Transcollege Clusters

Faculty Coordinator: Michael Ziser (English)

The goal of this cluster is to build solidarity and knowledge across disciplines in order to evaluate the promise of the “Green New Deal” and contribute to the process of critiquing, shaping, and materializing its stated goals and policies. The Green New Deal evokes both a return to the progressive legislation and economic stimulus brought about by FDR's New Deal, but it has also brought with it conversations about a "Just Transition,” a phrase that names a framework for moving from our current fossil-fuel economy to a green economy based on sustainable practices and new green energy jobs. Our cluster aims both to explore different theoretical aspects of the Green New Deal and Just Transition and, by bringing together scholars from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities disciplines, to produce work that might have a tangible influence on how these conversations develop.

Faculty Coordinators: Margaret Kemp (Theatre & Dance), Kate Scow (Land, Air, and Water Resources), Christina Cogdell (Design), Amanda Crump (International Agricultural Development)

Emergent methods in bioremediation bring back the ability of ecosystems to thrive and be resilient to future challenges. However, activists and scholars also warn us that strategies for remediation are not comprehensive solutions; while they offer palliative reprieve against environmental degradation, they do not address systemic issues of over-production and consumption that have brought us to this ecological impasse. Around these questions, we gather as an interdisciplinary group of scholars, scientists, artists, engineers, community workers and activists to deepen our understanding from across our various situated disciplines, and to develop strategies for response that are holistic in their approach. This collaboration will pay attention to the arts as a powerful site for coalition building, for the first step in changing our land-based practices is to reinvigorate the stories we tell about them. Remediation is not only a practice that relates to soil; it is also an aesthetic and narrative practice in this undertaking.

Faculty Coordinator: Clare Cannon (Human Ecology)

Political ecology has grown into a diverse field that attends to how power, representation, and knowledge production shape understandings of and interventions into nature-society systems. To this end, the Political Ecology Research Cluster at UC Davis fosters collaborative projects addressing unequal power dynamics that cause and emerge from socio-environmental relations and changes. Through our collaboration, members imagine new possibilities on how to achieve a just world for humans and non-humans alike. We conceive of our cluster as a place where disciplines like human geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities converge.

Faculty Coordinators: Dr. Sanjai Parikh (Land, Air, and Water Resources) and Dr. Nicolas Zwyns (Anthropology)

UC Davis houses some of the best specialists in the fields of quaternary geology and soil sciences; however, a mechanism to foster long-term collaborations with archaeologists, paleoanthropologists and soil scientists on campus is yet to be established. Dr. Parikh and the Center for Experimental Archaeology group is in a unique position to facilitate these connections. The creation of a cluster for experimental archaeology which incorporates interdisciplinary collaboration and supports communication between two schools of specialists would stem from the bone projects completed and in progress (coordinated by Giulia Gallo).

Faculty Coordinator: Jiayi Young (Design)

We aim to found a dynamic research cluster that brings together scholars and practitioners from very different corners of the university – Humanities, Arts, Data Science, and Computer Science – to investigate the use of information in democratic politics and society. Through the dynamic makeup of this cluster, research inquiries would find points of overlap across areas such as digital media and voting technologies; election biases, social media, and democratic processes; and, devices of public-engagement and social and political agency.

Faculty Coordinators: Gerardo Con Diaz (Science and Technology Studies), Nina Amenta (Computer Science)

The Science and Technology Studies Program and the Computer Science Department jointly propose the development of a new curriculum in digital ethics at UC Davis. We will develop new courses on the ethics of information technologies aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at computer science and computer engineering majors. Our goal is to train UC Davis graduates who have the technological and humanistic skills necessary to design and create socially responsible computing innovations.

Faculty Coordinator: Clare Cannon (Community and Regional Development)

The Davis Political Ecology lab aims to create transdisciplinary intellectual space for examining how political ecology can generate deeper socio-ecological diversity, equity, and inclusion. ​As interdisciplinary scholars, we increasingly seek to orient our work toward social and environmental justice, drawing from a ​methodological toolkit whose origins lie in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.

Faculty Coordinators: Thomas Jue (Medicine), Gabriel Jack Chin (Law), and Robyn Rodriguez (Asian American Studies)

A multidisciplinary initiative to develop historical and cultural perspectives on the immigrant experience and the struggle for equality and to establish historical, social, and political context to promote an informed discourse, which in turn can properly guide the public debate.