All Events
Race Matters Series
Brown Skins, White Avatars: Racebending and Straightwashing in Digital Games
MCC Lounge
Given recent critiques of the lack of diversity in digital games, this presentation examines the many ways games are stereotypical and normative in regarding race, gender, and sexuality. How are we to unpack the ways characters of color are often rendered as either lighter-skinned protagonists or darker-skinned enemies? Or how might we understand how game design problematically constrains gender and sexuality? Edmond Chang is a visiting Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon.
Cup of Culture
Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action
MCC Theater
Nearly all Indian lands in the U.S. face grave environmental threats – toxic waste, strip mining, oil drilling and nuclear contamination. Homeland tells the stories of five remarkable Native American activists in four communities who are fighting back government agencies and powerful energy companies, to protect the environment against disastrous environmental hazards. Dr. David N. Pellow, Endowed Chair and Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies at UCSB, will lead a post-film discussion. (88 min, English, 2005)
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wppwutXf5lU
An Evening of Balkan Music: Inspector Gadje Balkan Brass Band with Ismail Lumanovski
The Hub
'This was rip roaring mad Balkan brass bedlam!' – Stephen Kent, Internationally Acclaimed Composer
With up to 14 musicians, Bay Area-based Inspector Gadje pays homage to Romani culture and community. The band is a joyful collective of fiery musicians who bring a big sound to the beautiful and bumpin’ brass band music of Southeast Europe’s Balkan Peninsula. The driving, tight grooves with soaring melodies incite joy and dance from the very first downbeat. Ismail Lumanovski is a widely esteemed Macedonian/Turkish clarinetist, and perhaps the first Roma (gyspy) clarinet player to graduate from the renowned Julliard School of Music in NYC.
Listen to Inspector Gadge Balkan Brass Band music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mx2u-RdW5Q
Tickets: $5 UCSB Students and Children Under 12 / $15 general. Purchase tickets at A.S. Ticket Office or online here.
Art Exhibition Opening Reception
Malik Seneferu: From the Hill and Beyond
MCC Lounge
Please join the MCC for an Opening Reception to welcome our artist of the quarter, Malik Seneferu! Free food.
Malik Seneferu is an American conceptual artist and painter whose work explores race, identity, politics, spirituality, and adolescence. Employing intense color, he engages in magical realism with other works from the visual arts, literature, and history, as well as his own life. From the Hill and Beyond draws on Seneferu’s experience of leaving San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point community where he began his career, and his travels in Kenya where he explored his roots among the Kamba people of Machakos.
