Archive of CUES Workshops, Events, Conferences

A Conversation on Black Ecologies 

Thursday, October 23, 2025

12:00-1:15 PM

Rachel Carson College RedRoom, Lunch to follow

Join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to welcome speakers Tianna Bruno and Justin Hosbey (UC Berkeley) for a conversation on Black Ecologies. We will discuss Bruno and Hosbey’s recent work and past and future directions for the field. A catered lunch will follow. We invite you to stay for the afternoon where Community Studies will host an event on Rethinking Economic Planning beginning at 3:00pm. More below.

Tianna Bruno is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography. Through her work, she aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. Her research also highlights the mutual experiences of degradation and survival between subaltern communities and their surrounding ecologies through the integration of Black geographies and critical physical geography, specifically analyzing trees. This research is currently focused on Texas, and will soon expand to various locations across the Black diaspora. Tianna’s previous work broadly related to Black environmental geographies has been published in Progress in Environmental Geography, Professional Geographer, the Annals of the American Association of Geography, among others journals, and a book project currently underway.

Justin Hosbey is a humanistic social scientist and Black studies scholar. He is Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His ethnographic work explores Black social and cultural life in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta regions. He focuses on the ways that southern Black communities articulate modes of citizenship that demand the interruption of racial capitalism and ecocide. His forthcoming book project utilizes research methods from the digital and spatial humanities to understand and visualize how the post-Katrina privatization of neighborhood schools in low-income and working-class Black communities has fractured, but not broken, space and placemaking in Black New Orleans. His published work can be found in Southern Cultures, Environment and Society, and Environment and Planning F.

Lindsey Dillon is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

This event is part of a series co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with the Sociology Department, the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Rethinking Economic Planning

Thursday, October 23, 2025

3:00PM

Rachel Carson College RedRoom

This presentation will examine recent debates surrounding economic planning. The first section will provide a theoretical account of planning processes within capitalist market economies, advancing the argument that planning—far from disappearing—has in fact expanded significantly within capitalism over time. This trajectory will be contextualized by situating a diverse body of recent scholarship that identifies a resurgence of planning in multiple contemporary forms, including but not limited to digital market design, intellectual monopoly capitalism, derisking strategies, and the emergence of new state capitalism.

The second section will address the renewed relevance of the socialist calculation debate, historically concerned with the comparative merits and limitations of markets versus planning as mechanisms of coordination and allocation. Christoph Sorg, social scientist, will differentiate between what he terms Keynesian planning (the shaping of markets), Neurathian planning (the abolition of markets), and Polanyian planning (the embedding of markets). His argument is that the latter—Polanyian planning—offers the most promising framework for integrating democratic deliberation over social surplus, decommodifying essential goods, and utilizing digital-ecological accounting practices conducive to the negotiation of socially determined prices.

Christoph Sorg is a social scientist at Humboldt University Berlin and currently serves as a guest researcher at UC Berkeley. His research integrates economic sociology, political economy, and political sociology to analyze capitalism and its alternatives, with a particular emphasis on economic planning and social reproduction. Most recently, together with Jan Groos, he co-edited a special issue of Competition & Change entitled “Rethinking Economic Planning” as well as an edited volume with Bristol University Press, “Creative Construction: Democratic Planning in the 21st Century.” His scholarly articles have appeared in venues such as Competition & Change, European Journal of Social Theory, Critical Sociology, and Globalizations, among others.

This event is hosted by Community Studies, with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies, and History of Consciousness.

Black Ecologies Workshop 

Friday, October 24, 2025

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Rachel Carson College Room 301 + Zoom

Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in Rachel Carson College Room 301 and over Zoom, for a workshop following the Black Ecologies discussion.

This event is part of a series co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with the Sociology Department and The Black Geographies Lab.

Haunting Interruptions: Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri

Thursday, November 13, 2025

12:00-1:15 PM

Rachel Carson College RedRoom

Join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to welcome speaker Rashad Timmons (UC PPFP) for a discussion on Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri moderated by Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz).

