Shaping San Francisco

Shaping San Francisco is a series of free lectures, which aim to excavate the city’s lost history. It’s a place to meet and talk unmediated by corporations, official spokespeople, religion, political parties, or dogma.

Shaping San Francisco
Periodic Wednesdays | 7:30 pm
Eric Quezada Center for Culture & Politics | 518 Valencia St., SF
FREE

January 25 – Art & Politics: Packard Jennings
Visual and conceptual artist Packard Jennings talks about his work which ranges from digital subversions
to quiet mail-in actions to large scale interventions on billboards. He also speaks about work that
gets made and that which doesn’t.

February 8 – Citizen Science/Extinction Culture
Doing science and making culture are increasingly intertwined as more and more amateur naturalists
crowdsource the multi-layered experience of life on this planet. Authors Mary Ellen Hannibal and Ursula
Heise illuminate the tangled, dynamic processes of thinking and doing that help us understand where we
are and what we can—or ought to—do about living through this heartbreaking Great Extinction.

February 22 – Progressive Transgressions
Crossing centuries and social mores, editors Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus, (Alice: Memoirs of
a Barbary Coast Prostitute) and author Clare Sears (Arresting Dress) take us into San Francisco’s
mid-1800s underworld to look at how normative ideas of sexuality were policed and created by
widespread mid-1800s laws as well as challenged by gender defiers.

March 8 – Local History in Your Ear
Podcasts are shaping the presentation of history through audio delivery. Hosts of several local series
tell us why they chose this new technology to delve into the past and how they gauge success. Hear
clips of each program in a special podcast challenge! With David Gallagher and Woody LaBounty of
Outside Lands San Francisco, Liam O’Donoghue of East Bay Yesterday, and others TBA. .

March 22 – We’ve Done This Before: 1980s Movements
The fight against the Reagan administration’s war build-up, emergency response against Central
American wars, birth of the Peace Navy, stopping the USS Missouri, creating sanctuary cities, AIDS
and Anti-Nuclear activism. We bring it up to climate justice & no nukes today. With activists and
archivists Marcy Darnovsky, Steve Stallone, and Lincoln Cushing.

May 3 – Agents of Change!
Fred Glass, author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement, takes a
long look at the labor history of California and Chris Carlsson, of Foundsf.org focuses on the ebb and
flow of class war in San Francisco. With videos and debate!

May 10 – From the Delta to the Bayshore:
Adaptation Infrastructure and Rising Seas
Tim Stroshane of Restore the Delta and Brenda Goeden of BCDC discuss the politics and prospects
of facing our rapidly changing future around and health of the bayshore. Wetlands restoration, Sea
Level Rise, Delta Tunnels, Clean Water Act, future of EPA, and more..

May 31 – Summer of Love or Vietnam Summer?
Music, Art, & Politics of 1967: Was it all peace and love or did the anti-war movement really
define the era? A conversational antidote to the narrow interpretation of a memorable
summer in the City. With Calvin Welch, Judy Goldhaft, Mat Callahan, and Pam Brennan.

June 7 – Kent Minault’s “Diggerly-Do’s”
Kent Minault tells of the explosive first six months of the SF Diggers. Featuring stories of the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, Tim Leary, Huey Newton, Lenore Kandel, Gary Snyder, the first Digger free
food and Free Store, the Invisible Circus, photos by Chuck Gould, and music by Peter Coyote. The
evening chronicles a turning point in SF and the transformation of a youth into a life-long activist.