Our Work Together
The Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies (CUES) is a laboratory for social scientific research on urbanization and the environment in a time of increasing inequality and climate change. It is the first institutional consolidation of UCSC’s wide-ranging expertise in the political, cultural, and spatial dimensions of urban-environmental issues. CUES’s primary goals are to support research activities of affiliated faculty; build intellectual community among faculty, graduate students, and postdocs through our ongoing workshop and reading group and occasional public events; and support graduate students through funding and professional development opportunities.
CUES supports and promotes critical, public-facing urban-environmental research and action at UCSC. It unites a number of longstanding Sociology Department commitments–to the interdisciplinary fields of political economy, political ecology, and place, space, and culture; to mixed-methods and community engaged research; and to maintaining a “critical” orientation to justice and social change in both applied and speculative realms. In drawing from the distinctiveness of Santa Cruz–in relation to both the intersection of urban/rural/wildlands spaces and politics, and our campus’s history of critical urban and environmental work–it also advances a “Santa Cruz approach” to urban studies.
