All Events
Conscious Conversations Series
Food Justice Panel
Nancy Aragon, Daniel Parra Hensel & Chuy Valle
In-person: MCC Theater
Join the UCSB MultiCultural Center for a panel discussion on food justice in our local community. Centering the experiences of local community organizers that have worked to address food insecurity, criminalization, and finding power in our neighbors, relatives, and non-human beings.
Reception in the MCC Lounge/courtyard at 5-6pm
In-Person Panel event in the MCC Theater at 6pm
Nancy Aragon (she/her/ella) is a queer, bruha, eco-feminist, born in the indigenous land of Cuzcatlan, known today as El Salvador. She grew up in North East Los Angeles and majored in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at California State University Los Angeles. Nancy’s politics includeintersectional feminism, pro-choice, no borders, black lives matter, ni una mas, body positivity, save the bees, return stolen land to indigenous people’s, water is life, prison abolition, abolish I.C.E, free them all, queer and trans liberation now, free Puerto Rico and free Palestine. Through urban farming, Nancy empowers people to advocate for food justice and food sovereignty, organic regenerative urban agriculture, public green spaces, and equitable, sustainable and regional food systems. Currently, she serves as the Farm Facilitator at the Roots for Peace community garden in South Central. She’s also working with a collective of femmes and non-binary herbalists of colors to build a queer feminist farmer co-op in Puerto Rico, a dream project that offers organic foods, herbs and roots as a tool of liberation and justice for communities impacted by systemic oppression. When she is not slaying the patriarchy, you can find Nancy reading up on queer ecology and tending to her medicinal garden!
Daniel Parra Hensel is a full-time agroecology educator, consultant and organizer. In 2015 Daniel joined the Environmental Horticulture department as an adjunct faculty member at Santa Barbara City College where he teaches two permaculture design courses; Resilient Community Design and Regenerative Agroecology. He is the vermicompost manager at Gaviota SOIL, the project coordinator for the Santa Barbara area California Alliance of Community Composting and the co-coordinator for the Somos Semillas Food Sovereignty Garden, a project of El Centro Santa Barbara. Daniels' work and organizing is focused on ecological justice which explores the political, economic and ecological challenges in our food system and society. Daniel has a passion for place based pedagogy with a philosophy focused on disability justice, thoughtful communication and conversation, and practical application of ecological concepts towards our social movements. His focus lies in co-create mutually beneficial alternatives, strategies and solutions to local challenges that fall at the intersection of ecological degradation and social inequity.
Chuy Valle (they/them/elle) was born on Chumash land and raised between Chumash land and rural Mexico. For Chuy, food has always been a central piece in their connection with culture, identity, and community building. They strongly believe that food sovereignty is a crucial way in which we can construct healthier spaces of belonging. They have been involved in local mutual aid, resistance work, cooperatives, and different urban garden projects.Their larger community vision centers around (re)imagining our futures through stories and action in order to honor our interconnectedness and (re)build our relationship to land and each other. As a queer person of color and a child to migrants, they find it important to always politicize and expand our notion of food justice and access in order to build out a more inclusive society.
Race Matters Series
Forecasting through Anthropology and Theatre For Black Life
Dr. Ugo Edu
Online
Drawing on experiences utilizing playwriting to grapple with the historical legacies entangling Blackness and the development of the sciences, medicine, and health that emerged through ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Edu addresses how anthropology and theater can be put together in the service of predicting what is to come and making space for that exploration and galvanization for change and improved Black lives. Can it help us make futures that invite, nurture, and sustain Blackness, Black reproduction, bodies, technologies, and life, towards the promotion, celebration, and sustenance of Black life? Ugo Edu is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproductive and sexual health, gender, race, aesthetics, body knowledge, and body modifications. Her book project: The “Family Planned”: Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. She is working on a play, Securing Ties, which draws heavily on her book project as a means for critical public engagement and an incorporation of the arts in her scholarship. She is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department at UCLA.
Cup of Culture
Gather
Director: Sanjay Rawal
In-person: MCC Theater
Gather is an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide. Gather follows Nephi Craig, a chef from the White Mountain Apache Nation (Arizona), opening an indigenous café as a nutritional recovery clinic; Elsie Dubray, a young scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation (South Dakota), conducting landmark studies on bison; and the Ancestral Guard, a group of environmental activists from the Yurok Nation (Northern California), trying to save the Klamath river. 2020. 1h 14min.
Cup of Culture
Hawaiian Soul
MCC Theater
Against the backdrop of the 1970s native rights movement, George Helm, a young Hawaiian activist and musician must gain the support of kūpuna (community elders) from the island of Maui to aid in the fight of protecting the precious neighboring island of Kahoʻolawe from military bombing.
Co-sponsors: A.S. External VP for Statewide Affairs & Mauna Kea Protectors
