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2023 Open House

IHC Open House

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 5, from 4-6 pm. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Imagining California, our 2023-24 public events series. Find out about our publicly engaged programs and funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts

Inaugural Talk - Moraga

Imagining California Inaugural Talk: Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga will present journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors. Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the ...

M.G. Lord - Is Barbie Feminist?

Imagining California Talk: Is Barbie Feminist? It’s Complicated

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In 1994, when M.G. Lord interviewed the California-based creators of the Barbie doll, she had no doubt Barbie would be as provocative in 2023 as she was in 1959. But Lord did not anticipate that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, would evolve into a touchstone for understanding feminism—as well as the star of a blockbuster attack on patriarchy. This talk will explore the Greta Gerwig effect and the 64 years of changes in ...

Mark Arax: The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

Imagining California Talk: The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk, journalist Mark Arax will discuss how California's capture of land and water is the story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders and devastation it has wrought. It's a tale of magic and madness in the arid West, of genocide and endless extraction, of redirected rivers and ever higher dams and deeper wells, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth made to give more even ...

Susan Straight - Event

Imagining California Talk: Writing Our Californias

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

For decades, America has imagined California novels as placed in locations like Hollywood or San Francisco. But, as Susan Straight will discuss in her presentation, other geographies are as beautiful, tragic, and full of narratives set in remote canyons, inland citrus groves, ancient ranchos, and hidden deserts. Straight's characters, who might be seventh generation Californian or people just arrived, live in the places she's known forever, hidden kingdoms of love and redemption amid the sycamore ...

Rosanna Xia Imagining CaliforniaEvent

Imagining California Event: California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us as Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, discuss sea level rise and the challenges looming over the California coast. Xia will draw from her new book, California Against the Sea, in which deeply reported stories braid together science, policy, and the state’s social history. The conversation will explore how the decisions we make today will determine where we go ...

Imagining California Talk: Aesthetic Mobility and Solidarities at Self Help Graphics & Art

Zoom

Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial ...

Ending Poverty in California logo

Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an ...