UC Santa Cruz film professor Shelley Stamp said that the 1944 film noir classic “Gaslight” exposed sexual and psychological abuse in relationships and in Hollywood. She spoke at a “Classic” series screening hosted by UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center.
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When a resident of Wuhan, China wrote an online diary criticizing the government’s response to Covid-19, authorities retaliated by launching a disinformation campaign and propelling online hate toward her. This weaponization of the internet for political purposes parallels the information wars that occurred in the United States during the pandemic, said UCLA Chinese culture professor Michael Berry at a recent UC Santa Barbara Center for Taiwan Studies event.
The Walter H. Capps Center invited a panel of UCSB faculty to discuss holistic approaches to ending sexual violence on campus. Panelists stressed the importance of informal healing processes, or ‘alternate resolutions,’ as valid and useful for survivors.
UCSB’s World Indian Ensemble led an hour-long performance in the Department of Music’s Music Bowl, as part of its World Music Series. The ensemble is headed by Department of Music professor Scott Marcus and will hold an end-of-year recital on June 8th.
Oxford University researcher Emily Troscianko recently led a UC Santa Barbara workshop on trauma-informed pedagogy. Her research on disordered eating shows that traumatizing content can cause one to re-experience one’s own trauma. Troscianko discussed the importance of trigger warnings, urging writers and educators to consider the power of texts to affect their readers’ moods and behaviors.
The book, “Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design” by Canadian author Charles Montgomery was recently selected to be the UC Santa Barbara’s Reads Annual Program book of the year. Montgomery came to the UCSB campus to speak about the book and the underlying themes of how our happiness begins with a happy, livable, and well designed community. UCSB Reads Manager, Alex Regan, also shared her thoughts on the book and its timely anecdotes.
Music student Jason Cathcart is deeply involved in the arts at UCSB, and spends his time performing and sharing his love for music with the community. He plays about ten instruments, and is president of the Poets’ Club, where he recently released his own personal poetry magazine, Dizziness Great!
Humanities and Fine Arts student intern Faith Harvey moderated a discussion to mark Mental Health Awareness Month about the links between mental health and arts and humanities. She was joined by panelists Ellen O’Connell Whittet, a UC Santa Barbara continuing lecturer in the Writing Program, and Breana Gilcher, a UC Santa Barbara lecturer in the Department of Music. During this hour-long Zoom webinar, the HFA faculty members discussed their own mental health experiences, trends in mental health they’ve noticed among UCSB students and what advice they would give those suffering from burn out.
Diarmid Flatley, a Ph.D. candidate enrolled in UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology Program, discussed artificial intelligence and his work with “transmodal” arts in an interview with Environmental Studies major Lucian Scher.
UC Santa Barbara’s Sustainability Transportation Committee chair and English professor Ken Hiltner recently spoke about a transportation survey the committee sent out last month. The survey asked students questions about modes of transportation in order to come to a better understanding about why transportation emissions are so high on a campus that prioritizes bike culture.
Jaime Alves, Black Studies professor at UCSB, said that scholars should frame Blackness as a resistance to Latin American colonial narratives that have falsely asserted Blacks were fully integrated into society. This talk was part of the 21st Hispanic and Lusophone Conference, hosted annually by UCSB’s Spanish and Portuguese department.
If journalism is a first draft of history, then documentary is probably a second or third draft, says award-winning Filipino American documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz. But people should experience documentary as cinema, not as a historical account, she told a UC Santa Barbara audience following a recent Carsey-Wolf Center screening of her 2020 documentary A Thousand Cuts.
A UC Santa Barbara professor in the Writing Program Paul Rogers recently sat down for an interview about his research for a chapter of a book “Writing as a Human Activity: Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman,” he wrote. In the interview, Rogers discussed how students can contribute to the growing field of social entrepreneurship by using writing as a tool for social change.
UC Santa Barbara historian Salim Yaqub recently published his book on contemporary U.S. history, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945. Yaqub aimed to provide a “fresh look” at modern America by documenting modern events as recent as the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and Donald Trump’s presidency to help readers understand America’s past.
A Woman, Life ,Freedom art projection was displayed on campus earlier this week in solidarity with the struggle for women’s equality in Iran. Shiva Balaghi, a cultural historian and academic coordinator of the UCSB Area Global Initiative, collaborated with her colleagues at two nonprofit organizations, Mozaik and ArtRise Collective, to create the public art project.
UC Santa Barbara’s Writing Program invited Dhishal Jayasinghe, a former Global Studies and Philosophy double major and Professional Writing minor, to deliver a talk on the realities of life and career after graduating from college and working in Washington D.C.
A UC Berkeley computer science professor, Hany Farid, spoke to a UC Santa Barbara audience last week about the dangers of deep fake technology and artificial intelligence, as part of IHC’s Too Much Information (TMI) series.
Activists in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, including Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, visited UC Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center to speak about the increase in Anti-AAPI violence and bias in America after the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a panel discussion, Kulkarni gave a keynote presentation titled “Challenging Hate: How to Stop AAPI Violence.”
In 1951, Moris Sawda’i, an Iraqi Jew, left Baghdad for Israel and worked as an assistant editor on an Israeli film production team. In an unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I hoped to realize my dreams of becoming a great film director. However, at the end of this journey, the fact of working as a small contributor in a big cinema project left me depressed.” Sawda’i went from the top of the film business in his country of birth to starting over, said University of Oslo Middle East cultural historian Pelle Valentin Olsen at a recent UCSB event. The Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas and established the first Iraqi film studio in the 20th century.
Researcher and author Daniel Araya was co-hosted by the Center for Information Technology and Society and Center for Black Studies Research at UC Santa Barbara, where he discussed the rise of artificial intelligence in the global age. He warned of the potential effects of AI on global powers, societal structures, and the workforce, referencing the recent release of the AI ChatGPT.