Past Events

Intellectual Life Book Talk - May 21, 2025

The Intellectual Life Committee held a book event and workshop featuring Jennifer Holt, Professor & Chair in the Department of Film & Media Studies at UCSB and one of our partners at the MACRO Lab. She discussed her new book, Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024). 

At the workshop, Jennifer discussed the methods used in Cloud Policy as well as her earlier book Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980-1996. She talked specifically about how to do research with legal documents and more broadly about researching the history of technology, media, and regulation. 

"Radical Worldbuilding Through Videogames" - May 16, 2025

Workshop: Bo Ruberg, Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine, is currently the co-editor of Journal of Cinema & Media Studies and walked attendees through the submission and peer-review process for high-impact journals. They also discussed the publishing environment for graduate students.

Talk: Today more than ever, we need the power to build new worlds. In video games, worlds are built on the foundation of interaction design, software simulations, graphical dimensions, and other elements often overlooked as too technical to hold cultural meaning. By analyzing these elements of game development as acts of worldbuilding, we can reimagine worldbuilding itself: as a process of challenging firmly held beliefs about the fundamental structures, conventions, and irreducible truths that give shape to the world around us. Video games also powerfully model the concept of queer worldbuilding--a practice of building worlds that destabilizes the fundamental logics of our universe and builds new worlds founded on alternate expressions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, intimacy, and desire.

A Constellation of Care: Kaʻākaukukui Reef and the Native Hawaiian Anti-Eviction Movement in Urbanizing Honolulu in the Early-Twentieth Century - April 23, 2025

Alika Bourgette is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) historian and scholar of Native American and Indigenous Studies from Āliamanu, Oʻahu. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Spring 2024, and is currently a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies (2024-2025). His research historicizes the long struggle for Native Hawaiian land and water justice along the urbanizing Honolulu waterfront in the early twentieth century. His work demonstrates how Indigenous lands and waters themselves participated as important agents in feeding and protecting all against the shifting winds of colonization. He documents how Native Hawaiians of multiple genders developed expanded kin and food networks from mountains to sea to braid a constellation of care and anti-eviction efforts across Honolulu.

This talk was sponsored by: Communication Department, Department of Urban Studies & Planning; Indigenous Futures Institute (IFI), Muir College; Nature, Space & Politics; and Stewart Memorial Fund.

The World - The Role of Faith and Community Among Youth - April 17, 2025

Public Radio's The World  presented a panel discussion of "The Role of Faith and Community Among Youth," moderated by The World's Hosts, Marco Werman and Carolyn Beeler.

What is driving young people to religious spaces today? The World, public radio's longest-running daily global news program, and UCSD's Department of Communication held a moderated event exploring the role of religious practice and community engagement among young generations. 

Panelists:

• Marquisha Lawrence Scott - Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver
• Babak Rahimi - Associate Professor of Literature, Director of the Program for the Study of Religion, UCSD
• Devin Buss - UCSD Environmental Systems undergraduate, member of the Mission Hills United Church of Christ

Intellectual Life Book Talk - April 9, 2025

The Intellectual Life Committee held an event highlighting Dan Hallin's updated book, Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. Lillian Walkover discussed how she engaged with the book in the context of a Community Engaged Learning Project.

Making Health Public by Daniel Hallin and Charles Briggs examines the relationship between media and medicine. Drawing on insights from anthropology, linguistics, and media studies, it considers the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of 'biomediatization' and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites of knowledge making and through multiple forms of expertise.

Intellectual Life Works-in-Progress Event - March 12, 2025

The Intellectual Life Committee held its first works-in-progress event, highlighting two dissertation projects. 

Marwa Abdalla discussed her research, The Imagined Practice of Islam and the Resilience of Islamophobia, analyzing "traditional and digital media to explore how ideology and affect shape what is commonly understood as 'Islam' in ways that reinforce Islamophobia." She introduces "the Imagined Practice of Islam (IPI) as a product of white supremacist knowledge systems that frame religion as an analytic category, linking racialized markers of Muslimness to perceived threat under the guise of common sense."

Joseph Moreno's research, Frontier Futurism: Scifi-Chic Urbanism and the Erasure of (Im)migrant Regional Identity, discussed "multiple vectors in the production of regional identity in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) of Texas through the matrix of infrastructure and peoplehood forged by municipal and economic statecraft."

 

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Intellectual Life Book Talk - January 22, 2025
The Intellectual Life Committee presents the second book event of the season, celebrating two new books. Both Patrick Anderson and David Serlin discuss their new publications. The conversation was facilitated by Lian Song and Joe Moreno.

Patrick Anderson discusses The Lamentations: A Requiem for Queer Suicide (2024). The Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Anderson examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.

David Serlin discusses Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (2025). This book examines the sensorial and experiential words of people with disabilities through the medium of architecture decades before the disability rights movement of the late 1960s standardized now-familiar terms like "access" and "accommodation." 

 

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Democracy Lab - Ediciones Caradura - January 18, 2025

A group of 15 spent a long and generative day in Tijuana with Ediciones Caradura, an independent editorial and art collective. With the enormous and generous support of Julia Kott, who facilitated their connection with Caradura and helped plan the event, and Pepe Rojo-Solis, TJ expert and workshop leader extraordinaire, they spent the day in and around the collective's space -- the cafeteøría (café-theory) – thinking about the question: ¿Cómo derribar un muro? How to break down a wall?

At the cafe, they split into groups and completed three activities involving translating fragments of texts in the cafeteøría space and putting them in dialogue with each other, walked around and explored/documented the streets of downtown Tijuana, and collectively created art together on one of the cafeteøría walls. It was a packed and productive day of dialogue, activity, and community-building.

 

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Intellectual Life Book Talk - October 23, 2024
The Intellectual Life Committee presents the first book event of the season. Professors Caroline Jack and Andrew deWaard talk about their new publications. The conversation is facilitated by graduate students Lian Song and Marwa Abdalla.

Caroline Jack discusses Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century (2024). Business as Usual is about a distinctively American form of twentieth-century media detritus: pamphlets, films, broadcast programs, public service announcements, and more, funded by private enterprise and designed to sell ordinary people on capitalism itself. 

Andrew deWaard discusses Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (2024). Media systems are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture.

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