This presentation engages the racial politics of infrastructural violence and spatial memory in Ferguson, Missouri—the historically-white suburb of St. Louis and site of the tragic police killing of Black, 18-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. in August 2014. It critically examines the use of blockades, space-based protests, and other forms of infrastructural disruption by Black subjects in Ferguson before and after Michael Brown Jr.’s execution, paying specific attention to the mnemonic work these practices perform. It argues that Black subjects in Ferguson deploy these tactics of spatial intervention not only to claim space in Ferguson’s suburban landscape but to haunt its collective memory. These disruptive practices—what I call “haunting interruptions”—disturb or interfere with the normative function of infrastructures such as roads and highways to reveal, indict, and account for the historical racist logics underlying (sub)urban life. The presentation grounds haunting interruptions in an examination of historical and contemporary protests in the notorious apartment complex where Michael Brown Jr. perished and finds that Black subjects use protest and blockage as spatial tactics not simply to force state, institutional, or corporate entities to act but to surface the memory of persistent racial suffering that exceeds reparation and is acutely sedimented in the suburban geography.

Rashad Arman Timmons (he/him) is a community builder, musician, writer, scholar, and educator from Detroit, Michigan, the ancestral and present homelands of the Anishinaabeg. The proud son of factory workers, he teaches and writes broadly about race, urban infrastructure, mobility, and power in the midwestern United States, es Black people’s longstanding use of the built environment to imagine a freer and more just world. Rashad earned his Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he researched the violent and racist history of infrastructural development (e.g., railways, roads, telecommunications) and policing in Ferguson, Missouri. Rashad is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where he is writing a book about the plunder and persistence of Black geographies in Ferguson.

Alongside his scholarly work, Rashad serves and organizes with the Michael Brown Sr. Chosen for Change Organization to uplift the life and legacy of Michael “Mike Mike” Brown Jr. In this role, Rashad leads public history and community engagement projects dedicated to uncovering and preserving Black history in Ferguson and St. Louis. He also writes grants to support the Brown family’s healing and racial justice efforts throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. As lead grant writer, Rashad has secured more than a half a million dollars of direct funding to the family’s non-profit organization.

Rashad currently lives in Oakland, California—the unceded lands of the Lisjan Ohlone—where he delivers political education to Bay Area youth and supports organizations working to end police terrorism in the U.S. and abroad.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with The Black Geographies Lab, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, History, History of Consciousness, and the Sociology Department.

Yield: Suburban Roads, Pedestrian Acts, and the Policing of Black Mobility in Ferguson, Missouri

Friday, November 14, 2025

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Rachel Carson College Room 301 + Zoom

Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES), the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in Rachel Carson College Room 301 and over Zoom, for a workshop following the presentation by Rashad Timmons.

Keywords: suburban roadways, black mobility, policing, yield, Michael Brown Jr., Ferguson

This event is part of a series co-sponsored by the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) together with the Sociology Department, the UCSC Black Geographies Lab and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Book Celebration: The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity

Thursday, January 23, 2025
Time: 4:00 – 6:00pm
Location: RCC Red Room

Join the Sociology Department together with the Science & Justice Research Center, the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and The Black Geographies Lab, in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to celebrate The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).

About The Black Geographic: Co-edited by Associate Professor Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field. The Black Geographic  is available at Duke University Press.

Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne

Liz Koslov on What does managed retreat mean in the context of wildfire? An interdisciplinary research agenda

Thursday, April 25, 2024
Time: 12:00 – 1:15pm
Location: RCC 301 + Zoom

Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and WUI Research for Resilience (WRR) scholars, in RCC 301 and over Zoom, for a discussion with Liz Koslov on emerging work on the similarities of flood/managed retreat questions to fire issues.“Managed retreat,” or planned relocation away from high-risk areas, is increasingly seen as a necessary response to a range of climate-linked hazards, from floods and hurricanes to, more recently, catastrophic wildfires. The emerging geography of retreat is neither wholly natural nor inevitable; it is the product of social geography as well as physical geography, of social dynamics, policy decisions, cultural narratives, and patterns of uneven and racialized development that render some people and places more vulnerable and others relatively secure. These patterns hold across landscapes of fire and flood, but there are important differences to consider in conceiving and enacting retreat as a response to wildfire versus flooding. This talk draws on cases from New York and California to examine the challenges and questions that retreat poses in practice, and what it reveals as it moves across social, cultural, and environmental contexts.

