Career & Tools

Join us for our first Lunch & Learn of winter quarter! Our January Lunch & Learn will feature graduate students from English and Dynamic Neuroscience! Enjoy free lunch and a chance to socialize with grads from across campus. Space is limited, so sign up today!

Friday, January 4th, 2019 - 8:00am


Join us for our ​​​​​January Lunch & Learn, featuring talks by graduate students in ​​​English and Dynamic Neuroscience! Lunch & Learn is co-sponsored by the Graduate Division, the Graduate Student Association, and the UCSB Library. ​Feed your mind and your stomach while socializing with grad students from across the campus!

Lunch & Learn
This Edition: ​​Sci-Fi and ​​Systems

Friday, January 18
Noon-1 p.m.
Library, Room 1312 (map)
Lunch will be provided
*To help us estimate food, ​please RSVP*

Science Fictions of Alterity and the Power of Possible Worlds
Rebecca Baker

Graduate Student in ​​English

Although often denigrated as "lowbrow", science fiction--at its best--is a powerful tool for defamiliarizing, analyzing, and intervening into our technocultural, often dystopic realities. Sci-fi creatively reimagines the ways that biology, technology, and culture are entangled in rich and complex ways, compelling us to engage with new attention to situations and problems that we too often prefer to ignore, or give up as "inevitable". Although some sci-fi certainly falls into the realm of escapist fantasy, others refuse this nepenthe and prefer, as Donna Haraway would say, "staying with the trouble". This talk will focus briefly on "alterity" science fiction--including feminist, Afrofuturist, and thought experiment subgenres--tracing the ways in which these stories are pushing back against the hegemonic stereotype of
"(white) man vs. frontier" into which much early science fiction falls.

How Did I Know That? Category Learning and the Brain
Luke Rosedahl
Graduate Student in Dynamic Neuroscience

Categorization is an essential part of the human experience. Every object we recognize, every friend we see, and every car we avoid while driving requires categorization. When objects are incorrectly categorized--for example, a tumor is categorized as normal tissue--the results can be dire. In this talk I will give an overview of two different category learning systems in the brain and some important differences between them.

This event will be moderated by​ ​​Jane Faulkner, ​who is in charge of Outreach and Academic Collaboration at the UCSB Library.

Interested in being a presenter at an upcoming Lunch & Learn? Click here to find out more! If you have any questions about this event or Lunch & Learn in general, please email Daina Tagavi.