About CUES
The Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES) is a laboratory for social scientific research on urbanization and the environment in a time of increasing inequality and climate change. It is the first institutional consolidation of UCSC’s wide-ranging expertise in the political, cultural, and spatial dimensions of urban-environmental issues. CUES’s primary goals are to support research activities of affiliated faculty; build intellectual community among faculty, graduate students, and postdocs through our ongoing workshop and reading group and occasional public events; and support graduate students through funding and professional development opportunities.
CUES supports and promotes critical, public-facing urban-environmental research and action at UCSC. It unites a number of longstanding Sociology Department commitments–to the interdisciplinary fields of political economy, political ecology, and place, space, and culture; to mixed-methods and community engaged research; and to maintaining a “critical” orientation to justice and social change in both applied and speculative realms. In drawing from the distinctiveness of Santa Cruz–in relation to both the intersection of urban/rural/wildlands spaces and politics, and our campus’s history of critical urban and environmental work–it also advances a “Santa Cruz approach” to urban studies.
What do we mean by “critical”?
We use the word “critical” in both senses implied by materialist social-theoretical traditions: scholarship that is a response to a moment of potential crisis, and that employs a method of critique. In the first sense, we are motivated by the critical urgency of our current moment–for the fate of communities and ecosystems facing the interconnected crises of global climate change, social and economic inequality, and hazardous and precarious urban development. We take inspiration from creative responses to current crises and energy devoted to building a more just future.
In the second sense, we also bring a critical theoretical approach to the examination of urban environmental politics, in that our analytical objectives are to illuminate the exclusions, injustices, and ideologies of present social formations, with an eye toward changing them. For instance, we examine how questions of power, difference, place, and history shape concepts at the vanguard of urban environmental change—from “sustainability” to “resilience” to “equity.” This allows us to ask questions like: Where do different urban environmental interventions come from? Whose knowledges do they draw upon and whose do they exclude? What might then be their varied impacts and unintended consequences? How can these approaches be made more accountable, inclusive, and just?