelson also teaches in the Visualizing Abolition Studies program at UC Santa Cruz. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPooja Rangan is an award-winning documentary scholar and Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability\, Thinking with an Accent (coedited)\, and Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. She is currently co-authoring a book on documentary and carceral world-building with filmmaker Brett Story\, titled Why Look at Prisons. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGilda Sheppard is faculty emerita in sociology\, cultural and media studies at Evergreen State College in Tacoma\, WA. Sheppard taught at Washington prisons for over a decade. She is an international award-winning filmmaker\, most recently for her documentary\, Since I Been Down\, featuring the Black Prisoner Caucus and their prison initiated liberation education program. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnthony “Tony” Tafoya is a paralegal\, organizer\, and Inside Managing Producer of the award-winning podcast Ear Hustle. A queer organizer and systems-impacted advocate\, Tafoya works on legislative campaigns and policy initiatives focused on justice-impacted communities. They currently serve as Inside Policy Fellow with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights\, supporting systems-impacted organizers through legislative training. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThanh Tran is an Amerasian Vietnamese and Black filmmaker\, music artist\, and community organizer from Sacramento\, California. While incarcerated at San Quentin\, he co-founded Uncuffed\, an award-winning podcast\, and ForwardThis Productions\, one of the first film collectives led entirely by incarcerated people. He is now co-founder of New Krma Media and director of Finding Má\, a feature documentary about his family’s search for their unhoused mother. URL:https://ias.ucsc.edu/event/carceral-media-ecologies-and-how-to-break-them/ LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences\, 100 Panetta Avenue\, Santa Cruz\, California\, 95060\, United States CATEGORIES:Symposiums & Conferences,Visualizing Abolition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://ias.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/since-i-been-down-smaller.png END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR