Community Studies
Associate Teaching Professor Alison Hope Alkon published two articles about experiential pedagogies. The first, "A Pedagogy for the End of the World: Teaching Environmental Health and Justice in a Sacrifice Zone," appeared in a special issue of Environmental Studies and Sciences dedicated to Practicing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The second piece, “A People’s Pedagogy: Engaging a People’s Guide in Stockton, CA,” analyzes an undergraduate class's counter-cartographic work with the city's history of underdevelopment.
Economics
Lecturer Steve Owen along with Building Belonging undergraduate student researchers Ella Ripley-Rodriguez, Molly Jenkins & Sophie Walsh published “Let Them Eat Big Macs, Crunchwraps, and Whoppers: A Working Paper Describing the Local Impact of California's $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage in the City of Santa Cruz”. This study examines the local impact of California’s Assembly Bill 1228, which implemented a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers, using the city of Santa Cruz as a case study to highlight the many unintended consequences of this legislation. Analysis of quantitative labor market data and qualitative interviews with fast food franchise and independently owned restaurant managers has exposed workforce economic inefficiencies and accelerated changes in operational strategies. Results indicate a plethora of negative outcomes such as higher menu prices for consumers, reductions in employee working hours, widespread elimination of overtime & loss of benefits for employees. Decreases in employee opportunities are being driven by automation & the adoption of labor replacement technologies is accelerating. Though exempt from the new minimum wage law, independent restaurants have also faced negative side effects in the form of upward wage pressures & shrinking operating margins. These findings provide a common sense understanding of the policy’s economic & social effects.
Environmental Studies
Associate Professor Madeleine Fairbairn co-authored "Digital agriculture will perpetuate injustice unless led from the grassroots" with Maywa Montenegro for Nature Food, critiquing the corporate-controlled digital agriculture. Instead, the authors argue for innovation processes that center on the needs, knowledge, and priorities of communities who live and work in close relationship to the land.
She also published "Agrarian Platform Capitalism: Digital Rentiership Comes to Farming” in Antipode, which explores the growing scholarly interest in the rise of "platform capitalism.” Historically, this research has been largely focused on urban areas by looking at the impacts of Uber or Airbnb. In this article, the authors consider how platformization in agriculture is combined with the distinctive features of agrarian political economy to produce unique effects.
Professor Karen Holl published two articles with collaborator Pedro Brancalion (University of Sao Paulo) on scaling up forest restoration globally. The article “Upscaling ecological restoration by integrating with agriculture” in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment highlights the steps necessary to use common small-scale ecological restoration approaches to restore large areas of land. Along with three other researchers, Holl and Brancalion authored “Moving biodiversity from an afterthought to a key outcome of forest restoration” for Nature Reviews Biodiversity, which makes recommendations for planning, financing, and monitoring biodiversity-centered forest restoration.
Latin American and Latino Studies
Professor & Chair Catherine Ramírez was announced to be one of 15 thought leaders selected to be a 2025-26 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, which is part of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, one of the nation's oldest academic honor societies. As a Visiting Scholar, she'll share her work with scholars and students across the country over the upcoming academic year. The last UCSC faculty member to be selected as a Visiting Scholar was James Zachos in 2017-18.
Ramírez also recently conducted an interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz with anthropologist Jason De León about his award-winning book, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, which was published by Public Books in March.
Politics
Associate Professor Sara Niedzwiecki published "Immigrants’ Barriers to Accessing Social Policy in Argentina and Chile" in International Migration Review. This article systematically maps differences in the hurdles that immigrants face in accessing basic income and healthcare from 1990 to the present. Through 80 in-depth interviews in Buenos Aires and Santiago, it argues that these barriers depend on political elites’ views—as policies are expanded, policymakers will lower access barriers for universal policies. At the same time, they will raise more hurdles for targeted policies.
Psychology
Professor Phil Hammack was awarded a small grant from Division 1 of the American Psychological Association (the Society for General Psychology) to support the completion of his forthcoming book, "Radical Authenticity: The Twenty-First Century Revolution in Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships" (contracted with Oxford University Press' trade division). The book blends a review of recent scientific research on sexuality and gender with an analysis of personal narrative interviews from the last decade of Hammack's research in the Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory.
Distinguished Professor Campbell Leaper co-published an article in the Journal of Latinx Psychology with former doctoral student Dr. Brenda Gutierrez, which examined the socialization of sexist attitudes among Mexican-heritage college youths. Endorsing sexism was less likely if both their cultural identity was important and their familial peers (e.g., cousins, siblings) had conveyed gender-egalitarian messages. Thus, same-aged relatives may help Mexican-heritage youths maintain a strong ethnic identity while endorsing nontraditional gender attitudes.
Distinguished Professor Jean Fox Tree co-authored “Small talk in videoconferencing improves conversational experience and fosters relationships” in Cognition and Emotion.
While many people dislike videoconferencing, one thing that can make it better is allowing time for small talk. Participants in our study engaged in three iterations of tasks and breaks. Some could chat during breaks and others couldn’t. Those who could chat enjoyed their conversations more, reported that they were more willing to talk to their partners in the future, and actually did talk to their partners more at the end of the study.
Fox Tree also co-authored “Social presence and collaborative creativity in leaner media” for Computers in Human Behavior Reports, which explores how leaner media like telephone talk and text chat has fewer cues for people to use in understanding each other. In this study, a team’s creativity was maximized when they started by texting ideas and then switched to an audio call. We also discovered that more balanced conversations yielded more creative output.
The article “The liking gap online: People like us more than we think” was published in the same journal, examining the liking gap, a phenomenon where people underestimate how much their addressees like them. The liking gap has generally been studied in in-person settings, but researchers found that the liking gap is also observable in online settings. They also found that the more people enjoyed their conversations, the more they liked their addressees."
Lastly, Fox Tree co-published “Discourse markers in small talk and tasks” in Discourse Studies, which tested how discourse markers (words like so, oh, and like) were used across task-related talk and small talk in fully-in-lab and partially-out-of-the-lab settings. Reseaarchers found evidence that small talk is easier to produce when it’s partially in the wild rather than fully in the lab. The more conversations required negotiation, the more discourse markers were used. "
Ph.D. candidate Elise Duffau co-authored the article “Expecting politeness: Perceptions of voice assistant politeness” in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. For fifty years, politeness researchers claimed that some politeness forms show camaraderie (“Let’s go get lunch”) and some show distance (“If it’s not too much trouble, want to get lunch together?”). Researchers assessed how people interpreted these forms and found that many claims were wrong. They also discovered that politeness perception is affected by the activity in which communicators are engaged in (such as a social game or an instructional task) and whether people believed they were communicating with a person or an artificial agent.
UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor Barbara Rogoff was included in a compendium of leading figures in developmental psychology and asked to describe her career path and contributions. In October, Rogoff was a guest speaker at the Universidad Rafael Landivar and at the Scientific Conference on Human Development in Antigua Guatemala.
