Committee on Faculty Research Lecture

The Adventures of Form

Nonliving beings make worlds, and stories, through their physical form—just as living beings do. The adventures of infrastructure as form take us beyond its designated role as service provider into feral territory, where it hooks up with all kinds of creatures, human and nonhuman, living and not, and both generous and deadly. This talk takes listeners to the town of Sorong in Indonesian Papua, where Indonesian settlers have overwhelmed and displaced Indigenous Papuans through infrastructure. Infrastructures here can be suffocating and violent as they transform the land; waste places can be gifts. The talk follows physical forms in action in building the settler city, complete with its chronic floods, disappearing plants and animals, and still remaining, if largely unrecognized, spaces of refuge.

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Program

The Whole Time…
A Redwoods Rasanblaj Epic Poem
on 7 Pwen

Inspired by Sinéad O’Connor and 11th Hour’s caffeine chronicles, this epic stream of consciousness ethnographic poem meditates on origins, a theory of everything, the dark arts, shadow work in the upside down of arboreal classrooms in these redwoods on Indigenous Land of the so-called holy cross…

Lacing ancestral chants, cosmos spaciousness, history with misfit tales, this non psychedelic surrealist journey explores the contours of linear and all-around time in search of aliveness on scorched earth while ruminating on the impossibility of all sentient beings everywhere experiencing peace among the plantocracy with their disdain for brilliance where praxis is a floating signifier and our humanity is routinely questioned. 

Program

Research Directions on Communication Protocols for Intelligent Information Infrastructures

The computer networks we enjoy today have been built based on the initial designs by giants in the field of computer networks dating back to the 1960’s to 1980’s. These architectures and protocols have proven to be remarkably useful; however, the communication, computing, and storage resources available today are many orders of magnitude larger and far more affordable than researchers could have ever imagined 50 years ago. The availability of vast computing resources today allows us to reimagine how the Internet could operate if far more machine intelligence were used inside the networks themselves, rather than just at the servers and clients using them, and to develop new network architectures and protocols for intelligent information infrastructures. In this talk I describe early results showing how communication protocols can be reimagined taking into account machine intelligence and memory, and outline research directions for the development of protocols for intelligent information infrastructures.

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Program

Silent Speech, Migratory Gesture

Climate change, economic inequality and violence have caused over 280 million people to migrate from their country of origin in just the last few decades. This talk considers how the visual arts articulate the personal impact and the systemic conditions of this devastating human experience. In hauntingly poetic and pointedly activist works, contemporary artists explore the geopolitics of migration. Bodies become the surface for writing, gestures evolve into map making, language comes under erasure. Producing a kind of silent speech, artists track tensions of visibility and invisibility, displacement and transnational movement in the lives of everyday migrants.

This lecture draws from a larger research project exploring speech and silence in the history of art, with a special emphasis on the role of art as a form of political democracy.

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Program

Touching Extinction: A Wildlife Conservation Love Story

The lifelong journey of two wildlife biologists trying to save the kingdom of carnivorous mammals and ourselves

The pace of animal extinctions has accelerated in recent years, such that the calculated average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is 72-100 times greater than expected from natural causes. Big, fierce mammals have been especially impacted, with African lions, Alaskan sea otters, Greenlandic narwhals, Coastal killer whales, Hawaiian monk seals and many more disappearing before our eyes. Twenty-five year ago, my husband, Jim Estes, and I decided that we had to do something to stop the downward trajectory of wildlife. As field biologists working on opposite ends of the globe, we had independently witnessed the underlying forces driving a sixth mass extinction during our scientific lifetimes. The realization of what was about to be lost devastated us. We wondered, what would happen if we combined our scientific careers and expertise to try to save the kingdom of carnivorous mammals?

This lecture is our wildlife conservation story. It crosses the globe and scientific disciplines to explore how large carnivorous mammals are uniquely built, and how a rapidly changing world due to anthropogenic pressures now threatens the survival of the world’s most iconic species. Most importantly, our discoveries directly connect you to the wilderness, not just because our daily lives impact wild animals, but because wild animals hold the secret to our own survival.

Program

Responsible Data Science

Data science is an emerging discipline that offers both promise and peril. Responsible data science refers to efforts that address both the technical and societal issues in emerging data-driven technologies. Prof. Getoor is a computer scientist who is well known for her theoretical work that integrates logic and probability to reason collectively and holistically about context in structured domains. In this lecture, she will describe some of the opportunities and challenges in developing the foundations for responsible data science. How can machine learning and AI systems reason effectively about complex dependencies and uncertainty? Furthermore, how do we understand the ethical and justice issues involved in data-driven decision-making? There is a pressing need to integrate algorithmic and statistical principles, social science theories, and basic
humanist concepts so that we can think critically and constructively about the socio-technical systems we are building. In this talk, she will lay the groundwork for this important agenda.

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From the Great Inflation to the Great Recession and Beyond: The Interplay of Monetary Theory and Policy

Over the past 50 years, the U.S. and other industrialized economies have experienced the Great Inflation of the 1970s, the Great Moderation that stretched from the mid-1980s to 2007, and the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008-2009. The actions by central banks such as the Federal Reserve during each of these episodes have been influenced by academic research in monetary economics. And research in monetary economics has in turn been affected by lessons drawn from these policy actions. My lecture will trace these two-way interactions that have led from the heyday of monetarism to an environment of monetary theory (and policy) divorced from money and explore their implications for business cycles, unemployment, and inflation.

