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Heather Houser TMI Event Infowhelm

TMI Talk: The Climate Infowhelm

Zoom

Climate infowhelm is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by too much information about the environmental crisis. Heather Houser will discuss how infowhelm feels, sounds, and looks in various media and how contemporary art manages environmental knowledge and provides new ways of understanding environmental change. Audience Q&A will follow. Heather Houser is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ecosickness ...

The Critical Race Theory Forward Tracking Project - Event

TMI Talk: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Zoom

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy. ...

Laura Kurgan - GPS for the Brain

TMI Talk: GPS for the Brain: Networks, Urbanisms, Algorithms

Zoom

Laura Kurgan will talk about her recent work involving network science and urban theory. She will present work from the Center for Spatial Research on the Urban History of Algorithms: Homophily and Weak Ties, a history which not surprisingly lies dormant in its use in network science. She will also present new work on navigation theory in neuroscience, which revisits and asks questions about the canonical urban theory of Kevin Lynch (1970) and Fred Jameson's ...

Farid - Deep Fakes

TMI Talk: Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes

Zoom

Although varied in their form and creation, deep fakes refer to AI-synthesized image, audio, or video. Deep fakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. In this talk, Farid will provide an overview of how deep fakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how ...

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 ...

Wendy Chun, How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

TMI Talk: How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

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

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users' posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early- and mid-20th-century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese-American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis. A reception will follow. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Institute, which was launched ...

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 ...

Rupe Great Debate 2024

2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Is Housing a Human Right?

Campbell Hall Building 538, University of California, Santa Barbara, Mesa Rd,, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The dramatic housing shortage in California affects millions of residents and leads thousands to homelessness. The 2024 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate will address this issue by asking, “Is Housing a Human Right?” If so, our state faces a massive undertaking. Experts with diverse specialties and experiences will wrestle with some of our biggest challenges. How, for example, can we build low and moderate income housing when construction costs are high and community opposition is ...

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 ...

Reparations in California

Imagining California Panel Discussion: Reparations in California

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

Join us for a discussion on reparations in California with panelists Daina Ramey Berry (UCSB), Tiffany Caesar (San Francisco State University), and Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley), moderated by Giuliana Perrone (UCSB). Panelists will consider the history of reparations in the United States, explain why they are being considered in California, and assess the current status of plans for reparations in San Francisco as well as the state as a whole. Audience Q&A and a ...