Dance and Psychology major Yuna Choi has been planning the Mini Beach Ball hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s cotillion club. The Mini Beach Ball, a collegiate dance competition, will be held later in May. In a recent interview, Choi talked about her experience planning the upcoming dance competition and what she hopes to accomplish by coordinating this year’s Mini Beach Ball.
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.
In an interview, UCSB writing professor Ilene Miele discusses Starting Lines, a yearly compilation of student work used to teach future writing students. Miele describes the motivation behind the launch of the publication and its impact on the lives of hundreds of students and alumni alike.
“Although I enjoyed experiencing the diverse culture and people on campus, a sense of homesickness would always strike me when I talked to my parents on the phone. I felt lost and disconnected from my own culture,” says Au Yu Hsiao of what led him to try to rediscover his home country, Taiwan, in a literature course in the East Asian Cultural Studies department.
Jennifer Holt, a Film and Media Studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, researches media policy and the digital infrastructure that underlies modern communication. In this interview, she provides crucial insight on how to be a properly informed citizen without losing sight of our basic rights when it comes to digital usage.
Sociology major Tomas Palpallatoc shares his passion for poetry and his success at the UCSB Poetry in Performance Poetry Slam. In April, Palpallatoc will advance to the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in Houston, Texas with the UCSB slam team.
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.
A curtain of floating ginkgo-tree leaves, which once sprinkled Sarah Dahl’s front yard, fluttered overhead as visitors stopped by UC Santa Barbara’s Glass Box Gallery to admire the hovering city maps of places Dahl has called home. Dahl, a senior Physical Geography and Art double major, displayed her installation, titled “Please Forward, No Longer at This Address,” in the Art department’s student-run gallery exhibit “Body of Proof.” The installation was created as an ode to all of the places where Dahl has lived, and who she has become as the memories have begun to fade.
In a recent interview, Dahl spoke about her work, where she plans to take it, and what receiving an award as a Honors in Art student meant to her.
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.
How many college students have been lucky enough to be within two feet of actor Hugh Jackman at a black-tie gala to cover the event on social media?
Taylon Faltas interns at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) headquarters and had the incredible opportunity to attend the 2019 festival as a member of the press. The festival’s mission includes film education to the community, ranging from bringing local elementary school students to free movie screenings to the comprehensive internship experience offered to college students like Taylon.
In a series of video interviews, Humanities and Fine Arts professors share thoughts on the merits of their fields and their most rewarding experiences as teachers and researchers.
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.
“Like many students, I did not anticipate picking up a minor,” Hannah Lewry writes. Then she stumbled upon the Professional Writing Minor after taking a course that she thought would merely fulfilling a UC Santa Barbara writing requirement. Instead, she found a niche for herself and a stepping stone for a future career.
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.
