News & Events
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A Conjunctural Mapping of People’s Park
Following calls to spatialize conjunctures, this article proposes and practices conjunctural mapping through a case study of the ongoing struggle at People’s Park in Berkeley, California. Although the method of conjunctural analysis enables and requires an investigation into the multiple forces at work in the production of hegemony, such analyses tend to focus on cultural,…
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Ethnographic Diaries: Capturing the Everyday in Crisis
This ethnographic project was published through the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) in collaboration with Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, and produced by the ACSS working group on “Ethnography and Knowledge in the Arab Region.” Read the Ethnographic Diaries co-authored by Aida Mukharesh. Aida is currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology…
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Press related to Hillary Angelo’s Boomtown and Transition Geographies and Politics
Press related to Hillary Angelo’s Boomtown and Transition Geographies and Politics CUES’s inaugural director Hillary Angelo has published a cover story for Harper’s Magazine related to her research on climate change and public lands and CUES’s work on transition geographies and politics. You can hear her discuss the article, and how and why we often…
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Environmentalizing Urban Sociology
Read the journal article here. Urban sociology, like sociology as a whole, has traditionally excluded the natural environment. The Chicago School notoriously treated external nature as a metaphor for human society in its “human ecology” paradigm, while naturalizing urban inequality, segregation, and power relations. Such canonical and “de-natured” understandings of urban environments still pervade much…
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Can Cities Save the Planet?
Can Cities Save the Planet? While fears of global warming and environmental catastrophe loom ever greater, urban areas continue to expand unevenly. And, in the face of environmental crisis and urban crisis, the ideal of the ‘sustainable city’ is taking a leading role in urban planning and policy discourse. In terms of urban form, policymakers…
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![Wildland Urban Interface [WUI] Research for Resilience](https://criticalurbanenvironments.ucsc.edu/files/2023/11/20200609_North_Coast_SC_WCC_007-800x496.jpg)
Wildland Urban Interface [WUI] Research for Resilience
Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Research for Resilience: Addressing California’s Climate, Conservation & Housing Crises The Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) —where human development mixes in with or abuts undeveloped natural areas— is the area of the fastest housing growth in the U.S., with California leading in this growth. This is of major concern, since WUI housing…
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Urban-agrarian entanglements
Urban-agrarian entanglements Climate change is forcing a reconsideration of land use, infrastructural systems, and settlement across urban and agrarian space, with specific, grounded political demands coming from both sides that are often articulated in opposition to each other. Meanwhile, scholars of agrarian and urban studies are rarely in dialogue–despite the fact that places and people…
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Five UC Santa Cruz projects win California Climate Action Grant funding
The UC Santa Cruz campus newscenter shared that a roughly $1.6 million grant project will conduct a first-of-its kind study of how California’s housing crisis affects the growth of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), where the fringes of development reach into natural areas.
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University of California, state partner to award climate action grants
The Santa Cruz Sentinel covered the University of California’s Climate Action Grant awards to UC Santa Cruz faculty and quoted Miriam Greenberg, principal investigator for the Wildland Urban Interface Research for Resilience project.
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Critical Environmentalisms: Overcoming Institutional Obstacles to Meet Students’ Demands for Sustainability Curricula and Action
Read the full article here. This chapter brings together the voices of undergraduates, faculty and staff to share their perspectives about whether UC Santa Cruz is doing enough to address environmental concerns, and how it can better support critical sustainability and action. In the first section, we report the longitudinal results of surveys conducted in…
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Critical Campus Environmentalisms (2023)
Critical Campus Environmentalisms (2023) Institutions of higher education tend to privilege mainstream approaches to environmentalism that reinforce race, class and gender hierarchies around who and what constitutes an environmentalist or environmentalism. As a result, students of color and students from other marginalized backgrounds–who often experience environmental degradation and catastrophe firsthand–may not see their experiences reflected…