Friday, December 2 / 3 PM / Oakes Mural Room
The idea of “nation” implies territory, boundaries, place, a past, people who claim to belong, and assurances of rights and privileges. With work that examines these questions across national spaces, “Producing the Nation,” a new research cluster and writing group, will critically explore processes, claims, and contradictions regarding the nation and its influence on the formation of identities. With a focus on intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and political conviction, the writing group is particularly concerned with the production and consumption of cultural expression. The group’s participants turn to cultural production to help explain the range of emotional and political investments embedded in notions of national belonging. This panel also explores the mapping of national cultures, focusing on circumstances including exile, diaspora, nature, geography, and the impact of American domestic and foreign policies. The cluster plans to hold an additional panel discussion in spring of 2006.
TOPICS & PANELISTS:
Eco-Challenge or Eco-Circus: Adventure Sport and Land Use Controversies in the American Southwest
Barbara Barnes, graduate student in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
Isabel Allende and the U.S. Marketplace of Latin American Identity
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Ethnicity,
University of Southern California
On the Citizen-subject: Commemorating 1970s Political Violence in Thailand
Sudarat Musikawong, graduate student in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
Discussant: Herman Gray, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department