Language Through the Lens of Diversity

The ease and efficiency with which children acquire their first language(s) reveals that the capacity to know and use language is deeply human. It also raises the possibility that all languages have the same design–universal characteristics that make language acquisition possible. Are these views challenged by the great diversity of the world’s languages? In this talk, Sandra Chung explores this question from the perspective of Chamorro, an understudied language spoken in Micronesia. She suggests that while language diversity is real, language universals emerge when ‘small’ languages are investigated in the same depth as first-world languages.

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Beyond the DNA Code: Transmission of Developmental Instructions from Parents to Offspring

Professor Susan Strome studies germ cells, which are the progenitors of sperm and eggs and of future generations of organisms. A fundamental challenge in developmental biology has been the identification of mechanisms and genes that instruct a cell in the developing embryo to become a germ cell, as opposed to becoming a cell that contributes to the body (soma) of the organism. Throughout her career, Professor Strome has studied how germ cells arise in the embryo and how they maintain their ability to self-renew. Using nematodes as a model organism, she has identified genes that determine whether a cell becomes a germ cell or a body (somatic) cell.

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PrisonWorld: How Mass Incarceration Transformed U.S. Prisons, Impacted Prisoners, and Changed American Society

Over the last 35 years, psychology professor Craig Haney has very likely spent more time inside American prisons than any other social scientist, studying the psychological effects of incarceration. He has witnessed firsthand the profound transformation that has taken place in the American prison system, during a period that has been termed the “era of mass incarceration.” Since the publication of his well-received book, Reforming Punishment (2006), he has continued to document and assess conditions of confinement in many of the country’s harshest and most severe prisons. Professor Haney’s Faculty Research Lecture will illustrate and analyze what he has learned about the effects of this transformation in U.S. prison policies and conditions, including the rise of so-called “supermax” prisons, and discuss impact of this transformation on the prisoners most directly affected by it, on normative penal practices throughout the country, and on the norms and values of the larger U.S. society.

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The Higgs Boson Unleashed

This joint presentation of the Faculty Research Lecture is a first in Santa Cruz history. The long search for the Higgs boson has recently been successful and the UCSC Academic Senate is proud ot honor these tow faculty who played major roles in this important discovery.

Rural Women, Memory, and China’s Collective Past

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this talk, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of women in rural Shaanxi province during the early decades of state socialism, the 1950s and 1960s. She suggests that we think of gender not as a structure, but rather as a fractured, unpredictable, and expansive terrain. Beginning with the memories of a former child daughter-in-law turned village activist, she asks whether rural Chinese women had a revolution, and if so, when and what sort of revolution it was. Such questions encourage us to consider others that preoccupy historians: when is gender a useful category of historical analysis? How is the historical record shaped in interactions with the present moment? What counts as an event? Who gets to decide?

Across a Sea of Suns: Charting Distant Worlds, Other Earths

This talk will chronicle a 16-year search using the telescopes at UC’s Lick and Keck Observatories to find potentially habitable Earth-like worlds around the nearest stars, worlds that our distant space faring descendants may someday travel to and ultimately inhabit. Well over 1000 planets are now known in and around our stellar neighborhood, but almost all are large gas giants like Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus, or small hellish rocky worlds equivalent to Earth-sized glowing charcoal briquets. Few if any are likely to provide habitable conditions where life might flourish. In the continuing push to find Earth-like worlds, our search has recently achieved a major milestone: the detection of rocky planets that are nearly Earth-sized, and that orbit in the Habitable Zone of their star. These planets are very stable places where surface water could exist in liquid form for the billions of years required for evolution to work its magic. They are a key part of the answer to the question- “Is there life elsewhere in the Universe?”.

Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, has designed, built, and used high-precision spectrometers to find new worlds outside our solar system during his 33 years with UCSC.

In 2010, Vogt and a team of planet hunters announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting a nearby star at a distance that placed it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. Further observations are needed to confirm the discovery, which remains controversial

To Be… and… Not to Be

Paul Whitworth is a theater artist and scholar of uncommon distinction
and range. Since beginning his career at the prestigious Royal Shakespeare
Company, he has performed and directed professionally in many theaters in
England and the United States. His association with UC Santa Cruz began in
1984 when Shakespeare Santa Cruz invited him to play Prince Hal in their
production of Henry IV, Part I. As a professor of Theater Arts at UCSC and
former artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Whitworth has sought to
promote a creative exchange between scholarship and performance.

Campus news article

Migration and Poverty in Santa Cruz County

This lecture will present a decade of research conducted in Santa Cruz County about the intersecting processes of migration from Mexico and the causes of poverty, and how these affect migrants and Mexican Americans. Professor Zavella will discuss how those who have migrated, as well as those who only observed families and communities deeply immersed in transnational migration, develop what she calls “peripheral vision,” a sense of feeling displaced and a transnational imaginary that includes a comparison of daily life in relation to that on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Children of the Stars

How the violent deaths of stars create the conditions for life in the universe

Our lives are intimately entwined with those of the stars – not through the patterns that they make on the sky – but because without stellar death, we could not exist. The universe 13.7 billion years ago, right after the Big Bang, was composed of only hydrogen and helium. The other 79 stable elements of nature (carbon, oxygen, iron, and the rest) have been created in stars, both by stable nuclear fusion and in titanic explosions called supernovae. The mechanisms whereby stars explode and produce the elements of nature are still poorly understood and are fascinating in their own regard. Sometimes the explosions produce gamma-ray bursts, flashes of short wavelength radiation with apparent luminosities a billion times brighter than the sun. The lecture will cover the origin of the elements and current theory regarding the deaths of stars, including the potential hazard to life posed by gamma-ray bursts.