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Judy Shepard visited UCSB to discuss the significance of her son’s murder and how it inspired the play “The Laramie Project,” which UCSB is now staging, directed by Eric Jorgensen, a PhD candidate in Theater and Dance. In 1998 when Matthew Shepard was just 21 years old, he was beaten, tortured and left to die in Laramie, Wyoming—a violent act fueled by anti-gay hatred. The wound of Matthew Shepard’s death has now been open for 20 years and produced a legacy that continues today.
Space architect and researcher Barbara Imhof spoke at UCSB about her current and past projects exploring human habitation of space. Her talk “The Stars Look Very Different Today (David Bowie)” was part of the Seminar series hosted by Media Arts & Technology.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and human rights advocate Jose Antonio Vargas visited UC Santa Barbara to speak about the challenges undocumented immigrants faced. He urged undocumented immigrants to stand up for legal recognition of their status in the United States. “When our presence is broadly criminalized, our very existence is an act of resistance,” said Vargas in a recent talk at Campbell Hall.
At the Active Shooter Preparedness Training hosted earlier this month by the Walter H. Capps Center, emergency physician Dr. Scott Sherr recounted the hurdles his team faced during the Las Vegas Music Festival shooting. Drawing from his experience, Sherr offered a major piece of advice for the general public to better prepare for future mass shootings.
The 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith came to visit UC Santa Barbara to share her poems and writing process. Before her talk in UCSB’s Campbell Hall, she spoke to poets and aspiring student poets at the Old Little Theatre in The College of Creative Studies, where Writing, English and Literature students asked questions about her inspiring poetry journey.
UC Santa Barbara’s Asian Resource Center (ARC) hosted a celebration for Lunar New Years last week with different Asian Pacific Islander clubs organizing activities and performances that showed off traditional aspects of different Asian cultures. “Lunar New Year is not only about family reunion and local communities. It is also about cultural diversity when celebrated globally such as today in this building,” said East Asian Studies professor Xiaorong Li.
Cornell University English professor Helena María Viramontes urged students and faculty in UC Santa Barbara’s English department to consider launching a Creative Writing program during her talk called, “Residing, Reciting, Reading: One Writer’s Perspective on the value of Creative Writing.” Currently, the College of Creative Studies is where UCSB students can pursue a Writing and Literature major, while the Writing Program offers courses in creative nonfiction. But Viramontes endorsed the life-changing value creative writing has to offer to a larger population of students.
The Los Angeles landscape does not adapt to the people living there, says Elizabeth Timme, co-founder of urban design non-profit LA-Más. “We have this environment that is friendly to the rules and unfriendly to people.” In her talk at UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Timme discussed efforts to make L.A. more habitable, vibrant, and pedestrian-friendly.
Japanese artist Aisuke Kondo recently spoke about his Diaspora Memoria exhibition from his Matter and Memory series, which explores the idea of reconstructing memories of self and history.
“In doing research about your own history, you come to see how the larger societal history has developed,” Kondo said Thursday in a talk hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Theater and Dance department. Kondo’s work explores the history of his great-grandfather who immigrated to the United States and was then forced to stay at the Topaz internment camp in Millard County, Utah.
Historian Jane Sherron De Hart’s new book “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life” marks the first full biography written about the second female U.S. Supreme Court Justice. But the biography wasn’t an easy accomplishment. In a talk hosted by the UCSB History Associates last weekend, De Hart spoke about the challenges she faced while writing the biography.
Scholars, activists, and healers discussed the lack of opportunity given to formerly incarcerated students in the education system a colloquium called: The “Outlaw(ED) Intellectuals: Critiquing Structures of Power from Within.” The day-long event in UC Santa Barbara’s McCune Conference room was sponsored by the College of Letters and Science, the UCSB Multicultural Center, the Center for Black Studies Research, and several other organizations across campus.
“Collecting is very expensive but it’s money well spent,” said UC Santa Barbara alum Tomás Sanchez at the walkthrough of his collection, ¡Chicanismo! Sanchez’s collection will be on display until December 8 at UCSB’s Art, Design and Architecture Museum in honor of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Chicano/a Studies Department.
In a two-day International Conference on Chinese Religio-Environmental Ethics and Practice, an array of speakers touched on environmental issues such as the extinction of animals and how traditional Chinese religious cultures view them. Panelists spoke about religious rituals like making trees and forests sacred, the care of animals, preserving sacred sites and native places, and the ethics of these religious practices.
The Carsey-Wolf Center launched Beatles Revolutions, a series showcasing The Beatles’ impact on culture and politics in the US. The series kicked off at Pollock Theater with a screening of A Hard Day’s Night, followed by a conversation with journalist and author Ivor Davis. The next event takes place this Thursday, January 24th from 7:00-9:15 p.m. at Pollock Theater with Let It Be, a documentary directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, followed by a discussion with musician and producer Alan Parsons.
“We hope that those who attend the series will learn more about The Beatles both in the 1960s and beyond,” said Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center Patrice Petro.
The United Nations has warned that there will catastrophic consequences if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced by 2030. Kinari Webb, founder the nonprofit Health in Harmony emphasized the importance of taking action before it becomes to late, at a talk sponsored by the Walter Capps Center last week. “We have 11 years to figure this out on our planet. What we do now matters forever,” Webb said.
At the Center for Information Technology & Society on Monday, University of Duisburg-Essen professor Nicole Krämer addressed the psychology of online opinion formation and its dangers. Krämer discussed fake news, filter bubbles, micro-targeting, and other side effects of online communication.
Linguistics professor Marianne Mithun was recently elected as the 95th President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the latest in a string of high profile UC Santa Barbara Linguistics achievements on the national level. As president, she will lead the meetings of the society, serve as the chair of the Executive Committee and appoint honorary members and non-elective committees. Meanwhile, linguistics professor Anne Charity Hudley received the LSA’s Linguistics, Language and Public award.
Decades before Colin Kaepernick played for the National Football League, world champion boxer Muhammad Ali publicly opposed the Vietnam War and was stripped of his heavyweight title and banned from boxing for years. Recently, Kaepernick has followed in his footsteps and knelt in silence during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, hoping to garner support and promote change as Ali did in 1971.
To Brown University professor Bonnie Honig, Kaepernick and Ali’s actions that demonstrated their refusal to comply to society’s expectations reflects a “long tradition of American citizenship.”
“The societal changes of the Late Roman Republic’s aristocratic class has implications for how historians compare the past to our current political landscape,” scholar Noah Segal said in a recent talk to faculty and students of the Classics department. A decline in military background among those who serve in office is one trend in ancient Rome that echoes today.
Segal, who specializes in populism in democratic societies, will represent UC Santa Barbara at an international Classics convention in early January.
President Trump’s policies have stirred a lot of criticism from both the public and government officials. Many disagreed with his so-called “travel-ban” policy, his “zero tolerance” immigration policy and his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords. Visiting Yale legal scholar and former advisor to the Dept. of State Harold Koh offered some legal grounds for optimism, explaining why these policies won’t last for long.
