As part of the recent memorial of the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, gun violence expert Robyn Thomas spoke at UC Santa Barbara about the future of gun safety in the United States. “It is an absolutely devastating crisis,” Thomas said. “But we have momentum on our side.”
Thomas is the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and her talk was hosted by the Walter Capps Center for Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
Booklets, musicals, websites, essays and short stories were just some of the creative mediums produced and presented by students at the Raab Writing Fellows Showcase last week at the Mosher Alumni House. For the third year in a row, the program has allowed students to embrace their passions and explore their topic of interest through year-long research under the mentorship of faculty members in the Writing Program. The program is generously funded by UCSB Trustee Diana Raab, an award-winning author and poet, and advocate for personal writing as a source of healing and empowerment.
At a club fair at UCSB, film student Spencer Williams was immediately drawn to InterVals A Cappella, a student-run music club. “I was so drawn into the vibe. Everyone is cool,” he said. For the last four years, Williams has focused on his film and media education and his a cappella group. As he is set to graduate soon, he reflects on the profound impact being a part of his a cappella group had on his life and what it has taught him as he steps into a new future.
Hosted by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Religious Studies department at UC Santa Barbara, Brown University modern culture and media professor Regina Longo screened and spoke about her film “Shoah: Four Sisters” at an event recently at the Pollock Theatre.
“These films are points of confluence, death of family members and harshness of ghettos or concentration camps,” she told an audience of a campus and community members.
Alex Meinhof is a second-year student majoring in philosophy at UC Santa Barbara. He is involved in the music scene on campus and works at UCSB’s radio station, KCSB-FM, which serves as both a means of entertainment of place of community for students. Meinhof recently spoke to HFA about his experience in this interview.
“It comes from the premise that we need a comparative frame for understanding cities in much of the world,” said professor Chattopadhyay in UCSB’s History of Art and Architecture department. In a recent talk, Chattopadhyay addressed the challenges of documenting temporary structures specifically in Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, where structures are built for their annual Hindu religious festival called Durgapuja.
The job of an environmental journalists is to take the scientific language of research studies and clarify it in a concise manner for the general public. It is their responsibility to inform the public on the current state of the environment.
In a recent interview, Kayla Curtis-Evans shared what drew her to pursue this field and what she plans to achieve in the future.
Inspired by fellow student and artist Erika Kodama and her work in Little Tokyo at its Changing Tides exhibit, Quan Nguyen writes to express the impact that art, joining the Nikkei Student Union, and sharing the Asian American experience have had on his life.
Film and Media Studies major Katelyn Zamudio recently produced Playdolls, a documentary that looks at the issue of human trafficking from different perspectives. In a recent interview, Zamudio discusses her experience bringing this issue to light in an empathetic way.
In a recent interview, Raymok Ketema, a first-generation African American college student pursuing her PhD in History at UCSB, discussed her project for the Center for Black Studies Research on minorities in engineering and why she perseveres in her work for women, the Black community, and other people of color.
Third-year student Zeina Safadi, majoring in political science with minor in professional writing, is accustomed to public speaking. As she works towards graduation and a future career in law, she balances her academic life and jobs: undergraduate peer advisor, Mock Trial president, legal assistant at the law offices of Robert B. Locke, and attorney general at UC Santa Barbara. With an impressive resume and a facility for public speaking, Safadi spoke in a recent interview about the ways public speaking has played an important role in her life.
It’s a “dystopian fiction tragi-comedy set in 2050” that explores “our desire of a technological utopia that is supported by human greed and inevitable climate change,” said Maiza Hixon, a graduating Master of Fine Arts student.
Hixon recently held a reading of her first written play Chimera at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum in conjunction with the opening of the 2019 MFA thesis exhibition Temporary Clash.
“Intimate labor and the workers who performed it have always been central to the history of capitalism,” University of Wisconsin historian April Haynes said in a recent talk at UC Santa Barbara. She argues that intimate labor and sex have always played an important part in the United States’ economy.
Haynes, a UCSB alumna, shared her research on intimate labor from the 1790s to the 1860s during her talk for the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.
Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN) is the ambitious year-long project organized by students in Kapatirang Pilipino (KP), an organization which fosters a close-knit network of Filipinx-American students at UCSB to promote social, cultural, political, and academic ties within the community. The Filipinx student group just celebrated its 40th anniversary on the UCSB campus and serves as the powerhouse behind nearly three decades of Pilipino Cultural Nights.
“I learn about different indigenous cultures, and the dances that originate there and what inspired those performances,” a student said. “I learn about the hardships of the Filipinx people and become aware of matters in the past and present.”
In celebration of the 2019 Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Temporary Clash, The Art, Design, & Architecture Museum held a Friday evening reception in conjunction with the Art Department. Students, faculty, and community members admired the works of the eight featured artists—Maiza Hixson, Madeleine Eve Ignon, Adam Jahnke, Kayla Mattes, Elisa Ortega Montilla, Andrew Morrison, Echo Theohar, and Christopher Anthony Velasco. Temporary Clash highlights the M.F.A. students’ strikingly diverse styles, mediums, and messages, while collectively portraying the human experience.
“Stanford. Harvard. Yale. Berkeley.
These were just a few of the universities that my classmates from the second-ranked school on the list of Best College Preparatory Public High Schools in California went to. Going to community college was seen as failure in the Bay Area, a stigma that I could feel from the gaze of everyone who asked me where I was going.”
In a candid and inspiring piece, Esther Ho reflects on attitudes toward community college, and how she pushed past them to succeed academically and financially, ultimately landing at UC Santa Barbara.
“Great ancestors, you are breath, you are bridge, you carry us over tumultuous time,” recited New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson to a Tuesday evening spoken word event at UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center. As she does below, she conveys the beauty and pain of being human into words.
“We often say that living in New Orleans is an act of resistance,” she said. She described the area as both a home and a burial ground, where its residents avoid talking about slavery’s legacy on the city’s culture. When people start digging to build a pool, she said, they often find bones in the ground.
As a transfer student spending his first year at UC Santa Barbara Omar Reyes is still figuring what he wants to do during his time at college. Through a project in the English Department’s Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellow Program, Reyes has learned to balance his individual work with finding community and seeking knowledge from his colleagues.
“I consider that evening in May 2018 and the months of work leading up to it to be some of the most memorable and impactful experiences of my life,” says Giovanna Vicini, a graduating Film & Media Studies and Communication double major at UCSB, of hosting the 27th Annual Reel Loud Film & Arts Festival onstage at Campbell Hall. “My teammates and I led the organization toward record-breaking growth, achieving Reel Loud’s most competitive year to date.”
While Olivia Saunders isn’t majoring in Linguistics, her major in Communication has provoked many questions from others about whether she wants to pursue speech therapy. That led her on a search to learn more about Linguistics, the major that is most closely linked to speech therapy. She found that its career options and students’ pursuits go much further, as she explains in this article.
