Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Cavafy at the Margins: Geography, History, Desire
2013-10-19 00:00 (America/Denver)
For more information on this lecture, click here or contact Prof. Helen Morales in the UCSB Department of Classics.
Sponsored by the UCSB Argyropoulos Endowment in Hellenic Studies.
jwil 16.viii.2013

"Do not forget to send the Negro": Elite ties, enslaved lives in colonial Massachusetts and New York, 1660-1720
2013-10-21 00:00
Dr. Maskiell is an expert on family and household relationships within slavery as well as on slave networks in both Dutch and English colonial Atlantic America. The author of “Elite Slave Networks in the Dutch Atlantic,” published in Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Post Colonial Literature, (ed. Dewulf, Praamstra and van Kempen, forthcoming) she will talk to us about her current research.
This talk is made possible by support from the UCSB History Department, the UCSB Early Modern Studies Center, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, as well as additional funds provided by Prof. John Majewski for development of early American history and slavery studies.
hm 10/15/13

"The Story of Por-Por"
2013-10-23 00:00
This new film is located at the intersection of labor history and music history – about union drivers and the invention of honkhorn music in Accra, Ghana.
Steven Feld is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, who is currently Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico.
hm 10/9/13

“Beer, Beer, Beer!”
2013-10-24 00:00
Beer has become a familiar presence in American life, but it was once an oft-despised commodity,banned as part of Prohibition. How did this remarkable transformation from banned commodity
to emblem of the good life occur? Join us at the UCSB Faculty Club for an evening of celebration
and enlightenment, as History Prof. Lisa Jacobson explores the role World War II played in
changing American attitudes toward the commodity that in many languages means “liquid bread”.
To facilitate appreciation, we will sample a selection of pub food appetizers and Firestone beers.
Prof. Lisa Jacobson is a specialist in U.S. cultural
history of the late 19th and 20th centuries. She
has written on the history of advertising and the
family and children. Her current project is a
study of “Alcohol’s Quest for Legitimacy following
Prohibition”.
The Faculty Club is located on the east side of
the campus, with convenient parking, for $3, in
Lot 23. For a map, go to http://www.tps.ucsb.edu/
mapFlash.aspx
$25 (members and guests) ; $30 (non-members)
Call (805) 893-4388 for reservations.
hm 10/10/13

Real Estate Politics and the Remaking of the Jim Crow South
2013-10-25 00:00
Nathan Connolly is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and author of By Eminent Domain: Race and Capital in the Building of An American South Florida (2011).
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy.

Data Sharing: A Problem of Supply or of Demand?
2013-10-25 00:00
On October 25 at 2PM, Prof. Christine Borgman from UCLA will be speaking about how the sharing of research data affects scientific practice. Her talk is the Social Sciences and Media Studies Building, Room 2135
Abstract
Knowledge sharing in science includes sharing research data. Research funding agencies have focused on increasing the supply of data by requiring data management plans and data sharing. Policy makers have paid surprisingly little attention to the demand for data. It stands to reason that if scholars actively sought data for reuse, then more data would be shared. The few studies that exist on the demand for extant data suggest that researchers rarely are asked for their data and rarely seek data from other investigators. Many investigators have difficulty imagining who might want their data or for what purposes they might be useful. The talk will explore the supply and demand for scientific data reuse, drawing on studies in astronomy and sensor networks, and will discuss implications for science policy.
About the Speaker
Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. In 2012-13 she was on sabbatical at the University of Oxford where she was the Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at Balliol College, and also affiliated with the Oxford Internet Institute and the eResearch Centre. Prof. Borgman is the author of more than 200 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. Her monographs, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (MIT Press, 2007) and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000), each won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She conducts data practices research with funding from the National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, and Microsoft Research. Current collaborations include Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory, The Transformation of Knowledge, Culture, and Practice in Data-Driven Science, and Empowering Long Tail Research. Her next book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World, is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2014.
This event is co-sponsored by the “Machines, People, and Politics” RFG and the Center for Information Technology and Society

Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle
2013-10-25 00:00
Freedom Now! showcases photographs rarely seen in the mainstream media,which depict the power wielded by black men, women and children in
remaking U.S. society through their activism. This exhibition has been curated by
Martin Berger, Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz.
The exhibition runs from October 19 to December 13, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 5:30-7:30pm
Opening talk by Curator Martin Berger (UCSC), 4pm, Oct. 25.
On November 15th, there will be a panel discussion titiled
“Fifty Years after the March: Civil Rights in Historical Memory”
at the Museum as part of the Great Society at Fifty initiative.
1-3PM.
hm 10/22/13, 11/25

Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony
2013-10-28 00:00
Thomas Trezise will facilitate a conversation about his new book, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. Trezise will focus the discussion on chapter 1 of his book (“Frames of Reception”), which is available for downloading on the IHC website : www.ihc.ucsb.edu/witnessing.
Monday, October 28 / 2:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Sponsored by the IHC series The Value of Care and the History Department.
hm 9/13/13; 9/24, 10/26

Models, Idols, and Porn Stars: Selling and Consuming the Beautiful Man in Britain, 1950s-1970s
2013-10-28 00:00
This talk examines physique pictorial magazines, magazines intended for a female teenage audience, and gay pornographic magazines—to illustrate how celebrations of beautiful male faces and bodies functioned as important and ubiquitous sites of pleasure in post-war Britain. Men and women utilized images and textual descriptions of masculine facial and bodily attractiveness to articulate sexual desires and identities in the years after 1945. Through a close reading of a range of pictures and articles from several physique pictorials including Male Model Monthly, Man Alive, Boyfriend and Him Exclusive this paper illustrates the connections between understandings of masculine physical attractiveness, post-World War II consumer cultures, and the formation of British social identities.
Paul R. Deslandes received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920 (Bloomington, 2005) and a number of articles and essays on the history of British education, masculinity, and male sexuality. Deslandes is currently writing a cultural history of male beauty in Britain from the 1840s to the present.
Sponsored by the Dept. of History, the Dept. of Feminist Studies, The Center for Modern Literature, Materialism and Aesthetics, and the IHC’s New Sexualities RFG.
More Information from the IHC.
?? before 10/15/13; hm

Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in the Achaemenid Persian Empire
2013-11-01 00:00
The Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE) stretched over thousands of miles and included many different cultures. Thanks to textual, visual, and archaeological materials, we can reconstruct some of the intricate and sophisticated ways this empire governed its diverse population and the ways those individuals and cultures responded to imperial presence. This talk examines government archives, palaces adorned with relief sculptures, eating and drinking practices, gender relations, mortuary remains, and communication systems — including the original “Pony Express” — to illuminate the complexity and vibrancy of Achaemenid Persia.
Elspeth Dusinberre is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sponsored by the UCSB Departments of History and Anthropology in conjunction with the Santa Barbara Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.
jwil 06.x.2013

History of the Present: The Middle East
2013-11-01 00:00
History of the Present: The Middle East
Syria’s civil war. Egypt’s political crisis. Iran’s nuclear program. Drone strikes. With the Middle East dominating today’s headlines, and with controversy swirling around the U.S. role in that region, the history department invites you to Professor Salim Yaqub’s short, informative lecture, “You Say You Want a Resolution? Presidents, Congress, and War in the Middle East.”
The reception afterward will give you the chance to meet Professor Yaqub and other UC Santa Barbara historians. Find out what doing history is all about and what it is “good for” in the wider world. Refreshments will be served.
hm 9/12/13

"F@!% WORK: Why "Full Employment" is a Bad Idea --or-- When Work Disappears, What is to Be Done"
2013-11-01 00:00
The Colloquium on Work, Labor, and Political Economy is delighted to host the Rutgers University Historian James Livingston for a conversation on his latest work. Livingston is the author of Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (1986); as well as The World Turned inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009) and Against Thrift: why consumer Culture is Good for the economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (2011). Professor Livingston describes his latest writing project as an attack “on the fetish of work in every current incarnation of critical theory, from Marxism to psychoanalysis. It is entitled F@!% WORK: Why “Full Employment” is a Bad Idea, or, When Work Disappears, What is to Be Done.
The Colloquium meets on Friday, November 1 at 1 p.m. in Room 4041 of the Humanities and Social Science Building on the UCSB campus.
Center for the Study of Work, Labor, & Democracy.

Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
2013-11-07 00:00
You are invited to the annual Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture. This year’s guest speaker will be Jacob Darwin Hamblin; his talk will be drawn from his new and acclaimed book Arming Mother Nature. A description of the talk and information about the speaker is below. The talk will be held November 7, 2013 7:00 PM at the Loma Pelona Conference Center on the UCSB campus. Parking is available in Parking Lot 23 near the UCSB Faculty Club.
When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, the movement–and its dire predictions–owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture. In his talk, Hamblin argues that military planning for World War III essentially created “catastrophic environmentalism”: the idea that human activity might cause global natural disasters. This awareness emerged out of dark ambitions, as governments poured funds into environmental science after World War II, searching for ways to harness natural processes–to kill millions of people. Hamblin explains the history of how the Cold War coincided with and catalyzed the birth of modern environmental science. Along the way, we see how Cold War scientists, driven initially by strategic imperatives, learned to think globally and to grasp humanity’s power to alter the environment.
About the Speaker:
The author of Arming Mother Nature and other books, Jacob Darwin Hamblin writes about the history and politics of science, technology, and environmental issues. He was born in Germany and grew up on or near American military bases, before going to college and graduate school in California, where he earned a Ph.D. in History at UC Santa Barbara. As an adult he has lived and worked in France, England, and several universities in the United States. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many publications devoted to the history of science, technology, and the natural world. He currently resides in the American Pacific Northwest, where he is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University.

Fifty Years After the March: Civil Rights in Historical Memory
2013-11-15 00:00
A panel discussion featuring Martin Berger, Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz as well as UC Santa Barbara Professors Gaye Johnson, Black Studies; John S.W. Park, Asian American Studies; and Jeffrey Stewart, Black Studies. Moderated by Alice O’Connor, History.

So Rich, So Poor: Why it’s so Hard to End Poverty in America
2013-11-21 00:00
Peter Edelman is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law Center. During President Clinton’s first term he was Counselor to HHS Secretary Donna Shalala and then Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Earlier in his career he was a Legislative Assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Issues Director for Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential campaign. He will be talking about his book, So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America, published by The New Press in the spring of 2012. Edelman’s lecture is part of the 2013-14 Critical Issues in America The Great Society at Fifty: Democracy in America 1964/2014, and is co-sponsored by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
Event Flyer

Mourning Tulli-a: The Shrine of Letters in ad Atticum 12 with Cicero and Lacan
2013-11-22 00:00
Sponsored by the Department of Classics.
jwil 08.ix.2013

Robot Caregivers and Robo-therapy in Japan: Treating the "Trauma" of Aging
2013-11-26 00:00
After their own children, elderly Japanese apparently prefer robot caregivers and companions to foreign ones (in the increasingly likely event of a severe shortage of ethnic Japanese nurses and social workers). Robots are perceived by seniors, and by politicians too, of eliminating the socio-cultural anxieties provoked by foreign laborers and caregivers. (And for some right-wing conservatives, limiting the number of foreigners reinforces a tenacious ideology of ethnic homogeneity.) Already high-tech homes for senior citizens are part of a booming industry, and specialized robots are being developed to stabilize and even reverse the effects of aging-related dementia and depression. Moreover, those promoting the country’s robotization argue that US$21 billion of elderly insurance payments could be saved over the next decade by using robots instead of humans to monitor the health of senior citizens, who now comprise 25% of the population. Sociable, interactive robots have also become the primary subjects of a new field of study named “robot psychology” and “robo-therapy.” Robertson’s talk represents a shift in focus from the more usual association of trauma with the consequences of the experience or witnessing of graphic violence. In linking aging to trauma, she is drawing from Ann Kaplan’s feminist scholarship in which she makes the case for aging as traumatic in the sense of the elderly being as vulnerable to identity crises as are adolescents.
This talk is part of the IHC Value of Care series and is co-sponsored by the RFG Reinventing Japan, the East Asia Center, the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, the Department of History, the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Media Arts and Technology.
hm 9/26/13

