News

Robinson Archive Collage featuring portrait of Cedric Robinson

Second Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson Archive Conference Spotlights Post-Custodial Archiving and the Black Radical Tradition

On October 9–10, 2026, scholars, activists, and community organizers will celebrate UC Santa Barbara’s Black radical tradition with an eye to both present and future struggles.

Speaker Series and Graduate Seminars Explore Academic Freedom

What is academic freedom and why does it matter? This is the central question of a yearlong graduate seminar and speaker series, “Just Futures: Academic Freedom and Democratic Cultures,” beginning this fall at UC Santa Barbara. The Mellon-Sawyer Seminar is supported by a $300,000 Mellon Foundation grant awarded to UCSB Area Global Initiative (AGI); the course is housed in the Department of Global Studies.

UCSB Welcomes 2026 PROPEL Scholars

Economist Shelly Lundberg wins prestigious Mincer Award, releases book on gender economics

Economist and demographer Shelly Lundberg, a distinguished professor and Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at UC Santa Barbara, has won the 2026 Jacob Mincer Award by the Society of Labor Economists (SLE) for her lifetime contributions to labor economics.

Economics Professor Honored for Environmental Markets Work

ICE Raids Have Forced Children Into Field Work, UCSB Researchers Find

Matt Kinsella-Walsh and Danny Sanchez Bravo are both graduate strategic researchers at the UC Santa Barbara Community Labor Center. In a July 15 editorial that ran in the Santa Barbara Independent, they write that ICE raids targeting undocumented workers in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties have disastrously impacted farmworker wages and even sent teenaged workers into the the fields to help support their families.

Communications Professor Dan Lane named UC fellow for research on AI and civic engagement

Artificial intelligence is becoming a fixture of college life, influencing how students learn, seek advice and navigate the world. As a 2026–27 fellow of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement (UC-NCFSCE), Dan Lane, an associate professor in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Communication, is examining what role these technologies play in civic learning and democratic participation.