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Student Engagement and Enrichment in Data Science (SEEDS) at UC Santa Barbara is a cohort of students from a variety of majors and diverse backgrounds who study data science ethics and how algorithms have biases that further social, political, and economic divides. The students are mentored by professors, including UCSB’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Sharon Tettegah. And they hear presentations from researchers in various data science fields.
Theater, Dance, and Music at UC Santa Barbara have persisted through the COVID-19 pandemic with a common strength: creativity. Theater and Dance department chair Irwin Appel, UCSB Dance Company director Delilah Moseley, and UCSB Gospel Choir director Victor Bell recently spoke at a Humanities and Fine Arts Division event HFA Speaks: Arts Evolving in a Pandemic, to discuss how the arts have changed, struggled, and adapted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adapted for film from the acclaimed science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, son of the noble family that governs the planet Arrakis, and his epic destiny-driven journey to the most dangerous realm in the universe. Dune has been celebrated by both critics and audiences for its exciting storytelling and vivid world building– and coming up with the successful feature adaptation was no small feat. Dune screenwriter and UCSB alumnus Eric Roth spoke with a student audience about his creative process for the film at a recent installment of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Script to Screen series.
Known for his literary works about immigrants and Chicano Studies, author and professor, Rubén Martínez, has been awarded UC Santa Barbara’s 17th annual Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.
Earlier this month, Santa Barbara Dance Theater began its 2022 season under the new artistic direction of Brandon Whited, marking a return to live performance after a pandemic-induced hiatus. In downtown Santa Barbara the company presented a series of performances, curated by Whited with guest choreography by fellow dance faculty member Nancy Colahan and UCSB Dance alumna Weslie Ching.
A new UCSB Library exhibition, “Beyond The Wall: The Prison Art Resistance,” opened last week, featuring art created by currently and formerly incarcerated individuals. It showcases the creative talent hidden behind bars, and the lengths that incarcerated artists will go in order to produce and share their creations. The gallery display serves as a means to share the experiences of the featured artists and to invite UCSB students to learn more about programs that support the educational endeavors of those who have been incarcerated.
The Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba has housed 780 “unlawful enemy combatants” over its 20-year history, detainees who were tortured and denied human rights because of the prison’s status in a “legal black hole.” In a recent Center for Middle East Studies event, UC Santa Barbara professor Lisa Hajjar said that the 39 detainees who remain at Guantanamo have not left or been convicted due to government failures. But Americans and the United States government should still be concerned with their future.
During the current pandemic, a lack of access to labs has made modular synthesizers even more elusive than usual to media arts students. But in a recent lecture hosted by UCSB’s Center for Research in Electronic Arts Technology, UCSB alumna, Jiayue Cecilia Wu, described how free, online software programs and a "student-centered" approach to teaching makes modular synthesis accessible to students. Wu now teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $24.7 million in grants for 208 humanities projects across the country this week. Of those, two grants were awarded to faculty in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB.
UCSB Theater and Dance’s BIPOC Reading Series Festival took place over this past week, hosting a diverse group of emerging and veteran playwrights from across the country to collaborate with UCSB students and staff on their newest works. The festival, born out of a need for more diversity in theater, creates an interactive space for playwrights and performing artists of color to present their work.
The murder of George Floyd in May, 2020 sparked a re-emergence of anti-racist activism in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, exhausting people across the country — especially those directly impacted by racial injustice. UCSB Library archivists have mounted an exhibition that highlights the Santa Barbara community’s experience during the pandemic, in an effort to maintain the momentum of social justice movements and narrate history as it happens.
Blushing is an uncontrollable physical response to embarrassment, erotic desire, anger, and other emotions. In a recent lecture hosted by UC Santa Barbara's Early Modern Center, the author and scholar Valerie Traub explained how a bodily function which is shared by all races was denied to literary characters of color throughout the 15th to 18th-century early modern literary era.
Fighting a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis prompted UC Santa Barbara alumna Ashley Ratcliff to inspire others and publish her first book, a memoir titled “Jesus Year.”
UCSB’s Middle East Ensemble has performed at Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, marking their return to live performances since the COVID-19 pandemic required social distancing. The ensemble has been performing as an ethnomusicology performance ensemble in UCSB’s Music department for 33 years. The concert showcased the diversity of Middle East cultures through a series of music and dance performances from across the region, including pieces by Egyptian legend Umm Kulthum.
One of Marvel’s newest film releases, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, tells the exciting tale of martial-artist-turned-superhero Shang-Chi, who must confront his past and estranged father in his fight against the mysterious Ten Rings criminal organization. At the core of the action-packed story lies an intimate look at the complex father-son relationship between Shang-Chi and his father Wenwu, co-writer and director Destin Daniel Cretton told a UCSB audience last week. Cretton was speaking as part of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Script to Screen series.
Journalists Ann Louise Bardach and Lou Cannon house their career media archives at the UCSB library’s Special Research Collections. The two were recently guest speakers at a library event titled “Why Archives Matter,” where they told stories from their journalistic heyday and agreed they chose to store their collections at UCSB in order to make them easily accessible to the public.
Accessibility statements put out by universities serve as well-intentioned attempts to accommodate people with disabilities. But to disability studies scholar Tanya Titchkosky, these surface-level acts of "caring" are useless until public perceptions of disability change. In a recent talk organized by UCSB's Graduate Center for Literary Research, Titchkosky described how representations of disability in university life and society as a whole continue to alienate people with disabilities by reinforcing a "background of ordinary."
The UC Santa Barbara Department of Theater and Dance opened its new season with a production of 35 plays presented in 70 minutes, titled “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” Fast moving, improvisational, and interactive, the debut production showcased a small, eight-member ensemble cast running full speed around the stage, with the audience participating.
The Center for Taiwan Studies has come back to campus in full force this year, with a roster of speaker events that stress the ties between Taiwan studies and other departments, and also enhance the artistic component of its lectures to bring Taiwan studies alive beyond textbooks. In one week alone, the department was abuzz with a total of three lectures, in both the center’s Workshop series and Sounds, Screens and Stages series.
Located near UC Santa Barbara’s signature monument Storke Tower, the university’s Art, Design & Architecture (AD&A) Museum has reopened its doors to the public after 19 months of pandemic, welcoming Gabriel Ritter as its new director.