Big Humanities Data
2013-11-26 00:00
Patrik Svensson is a professor in the Humanities and information technologyand director of HUMlab, Umeå University. His current research spans
information technology and learning, research infrastructure, screen
cultures and the digital humanities as an emerging field. Apart from having
main responsibility for HUMlab, he is currently heavily involved in Umeå
University’s new Arts Campus and the creation of a new platform for digital
media, culture and representation: HUMlab-X. Another prioritized area at
this point is strengthening strategic collaboration with selected national
and international partners.
http://patrik.humlab.umu.se/
This is an important talk for all those interested in the “digital humanities.”
UCSB student Anne Cong-Huyen visited at HUMlab last year; Lindsay Thomas will be going in December; former students Lisa Swanstrom and Mike Frangos have had postdocs there.
Hosted by the Transcriptions Project.
hm 11/22/13

El Capitan: The Story of the Capitan Grande Indians
2013-12-02 00:00
Professor Thorne’s new book, El Capitan tells the story of the seizure of El Capitan from theCapitan Grande Indians. Defining terms of their capitulation, the Capitan Grande people insisted
on being relocated as communities. Out of the geopolitical maelstrom of the Depression era
came the birth of two new reservations in San Diego County: Barona and Viejas.
Admission is free.
Presented by the Santa Barbara County Archaeological Society
hm 11/21/13

Darwin on the Cutting Room Floor: Evolutionary Biology and Film Censorship, 1930-1968
2013-12-03 00:00
Talk Description: Before 1968, censor boards in the US and UK dictated which aspects of science they considered appropriate for movies and which scientific subjects they considered indecent or immoral. This talk will explore how filmmakers between 1930 and 1968 crafted stories involving evolutionary biology and how religious groups attempted to control these evolutionary narratives through censorship. Often evolutionary themes fell victim to the “Hays Code” that was administered by Hollywood’s official censorship organization –the Production Code Administration (PCA). I will discuss how films, including Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Dr. Renault’s Secret (1942), were modified before production or edited after release to play down their inclusion of evolution and Darwinism in accordance with the PCA’s recommendations. I will also examine how the Catholic Legion of Decency’s censure of evolutionary themes in cinema changed after the 1950 Papal encyclical, Humani generis, acknowledged human evolution as consistent with Catholic Doctrine. The Legion’s censorship decisions for post-1950 films such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Planet of the Apes (1968) reveal how the Catholic Church continued to be conflicted about the moral implications of evolutionary narratives.
About the Speaker:
David A. Kirby was a practicing evolutionary geneticist before leaving bench science to become Senior Lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester. Several of his publications address the relationship between cinema, genetics and biotechnology. He has also studied how media professionals utilize, negotiate and transform science in order to tell stories about science in movies and on television. His book Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema examines collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry in the production of movies and demonstrates how these fictional texts affect real world science and technology. He recently received a prestigious Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust to investigate the interactions among the biosciences, religion and entertainment. He is currently writing a book titled Indecent Science: Science and Film Censorship, 1930-1968 which will explore how movies served as a battleground over science’s role in influencing morality.

