Community Resilience Project: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Resilience

What can we learn about building resilience from different academic subject specialists?

Our monthly series intended to help build community resilience continues with a look at different academic approaches to the study and understanding of resilience, and how these different perspectives can be applied in our community during the current crises. Join local academic researchers for a discussion focusing on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Community Resilience. Let's consider how we can come out of this crisis stronger than before. We invite people to come with questions and ideas to help us build a more resilient community.

Register: https://santacruzpl.libcal.com/event/7025394

Zoom participation links will be sent upon registration.

The event will be moderated by Professor Mike Rotkin. Panelists include:
Professor of History Dr. Robert Strayer
Professor of Psychology Dr. Regina Longhout
Medical Anthropologist Dr. Nancy Chen
Professor of Politics Dr. Matt Sparke
Zoom participation links will be sent upon registration.

About the presenters:

Mike Rotkin, Ph.D. is a community, labor, environmental, and social justice activist. He is a former Santa Cruz City Councilmember and five-time Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz. He has taught on community and social change issues at UCSC since 1969, when he got his first Santa Cruz Public Library card.

Robert Strayer, Ph.D. is an historian with a particular focus on World History. He has taught at the high school level in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps and at the university level at SUNY: Brockport, UCSC, CSU Monterey Bay, and Cabrillo College. In addition he was a visiting professor of world and Soviet history at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has received awards for excellence in both teaching and scholarship. His published works includes books in African, Soviet, and World History. His most recent book is “Ways of the World: A Brief Global History”, now in its 5th edition. Bob and his wife Suzanne Sturn have been living in La Selva Beach since 2002.

Regina Longhout, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in community psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on empowerment in workplace, educational, and neighborhood settings. She has published over 40 papers and book chapters on these topics. In the majority of her work, she uses a paradigm called participatory action research (PAR) to critically examine schools and neighborhoods. She is best known for her youth participatory action research with 9-12 year old Latinx children. Indeed, she has been asked to speak about or has given workshops on yPAR with 8-12 year olds across the Americas. Her most recent inquiry is focused on violence against immigrant communities and responses to that violence that focus on solidarity and community building. She is a fellow of the Society for Community Research and Action, and the 2019 recipient of the Special Contributions to Community Psychology award, given by the Society for Community Research & Action. She will be a keynote speaker for the 2021 conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology.

Nancy Chen, Ph.D. is a medical anthropologist who focuses on healing practices and health institutions. Her interests include the study of healing narratives, chronic and infectious diseases, traditional medical knowledge, and intersections between the body politic, gender, ethnicity, and medicine. Chen’s recent research examines the role of biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industries in Asian societies. She regularly teaches on the anthropology of food and focuses on changing meanings of food and medicine.

Matt Sparke, Ph.D. is a Professor of Politics at UCSC. Sparke's work focuses on the changing geography of politics and citizenship in the context of globalization. In recent years, he has come to focus on global health politics, examining the ways in which people become disenfranchised of health rights, and what can be done to expand health justice. Sparke's teaching interests include Global Politics, Global Health, Global Studies, Globalization, Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, Neoliberalism, Neo-Illiberalism and the Politics of Space.