All Events
Art Exhibition
Call for Student Artists - EXTENDED Submission Deadline
MCC Lounge
As a multipurpose center, the MCC Lounge often serves as a space to study, de-stress, and find peace. With healing as a goal of the MCC, art serves as a therapeutic medium, offering solace and a means of processing trauma and adversity.
Based on the book "Reclaiming UGLY!" by Vanessa Rochelle Lewis, the pieces in this collection explore the identities of marginalized bodies that are placed under these systems: focusing on themes of transphobia, Ablesim, Colorism, Fatphobia, sex work, Misogynoir, Femicide, and the demonization of afrocentric and indigenous centric features. Exploring when a body is granted humanity and when it is defined as inhumane, ie, "UGLY". Definitions below for further grounding and a deeper understanding of the exhibit.
Uglification: A social weapon that mobilizes people to fear, detest, support the oppression and marginalization of, or feel superior toward other people, beliefs, locations, causes, behaviors, desires, objects, or a specific individual.
Uglification: A tool, ideology, and type of oppression that designates some bodies as more or less worthy of love, respect, access, and dignity.
EXTENDED DEADLINE for submissions is Fri., Sept. 12th!
Click this link to learn more and to submit your art: https://tinyurl.com/
We will contact you if your art has been chosen to be displayed in the MCC. Each artist chosen will be offered a gift card by the MCC at our Art Exhibit Reception, TBD.
GIFT CARDS WILL BE BASED ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVE BASIS WITH SUBMITTED QUALITY ARTWORK.
If you have any questions, please email the MCC Programming Assistant, ajanityehimba@ucsb.
Cup of Culture
CANCELED - Parasite
Canceled
(1/7/21) – This event has been canceled.
This psychological thriller, directed by award-winning Bong Joon-Ho, follows a poor Korean family who scheme to become employed by a wealthy family and infiltrate their household by posing as unrelated, highly qualified individuals.
Conscious Conversations Series
Care or Criminalization?: BIPOC Youth in Foster Care
Ali Guajardo, Clay Wesley, Levette Morales & Kayla Martensen. Moderated by Isabella Restrepo
Online
The Foster Care system is often understood as a system of help for our most vulnerable populations, children and youth - this panel asks us to complicate this understanding to unpack the ways this system, embedded with carceral logics, impacts BIPOC youth. How can we shift our understanding of this system to center the needs of BIPOC youth? How can we understand the criminalization and pathologization of BIPOC youth within this long standing system? How can we think about the foster care system in relation to abolitionist discourse? Join the MCC for a discussion that explores the contemporary foster care systems impacts on BIPOC youth and the ways that youth practice resistance to this system of control.
PANEL:
- Ali Guajardo, LCSW (he/him) is a behavioral health consultant and clician at the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics where he specializes in transgender behavioral healthcare. With over six years experience serving Santa Barbara's BIPOC communities and as a former foster youth, Ali weaves experiential knowledge with clinical expertise to offer intersectional approaches to his practice. Ali is trained in DBT and EMDR and utilizes an eclectic, trauma informed approach in working with diverse communities.
- Clay Wesley.
- Kayla Martensen - Kayla Marie Martensen (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago in the Criminology, Law and Justice department and an instructor at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches class related to punishment, race, gender and social justice. Her areas of interest include critical carceral studies, feminist abolition, prison abolition, gender violence and youth studies. Currently, Kayla’s research focuses on Latinx/a young women who experience incarceration in a variety of institutions, including juvenile detention centers. In a forthcoming publication, prison is not feminist, service is not liberation, Kayla highlights the theoretical framework of this current study by critiquing the expansion of carceral logic and practice into community agencies and ‘non-punitive’ residential placements.
- Levette Morales is a Parent Partner with Casa Pacifica’s Wraparound program in Santa Barbara County. As a former foster youth, Levette has found a passion in utilizing their personal experience and knowledge to support parents and caregivers in gaining an increased understanding of systematic and interpersonal traumas and learning skills to support caring for high needs youth.
Race and Religion Series
Chicanx Indigeneity: Decolonization and Religious Refusal
Dr. Natalie Avalos
Online
Indigenous religious traditions continue to shape the identities and realities of Chicanx peoples in the U.S. This talk discusses the ways Indigenous religious resurgence now serves as a means to Chicanx cultural sovereignty under continued settler colonial relations north and south of the U.S./Mexico border. Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder and is currently working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decoloniality: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.