End of Fall 2013 instruction
2013-12-06 00:00
Last day of Fall classes on December 6, 2013.
hm 7/15/13

Start of Winter 2014 Instruction
2014-01-06 00:00
Classes start Monday, January 6.
Monday, January 20: Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.
Monday, February 17: Presidents’ Day holiday.
hm 10/3/13

Caring Democracy: The Paradigm Changes
2014-01-09 00:00
HULL LECTURE ON WOMEN AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
The feminist ethic of care grew out of a challenge to the traditional public/private split with its exclusion of women from the public sphere. In the past generation, though, neoliberal economic and political policies have reduced the prospects for collective life in a “public” sphere. This talk will discuss how care, beginning from different ontological, epistemological, ethical and political premises, can serve as an overarching critique of neoliberalism.
Joan Tronto is the author of Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice and Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. She is the co-editor, with Cathy Cohen and Kathy Jones, of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader.
Sponsored by the Hull Lecture on Women and Social Justice, the IHC’s Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment, and the IHC’s Value of Care series.
hm 1/6/14

Junípero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California
2014-01-13 00:00
On Monday January 13 at 5:00 pm author Greg Orfalea will be speaking abouthis new book Journey to the Sun: Junípero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of
California. Afterward he will be signing copies of his book which will be
available for purchase at the event.
The event is free and will be held in the SBMAL Conference Room. For more
information contact Monica Orozco at director@sbmal.org or (805) 682-4713
ext. 152.

Kinet Höyük (Turkey) and the Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Seaports
2014-01-24 00:00
The twenty-year project (1992-2011) at Kinet Höyük, an ancient seaport near Iskenderun in Turkey, offers a long perspective on maritime life in the northeasternmost corner of the Mediterranean. Kinet can be identified with classical Issos, overlooking the plain where Alexander the Great defeated the Persians in 333 BCE; and earlier, with a Hittite harbor named Izziya (ca. 1500-1200 BCE). The site’s archaeological span is much longer, however. Excavations show that from prehistoric times to the Crusades, Kinet flourished within an economic network extending at least as far as Cyprus, and occasionally throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
The Kinet excavations also concluded that archaeological expectations for land-based settlements differ from maritime sites in fundamental ways. The norms for ancient Near Eastern sites would predict that Kinet’s remote location and small size entailed a modest, self-contained existence. This port instead enjoyed enduring prosperity based on well-connected enterprise. My lecture will present an overview of the project’s findings, and propose parameters for the archaeology of seaports, using Kinet Höyük as guide.
For more information visit the project web site.
Dr. Marie-Henriette Gates (Bilkent University, Turkey), received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology from Yale University.
Sponsored by the Santa Barbara Society of the Archaeological Institute of America with support from the UCSB Departments of History and Classics.
jwil 16.viii.2013

From Evolution to Immunology: Nature’s Contributors and the Development of a Scientific Journal, 1869-1990"
2014-01-27 00:00
AbstractThe British scientific journal Nature, founded in 1869, is now one of the world’s most prestigious scientific publications. This talk examines the ways that contributor interests have influenced Nature’s, development using two episodes from different points in Nature’s history: a debate about evolutionary theory in the 1880s, and a controversy about a provocative immunology paper in the 1980s. A lively 1886 discussion about George J. Romanes’s theory of “physiological selection” illustrates Victorian naturalists’ attachment to Nature as a venue for scientific debates—an attachment that transformed Nature, from a publication aimed at laymen to one written by and for scientific researchers. In 1988, editor John Maddox sought to increase Nature’s, scope by personally visiting the laboratory of Jacques Benveniste, author of a controversial immunology paper, to evaluate the quality of Benveniste’s scientific work. Nature’s, contributors pushed back; they strongly criticized Maddox’s actions and these criticisms influenced Maddox’s future editorial conduct. These episodes illustrate that, far from being a passive or static feature of modern science, scientific journals such as Nature, are dynamic institutions whose development is influenced by the needs and goals of scientific practitioners.

