Reimagine the World

At UC Santa Cruz, the environmental humanities encourage us to ask: what happens when we stop treating the natural world as merely a backdrop, resource, or object of study—and instead treat it as a web of interconnected lives?

UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Professor Banu Bargu, an acclaimed scholar of political theory and resistance, has spent her career exploring some of the most extreme and harrowing forms of political protest, including hunger strikes.
Bargu’s work has now been recognized with the 2025 David Easton Prize from the American Political Science Association.

Three years ago, a fire broke out at the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru, imperiling one of the world’s most important collections of primary sources on Amazonian history, culture, and politics. For Amanda M. Smith, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, the disaster highlighted the urgency of the project she had already begun: digitizing the archive’s collections to preserve them, at least in electronic format, for the future.