Feb. 28 & March 7, 2019: Creating Participatory and Community Engaged Museums
Nina Simon is the outgoing director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) and incoming CEO for Of By For All. In this interview, we discuss rebuilding of the MAH to reach an unprecedented level of financial stability, what she’s learned about her own leadership style, about realizing one’s own career potential, and about the Of By For All movement.
March 14 & 21, 2019: How Algorithms Can Expose Racism Dr. Safiya Noble, Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies, and a visiting faculty member to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication, is the author of the best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press, 2018). We discussed her book and her overall research about the design of digital media platforms and their impact on society.
Jan 3, 2019: Global Yoga and Social Justice Originally aired on Transformation Highway on August 24, 2017, this interview with Jackie Sue Powell, certified yoga instructor in Santa Cruz, California is about global yoga, social justice and well-being. Jackie discussed her commitment to make yoga accessible, both in terms of cost and imagining yoga practices outside the studio. She spoke about her life-changing experiences teaching and learning yoga around the world, including Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Palestine. We also talked about the role yoga could play in improving the well-being of social justice activists.
Jan. 10, 2019: Writing About Love An interview with UC Santa Cruz Professor Micah Parks of Literature about her new book True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape (2018, Outpost 19). We discussed her unique upbringing living in a log cabin on a commune and how that sparked her creativity and love of reading and about the writing of her latest book.
Jan. 17, 2019: #IStandWithTeachers and the LASUD Strike An interview with Theresa Montaño, Vice-President of the California Teachers Association (CTA) about the unprecedented Los Angeles Unified School District strike. Dr. Montaño has an extensive teaching career at all levels of education in California public schools. Now a professor of Chicana/Chicano Studies with an emphasis in education at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), Dr. Montaño research interests include: teacher activism; Chicana/o and Latino/a educational equity; critical multicultural education; and Bilingual/ELL education. Dr. Montaño believes that these are crucial times for public education and for CTA.
Jan. 31, 2019: WoC in Academia, Mentoring, and Migration Research
Dr. Melissa Guzman-Garcia, Assistant Professor of Latino/a Studies at San Francisco State University, discusses being a women of color/Latina faculty member in academia, about mentoring, and about her research on migration and religion.
June 7th: The upcoming Mexican presidential elections & US-Mexico relations
An expert in Latino and Mexican politics, Dr. Adrian Félix offers his analysis of the upcoming July 2018 Mexican presidential elections as well as the state of US-Mexico political relations. Formerly of UC Santa Cruz’s Latin American and Latino Studies department, he joins the Ethnic Studies faculty of UC Riverside in Fall 2018.
June 14th: Brown Girl Surf & WOC Surfers Brown Girl Surf is an organization committed to diversifying the surf sport by training and mentoring girls of color from the Bay Area through their programs in the water (including summer camps), and programs out of the water. Marley Reynosa, Program and Events Manager and Lead Surf Instructor at Brown Girl Surf, is an avid surfer who has competed in national surf contests in her home country, the Dominican Republic. Her experiences as a female surfer in the Dominican Republic and as a Latina in the U.S. fuel her dedication to empowering women of color through outdoor recreation.
Remainder of June and July features re-airing of popular interviews with original shows returning in August.
February 1st: Cancer Care & Prevention for American Indians and Alaska Natives Dr. Emily Haozous earned her MSN and PhD from Yale University School of Nursing and is currently an Associate Professor and Regent’s Professor at the University of New Mexico College of Nursing. Dr. Haozous discussed her cancer research focused on improving symptom management and cancer outcomes for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Dr. Haozous works from a social justice lens to address issues of health inequities in indigenous communities. She is a member of the Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache Tribe and is from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She will be the keynote speaker for the American Indian Health Symposium, called “Hearts, Minds, and Futures” at UC Santa Cruz on Feb. 10, 2018.
