People

Faculty

Naya Jones (she/her) / Primary Investigator & Studio Founder / is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSC and Core Faculty in the Global and Community Health Program. She is a geographer and cultural worker who bridges theory and practice. Her solo and collaborative work foregrounds Black geographies of health, ecologies, and healing in North and Latin America. With an emphasis on “ways of knowing” and how they are embodied, she uses a range of methods, from plant collection and participatory film, to oral history and ritual art. Her work has been published in outlets such as ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Policy Futures in Education, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Antipodeonline.org, Ofrenda Magazine, and Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Practices. Her current book project focuses on Black botanical knowledge and the Great Migration. Learn more and follow the work at www.nayajones.com .

Graduate Student Researchers & Affiliates

Chris Lang (he/him) / Graduate Student Affiliate / aspires to overhaul a system of extraction-disposability-neglect and replace it with one of regeneration-circularity-respect. Through plastic, he explores the ways that physical waste is racialized across every node of the supply chain. He troubles neat human-animal-object categorizations to consider how commodity production, consumption, and disposal pathways reproduce necropolitical outcomes while simultaneously opening up opportunities for solidarity and refusal. Chris champions the promise and possibilities of collective zero waste, plant-based praxes. While conscious of the exclusivity of “ethical consumer movements,” he builds off Black Feminist theory to consider how petrochemical and industrial animal industries overdetermine anti-Blackness, patriarchal white supremacy, settler coloniality, speciesism, and ecocide. As such, he hopes to digest and reassemble the current individualizing narratives of sustainable consumption and reframe them through boycott/cooperative economics to galvanize efforts of abolition and decolonization. Visit Chris on-line: 
Betania Santos (she/her) / Graduate Student Researcher / is a PhD, Sociology student at UC Santa Cruz from La Puente, CA. Her doctoral research is centered on community healing and exploring how social justice organizing youth groups throughout California practice “healing”, as a mode for political justice. This work is strongly rooted in her own personal narrative, as healing spaces in her community have been crucial to her well being by offering sanctuary, tools for mental health, and overall empowerment. Betania also serves as the graduate coordinator for El Centro: Chicanx and Latinx Resource center at UCSC – in where she created Colibri Circles – a weekly woman of color holistic writing circle that centers wellness and community. Through sharing lived experience and building caring relations, Betania hopes to foster just and abundant futures for communities of color.
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