Cancer, Viruses, and the Expanding American State 1946-1982
2014-01-29 00:00
AbstractIn 1964, the National Cancer Institute established the multi-million dollar Special Virus Leukemia Program, which sought to apply the methods of Cold War defense planning to the production of a cancer vaccine. It would, as Life magazine enthused, “do more than hand out money and wait for results…it would plan research and make results.” Remarkably, when the Program was established, no human cancer virus was known to exist! Indeed, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, few areas of biomedical research generated more excitement—or controversy—than the search for a human cancer virus.
In this talk, I examine the history research on the link between viruses and cancer as a unique site for understanding the relationship between the biomedical sciences and the Federal government and how it was redefined in the context of broader debates concerning the role of the state in American society. While the management of cancer research began as the cause of administrators within the National Cancer Institute, it soon provided a focus for a grassroots campaign demanding that the government wage a “War on Cancer” in the late 1960s. The success of this campaign resulted in the dramatic expansion of cancer virus research in the 1970s.
Yet despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars and mobilizing thousands of scientists to study cancer viruses, the National Cancer Institute failed to identify a human cancer virus. While the War on Cancer disappointed activists and administrators alike, it was a boon for academic biologists, who had been among its fiercest critics. Cancer virus research played a critical role in the expansion of molecular biology. Subsequently, the infrastructure created by the state played a critical role in the rise of biotechnology and mobilization against HIV/AIDS.
By following the arc of cancer virus research during these decades, we are able to reflect on the significance of state expansion (and contraction) in the sciences for defining specific regimes of knowledge production, citizenship, and political economy in society at large.

Who Cares About Those Who Care? An Argument and Interaction
2014-01-30 00:00
Prof. Eileen Boris; January 30 at 4 p.m.; McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Organizing for Economic Democracy
2014-01-31 00:00
UCSB kicks off this year’s Critical Issues in America program with a symposium that looks back at – and forward from – the history of the grassroots War on Poverty to consider its enduring legacy for economic justice organizing today. Panels will bring together historians and activists building on 50 years of organizing for economic justice.
Background
Fifty years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union Address to ask Congress to join him in fighting an “unconditional war on poverty” through full employment growth, an all-out “assault” on discrimination andinvestments in education, job training, and health care. At the heart of the administration’s program was a bold plan for federal support of locally-organized programs of community action and social welfare provision developed with “maximum feasible participation” from the poor. By offering people a voice in creating local Head Start programs, community health centers, child nutrition, legal services and much more, the Community Action Program changed the dynamic of struggles for access to human services and job opportunities that had been going on for decades, and worked in concert with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to support movements for fair labor standards and workplace democracy.
Speakers include:
Annelise Orleck- Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Pete White- Founder & Co-Director, Los Angeles Community Action Network
Sophia Lee- Professor of Law and History, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Steven Pitts- Associate Chair, UC-Berkeley Labor Center Poverty Law/ Legal Services
Clare Pastore- Professor, USC Gould Law School
José Padilla- Executive Director, California Rural Legal Assistance
See also this UCSB press release about the Organizing for Economic Democracy event.

Following the Data: Environmental Archives between Geophysics and Biology
2014-02-03 00:00
AbstractIn this talk I will present my current project, which explores the practices and politics of large-scale data collection in the environmental sciences during the Cold War. One of the purposes of this project is to broaden the historical inquiry into how knowledge about the environment was produced, by exploring the practices of data collection in both physical and biological environmental sciences. I will illustrate my project by presenting two case-studies, one from the physical environmental sciences and another from biological environmental sciences. The first example draws on the history of the World Data Centers, organized to serve the International Geophysical Year (1957-8). I will take us through several moments that will serve as snapshots of the ways in which the practices of global data collection and data exchange in physical environmental sciences shaped and were shaped by the Cold War political economy in the 1950s and early 1960s. After establishing this background I will then turn to my second example and will trace the ways these practices were emulated in the biological environmental sciences, but also altered at the critical nexus of ecological science and environmental politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Taken together, these examples reveal a less familiar kind of narrative in the environmental history, illustrating how the focus on data practices, and “following the data” around, allows to re-think the history of environmental sciences and to broaden the inquiry into how the knowledge about the environment is produced within but also beyond its traditional relationship with ecology.