Liz Koslov is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Environment and Sustainability, and Sociology at UCLA. Her research brings an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach to analyzing struggles over urban space in the context of climate change. She is currently writing a book, Retreat, about community organizing for home buyouts among coastal property owners after Hurricane Sandy. Her published work includes articles in Public Culture, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Annual Review of Sociology, and other outlets, as well as the collectively authored book, People or Property: Legal Contradictions, Climate Resettlement, and the View from Shifting Ground. Previously, Dr. Koslov served on the inaugural steering committee of the Climigration Network, which brings together community leaders, researchers, and practitioners to generate equitable, just, and community-led approaches to climate relocation.Before joining UCLA, Dr. Koslov was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She received a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, where she worked with the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Superstorm Research Lab, a mutual aid research collective studying climate change, inequality, and urban politics. She holds an MSc in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics, and a BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literature from the George Washington University. 

Book Celebration: The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean

Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Time: 3:00 – 5:00pm
Location: moved to Quarry Amphitheater

Join the Sociology Department together with the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and The Black Geographies Lab, in RCC 301 and over Zoom, to discuss The Natural Border (Cornell University Press, 2023) with author Tim Raeymakers.

About The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean The Natural Border tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. Timothy Raeymaekers shows how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies.Taking the example of the tomato—a typical ‘Made in Italy’ commodity—Raeymaekers asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the ‘naturalization’ of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power—and thus, as The Natural Border demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.

Timothy Raeymaekers is Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna, and Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Book Celebration: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution with Xuefei Ren – POSTPONED

Thursday, May 23, 2024Time: 12:00 – 1:15pm
Location: RCC 301 + Zoom

Join the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and WUI Research for Resilience (WRR) scholars, in RCC 301 and over Zoom, for a discussion with Xuefei Ren on on Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press).About Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air PollutionUrbanization is rapidly overtaking China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. One-sixth of humanity now lives in either a Chinese or Indian city. This transformation has unleashed enormous pressures on land use, housing, and the environment. Despite the stakes, the workings of urban governance in China and India remain obscure and poorly understood.

In this book, Xuefei Ren explores how China and India govern their cities and how their different styles of governance produce inequality and exclusion. Drawing upon historical-comparative analyses and extensive fieldwork (in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wukan, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata), Ren investigates the ways that Chinese and Indian cities manage land acquisition, slum clearance, and air pollution. She discovers that the two countries address these issues through radically different approaches. In China, urban governance centers on territorial institutions, such as hukou and the cadre evaluation system. In India, urban governance centers on associational politics, encompassing contingent alliances formed among state actors, the private sector, and civil society groups. Ren traces the origins of territorial and associational forms of governance to late imperial China and precolonial India. She then shows how these forms have evolved to shape urban growth and residents’ struggles today.

As the number of urban residents in China and India reaches beyond a billion, Governing the Urban in China and India makes clear that the development of cities in these two nations will have profound consequences well beyond their borders.Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist who studies urban governance and the built environment in comparative perspective. She is the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). She is a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a fellow in the Humanity’s Urban Future program of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). She has served as a co-editor for Journal of Urban Affairs, City and Community, and on the editorial board of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Her research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Urban Studies Foundation, among others. Her new projects include The City after Covid-19, which examines vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto and Johannesburg.

Book Celebration: The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity – POSTPONED

Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Time: 4:00 – 6:00pm
Location: RCC Red Room

Join the Sociology Department together with the Science & Justice Research Center, the Center for Critical Urban & Environmental Studies (CUES) and The Black Geographies Lab, in the Rachel Carson College Red Room, to celebrate The Black Geographic (Duke University Press, 2023).

About The Black Geographic: Co-edited by Associate Professor Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology, CRES), contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial violence, the geographies of racial capitalism, and struggles over urban space. Throughout, the contributors demonstrate that Blackness is itself a situating and place-making force, even as it is shaped by spatial processes and diasporic routes. Whether discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist print records or migration and surveillance in Niger, this volume demonstrates that Black Geographies is a mode of analyzing Blackness that fundamentally challenges the very foundations of the field of geography and its historical entwinement with colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism. In short, it marks a new step in the evolution of the field.

The Black Geographic  is available at Duke University Press.Contributors. Anna Livia Brand, C.N.E. Corbin, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Camilla Hawthorne, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Jovan Scott Lewis, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Muñoz, Diana Negrín, Danielle Purifoy, Sharita Towne