News

Central Coast Labor Council Award Ceremony

UCSB Community Labor Center Honored with "Unionize the Central Coast" Award

The Central Coast Labor Council awarded the UCSB Community Labor Center its "Unionize the Central Coast" award on October 3, 2026, recognizing the center's work bridging academic research and frontline labor advocacy across San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties.

New York Times Highlights Blum Center in UC Affordability Story

UCSB secures gift to launch a South Asian American studies center

The Mellon Foundation has awarded a major grant to UC Santa Barbara to establish infrastructure for the field of South Asian American studies in the form of a nationally facing interdisciplinary center. Initiated by an inquiry from the foundation last August, the $750,000 award allows campus scholars to build a systematic framework for a discipline that has historically lacked centralized institutional support.

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.