February 8th: A coup in Brazil? Dr. Patricia de Santana Pinho is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of several publications on blackness, whiteness, racism, and forms of resistance to racism in Brazil, including Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press, 2010). Her latest book, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2018), examines the construction of black transnational solidarity within the geopolitical context of the black diaspora. Pinho is a native of Salvador, Bahia and has a PhD in Social Sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP, Brazil. She spoke about the dire political situation in Brazil following the coup of former president Dilma Rouseff and now the targeting of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seeking re-election.
February 15th: Against the Anthropocene T.J. Demos is a Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz, and he is the Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and discussed his latest book called Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017). He addressed the meaning of Anthropocene and neoliberal sustainability, and spoke about his views about the future of the environmental justice movement today.
February 22nd: The Meaning of Food Justice A conversation with two key organizers of the UC Santa Cruz conference “Dig In: Cultivating Inclusive Approaches to Food Justice,” (held on March 2, 2018). Dr. Linnea Beckett (Food Justice Coordinator, Colleges Nine and Ten, UCSC) and Chris Lang (Environmental Studies Graduate Student, UCSC) addressed the meaning of food justice, discussed racism and racial dynamics in the vegan movement, and what the process and practice of decolonizing food means to them.
January 4th & 11th: The #Metoo Movement and What’s Next Dr. Ashwini Tambe is an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at University of Maryland-College Park. She has recently been writing about the #metoo movement. We discussed the precursors to this public outcry about sexual harassment, abuse, and violence; what it means to survivors/victims to be living through this moment; and how we should understand the circle of complicity that has emboldened this behavior. We also reflected on what it means to have a US president in office with accusations of sexual harassment and assault and about the crowdsourced survey created by Dr. Karen Kelsky regarding sexual harassment in academia.
January 18th: One Year Anniversary of the Women’s Marches Dr. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Chair and Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a return guest, discussing the 1-year anniversary of the Women’s Marches, the emergence of the #metoo movement, and her assessment of the challenges from 2017 under the Trump Administration.
November 2nd: The Gail Project: An Okinawan-American Public History Project The Gail Project: An Okinawan-American Dialogue is a multi-year public history project involving professors and undergraduate student researchers. As the project director, UC Santa Cruz Professor Alan Christy spoke about the extent of military occupation of Okinawa today, about Charles Eugene Gail (the namesake of the project) and about the extensive labor involved in creating a digital public history project. He explained the ways in which students played a key role as project collaborators. Alan Christy is an associate professor of history and provost of Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz.
September 7, 2017: Part 2 of my interview with Dr. Rebecca Hernandez Rosser, Director of UCSC American Indian Resource Center.
**See interview clip from August 24th for full interview.**
September 14, 2017: A Story About Climate Change & Forcible Displacement in Kivalina, Alaska An interview with Dr. Christine Shearer, a Senior Researcher at CoalSwarm, an organization that is mapping and analyzing all major proposed coal projects on the globe. Dr. Shearer is the author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (2011, Haymarket Press). She discusses the effects of climate change on the village of Kivalina, located in a remote area of Alaska. Dr. Shearer discusses how climate change is forcibly displacing this community that has agreed to a community relocation over 20 years ago. However, no federal resources are available to facilitate this relocation. Dr. Shearer also addresses a lawsuit filed by the village of Kivalina against 24 fossil fuel companies, which was recently dismissed.
September 21, 2017: Race, Critical Pedagogy, and Democratizing Education An interview with Professor Zeus Leonardo of UC Berkeley’s Education Department. We discussed his research on race and pedagogy, about the challenges facing public education today, and about the differences between white privilege and white supremacy as a framework to discuss whiteness. We also discussed the events happening in the city of Berkeley and at UC Berkeley by right-wing groups seeking to disrupt the city, specifically discussing the enormous financial burden to provide security for these speakers.
September 28, 2017:What It Means to be #FirstGeneration
An interview with Dr. Rebecca Covarrubias, Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCSC and the Director of The Culture & Achievement Collaborative. She is a first generation college student and now faculty member who helped launch UCSC’s First Generation Initiative to raise the visibility of the First Generation community at UCSC. We discussed the cultural challenges facing First Generation students. Being a native of Phoenix, we also talked about her reaction to the presidential pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaoi of Phoenix.
