Social Justice & Community
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Immigration Enforcement in Minnesota: Not Just a Political, also a Public Health Crisis
Politics Ph.D. student Lucia Vitale argues that immigration enforcement in Minnesota is leading to deteriorating access to health care, widespread psychological distress, and the displacement of protective responsibilities from the state onto communities themselves.
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Free-Speech Lines Blur for Teachers in Wake of Charlie Kirk’s Killing
The government’s move to revoke state-issued teaching licenses in response to teachers’ personal opinions posted to social media—notably not in the classroom or in public school forums—is part of a movement to curtail the free speech of Americans,” said Lora Bartlett, chair of the Education Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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‘People Are Losing Hope’: Suicide Risk Is Rife in ICE Detention Centers
UC Santa Cruz Psychology Professor Craig Haney emphasized that many detainee suicide attempts, and suicidal thoughts, were the result “of their circumstances, a reaction to an otherwise very despairing situation,” he said.
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An inmate died in a Nebraska prison fire. That was just the first tragedy.
Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explained how restrictive housing in prisons affects inmate behavior. “They’re allowed to deteriorate in these environments,” he said. “Eventually, they act out. The prison system responds to the acting out in the only way it knows, which is the application of force. And…
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In high-cost Santa Cruz County, a generation of young workers increasingly turns to unions
Young local workers once viewed service jobs as temporary steppingstones. Now, more than 80% told UC Santa Cruz researchers that they are open to unionizing, motivated by both economic pressures and a broader vision of workplace democracy.
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Class-action trial in Manitoba to challenge province’s use of segregation jail cells on children
Craig Haney, a psychology professor with the University of California, Santa Cruz, is among three academics to provide expert reports as part of the lawsuit. “The conditions of confinement I encountered were stark and depriving − ranging from very bad to outright egregious,” he said.
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The state of labor on Labor Day 2025
Teresa Ghilarducci, a research fellow at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Labor and Community, wrote an opinion article about the need to defend workers’ rights, voice, and the truth about their conditions.
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What Jesse Jackson and Zohran Mamdani Have in Common
Michael McCarthy, leader of the Community Studies Program at UC Santa Cruz says organizers have always known that “in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your…
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A Woman With HIV Spent Six Years in Solitary. She Sued and Missouri Will Change Its Policy.
“It is a psychologically traumatizing experience,” said Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, of solitary confinement. “It persists after somebody gets out of solitary confinement. In some instances, it’s fatal.”
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Nagaland University hosts workshop on ‘Ecologies of care’
UC Santa Cruz cohosted the workshop, and Professor Dolly Kikon, director of Center for South Asian Studies, introduced the initiative as a collaborative dialogue to explore the Himalayan region’s various intersections, expressions and care practices.
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As farmworkers face longer, hotter harvest seasons, their risk of heat-related illness grows
Matt Sparke, co-director of the global and community health program, is creating an app that maps health risks related to climate change. The app can be used by community health workers, farmworkers, and policy makers.
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A Bid to Undo a Colonial-Era Wrong Touches a People’s Old Wounds
Anthropology Professor Dolly Kikon was part of a delegation of 20 Indigenous Naga leaders, elders and scholars that recently visited the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford to advocate for repatriating the hundreds of human remains in the collection back to Naga ancestral lands on the Indian subcontinent.