Events By Quarter
Your Body, Your Agency: Empowerment Self Defense for Everyone
Professor erin Khuê Ninh
MCC Lounge
Join us for a day of self-advocacy as we explore strategies to defend our physical and emotional personhood hosted by erin Khuê Ninh, Empowerment Self Defense instructor and a Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
ESD teaches a set of skills based in social justice and intersectional embodiment aimed to protect people from the harms of harassment, violation, and assault. Learn verbal and physical techniques drawing from a tradition of feminist social analysis. We will review how to set boundaries and identify spatial relationships and body language. We will explore verbal responses and bystander intervention techniques to address dangerous situations. Please dress for comfort and movement! erin Khuê Ninh’s research centers on the model minority not as myth, but as racialization and identity. Throughlines in her writing and teaching are the subtleties of power, harm, and subject formation, whether in the contexts of terror and war, family and immigration, or gendering and rape culture.
Co-sponsored by Asian American Studies.
Disability Joy – Disabled Power Zine-Making Workshop
Jennifer White-Johnson
MCC Lounge
Disability Joy is a programming series grounded in disability justice that centers empowerment, community building, and joy as resistance. The series intentionally creates space for celebration, laughter, and connection as powerful acts of care and resistance. By uplifting disabled voices, creativity, and lived experiences, the series challenges dominant narratives that frame disability solely in terms of deficit or hardship. Through engaging, community-centered programming, Disability Joy fosters connection and affirms disability as a source of strength, culture, and resilience while actively resisting ableism and exclusion. Join us for a zine-making workshop with Jennifer White-Johnson, a Black and disabled artist and activist. They will begin the workshop with a discussion of their art-activist practice, followed by a demonstration of how zine-making can be used as a tool for activism. Crafting materials and food provided for participants! Jen White-Johnson is a disabled and neurodivergent artist and designer educator who centers Black disabled joy and futures in her work, informed by a disability justice and a Black feminist disability framework.
Co-sponsored by A.S. CODE, Disabled Students Program (DSP).
MCC Jackson Intern Community Engagement Project Showcase
MCC Jackson Interns
MCC Lounge
Stop by the MCC Jackson Intern Community Engagement Project Showcase to explore the work of this year’s Jackson Intern cohort. Meet the interns, learn about their projects and partnerships, and see how their initiatives support communities on and beyond campus. Connect, ask questions, and discover the impact of student-led community engagement.
Cup of Culture
Students on Set!
Student Filmmakers
MCC Theater and Lounge
Lights, Camera, Action: The MCC presents an evening of entertainment from creatives here at UCSB! This edition of Cup of Culture centers on our student filmmakers and their diverse stories. Bringing you a range of genres, perspectives, and subject matter, we present the short films of Keala Taylor, The Waiting Room, Salim Sabbagh, Full Ice, Veronica Becerra-Santiago, Rosie, and Becky Chen, Inside Isla Vista’s Housing Crisis. The screenings will be followed by a Director’s Q&A and a reception. Keala Taylor wrote, directed, and starred in The Waiting Room, a film about a girl named Damai who struggles with her mental & physical health while hiding her issues from those around her. An unfortunate situation leaves her no longer part of this physical world, and she enters an eerie waiting room, where she revisits her mistakes and ultimately decides whether to continue on with life. Salim Sabbagh, a Syrian filmmaker and Film & Media Studies graduate student, wrote and directed Full Ice in 2018–2019 during a period of conflict in Syria. It takes place in a bar where they worked for five years, covering a university student working as a bartender in Damascus who faces a moral dilemma. The bar has since closed, and the film now serves as an unintended documentation of that era and community. Veronica Becerra-Santiago, a third-year transfer student, directed a coming-of-age film titled Rosie, which explores the sentimental value of childhood we carry into adulthood. This film explores the uncertainty of growing up, and Rosie is the guiding light. Becky Chen wrote and directed a documentary, Inside Isla Vista’s Housing Crisis, on the state of housing at UCSB.