July 6, 2017: Incarceration Identity & the Consequences of Racial Sorting. An interview with Sociology assistant professor Patrick Lopez-Aguado of Santa Clara University about his forthcoming book titled Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity (University of California Press, 2018). His research interests include Race and Incarceration, Juvenile Justice, Youth and Street Cultures, and Urban Ethnography and he teaches courses on the Principles of Sociology, Sociology of the Criminal Justice System, Gender and Justice, and Sociology of Deviance.
July 13 & 20, 2017: Fish Contamination in Elkhorn Slough. An interview with Fred Evenson co-founder of the Ecological Rights Foundation and Annie Beaman and Marianna Del Valle Prieto Cervantes of Our Children’s Earth Foundation about fish contamination in Monterey County’s Elkhorn Slough. We discussed which specific fishes are of concern, the petition to have a permanent fish advisory at Elkhorn Slough, and bilingual outreach efforts to the predominately local Latino/a communities who fish here to provide for their families. This July 20th show includes a bonus segment in Spanish with Mariana Del Valle Prieto Cervantes about the impact of fish contamination on the local Latino/a fishing community.
July 27, 2017: Academic Freedom Today. An interview with Dr. David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and Executive Committee member of California Scholars for Academic Freedom about academic freedom. We discussed the definition of academic freedom, the work of the California Scholars of Academic Freedom, the increasing surveillance in social media about professors’ online posts, even when they are not representing their institutions. Of particular concern are scholars of Middle Eastern studies, specifically those who study Palestine and are critical of Israeli policies. Lastly, we discussed resources available for scholars who are on the receiving end of an attack on their academic freedom.
June 13, 2017: Spotlight Interviews. Interview highlights featuring excerpts with Professor Vijay Prashad, a Professor of International Studies and South Asian History at Trinity College in Connecticut and a renowned journalist (air date May 2 & 9, 2017), Professor Catherine Ramirez, Director of the Chicano Latino Research Center and Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz (air date April 11, 2017), and Claudia Lopez, a PhD candidate in Sociology, with Designated Emphases in Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies, at UC Santa Cruz (air date May 16, 2017).
May 2 & 9, 2017: Resistance. A two-part interview with Professor Vijay Prashad, the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studiesat Trinity College to discuss the role of moral outrage in this current political moment, the security of journalists, the state of mainstream media, an evaluation of the first 100 days of 45’s administration, and much more!
May 16, 2017: Forced Displacement in Colombia. An interview with Claudia Lopez, Ph.D. candidate of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. The interview focuses on Lopez’s dissertation research, which examines the urban resettlement and integration of rural internally displaced persons in Medellin, Colombia. Her dissertation is titled “The Life-Cycle of Forced Migration: The Lives and Politics of Rural Internally Displaced Persons in Medellín, Colombia.”
May 23, 2017: CARECEN-SF and San Francisco’s immigrant families. An interview with Kati Barahona-López, Ph.D. candidate in the department of Sociology of UC Santa Cruz and Senior Case Manager at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) in San Francisco. We discussed her work with CARECEN-SF where she provides immigrant families and unaccompanied minors with personalized and comprehensive case management to support their family’s well-being. We also discussed her dissertation research, which focuses on the role that deportation proceedings have on the day-to-day experiences of migrants, in particular unaccompanied minors living in San Francisco, CA.
May 30, 2017: The Neoliberal Project, Latinx Artists, and the Art Market. An interview withProfessor Arlene Dávila of New York University about her scholarship in the field of Latin American and Latino Studies. We discussed her most recent book (El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America published by the University of California Press in 2016) and her new research project about the marketing and circulation of Latino/x art within the context of a global art market that is Eurocentric, elite, and exclusionary in its structure. We concluded the interview talking about her concerns regarding the state of academic freedom for scholars challenging the status quo. ReadLatino/a Art: Race and the Illusion of Equality by Arlene Dávila.
