Of Interest Events for the Week of April 27, 2015

 

Wednesday, April 29 / HISTORY OF ART & VISUAL CULTURE / Sylvester Ogbechie / “Transcultural Interpretation and the Production of Alterity: Photography, Materiality, and Mediation in the Making of ‘African Art’” / 4:00-5:00pm / Porter College, Room D245

Thursday, April 30 / PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIA / Shelly Wilcox / “Immigration Justice in Nonideal Circumstances” / 4:15-5:45pm / Humanities 2, Room 259

Thursday, April 30 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Marilyn Chin / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206

Friday, May 1 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Kali Rubaii / “Writing the Future with a Cement Pen: How to Concretize Displacement” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202

Friday, May 1 / POETRY & POLITICS RESEARCH CLUSTER / James Beneda, Whitney DeVos, Ariane Helou, Katie Lally, Kenan Sharpe, Eric Sneathen, & Melissa Yinger / “Counteractions: A Symposium of Creative & Critical Inquiries” / 9:30am-5:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

 

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OF-INTEREST EVENT DESCRIPTIONS:

Wednesday, April 29 / HISTORY OF ART & VISUAL CULTURE / Sylvester Ogbechie / “Transcultural Interpretation and the Production of Alterity: Photography, Materiality, and Mediation in the Making of ‘African Art’” / 4:00-5:00pm / Porter College, Room D245

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie (Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2000) is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture of Global Africa at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is the author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (University of Rochester Press, 2008: winner of the 2009 Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association for best scholarly publication in African studies), Making History: The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2011), and editor of Artists of Nigeria (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2012). Ogbechie is also the founder and editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. He organized and coordinated the First International Nollywood Convention and Symposium (Los Angeles, June 2005) and subsequently founded in 2006 the Nollywood Foundation, which produced annual African film conventions in Los Angeles. Ogbechie has received prestigious fellowships, grants and awards for his research from the American Academy in Berlin, Getty Research Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, Institute for International Education, Smithsonian Institution and the Ford Foundation. His current research focuses on the role of cultural informatics and new media in analysis of the art and cultural patrimony of Africa and its Diaspora in the age of globalization.

Refreshments will be available before the talk.
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Thursday, April 30 / PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIA / Shelly Wilcox / “Immigration Justice in Nonideal Circumstances” / 4:15-5:45pm / Humanities 2, Room 259

In recent years, political philosophers have begun to interrogate the methodology they use to construct normative principles. Some have voiced the concern that prevailing liberal egalitarian principles are constructed under idealized assumptions and thus are ill-suited to real-world circumstances where such assumptions do not apply. Specifically, critics have raised three related objections to so-called ideal theory: (1) ideal theory cannot help us understand current injustices in the actual, nonideal world; (2) ideal principles are not sufficiently action-guiding; and (3) ideal theory is counterproductive or even dangerous because it tends to reflect and perpetuate illicit group privilege.

This paper explores recent work on the ethics of immigration in light of these methodological criticisms, focusing on the open borders debate. The central question in this debate is whether liberal states have a moral right to restrict immigration. I argue that prominent arguments on both sides of this issue are subject to the standard criticisms of ideal theory, and thus that a nonideal normative approach to immigration in urgently needed. I then develop several methodological desiderata for such an approach and draw upon these criteria to outline the broad contours of an adequate nonideal theory of justice in immigration.

Shelley Wilcox is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She works in the areas of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and applied ethics, with a special interest in immigration, global justice, and urban environmental issues. She has published articles on the ethics of immigration and globalization in Philosophical Studies, Social Theory and Practice, Journal of Social Philosophy, Philosophy Compass, and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as in numerous anthologies. She is currently working on a book manuscript on urban environmental ethics and serving as Book Review Editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.
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Thursday, April 30 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Marilyn Chin / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206

Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and the author of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty and Dwarf Bamboo. Her writing has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress. She was interviewed by Bill Moyers’ and featured in his PBS series The Language of Life and in PBS Poetry Everywhere. She can be found online at: http://www.marilynchin.org/
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Friday, May 1 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Kali Rubaii / “Writing the Future with a Cement Pen: How to Concretize Displacement” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available.
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Friday, May 1 / POETRY & POLITICS RESEARCH CLUSTER / James Beneda, Whitney DeVos, Ariane Helou, Katie Lally, Kenan Sharpe, Eric Sneathen, & Melissa Yinger / “Counteractions: A Symposium of Creative & Critical Inquiries” / 9:30am-5:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210

The Poetry & Politics Research Collective present “Counteractions: A Symposium of Creative & Critical Inquiries”. The event will feature papers from UCSC graduate students: James Beneda, Whitney DeVos, Ariane Helou, Katie Lally, Kenan Sharpe, Eric Sneathen, & Melissa Yinger. Roundtable conversations will be lead by Christopher Chen, Kendra Dority, Johanna Isaacson, Kyle Lane-McKinley, Brian Malone, Tsering Wangmo, Tim Willcutts, & others. Please also join us the previous evening, April 30, for a poetry reading in downtown Santa Cruz. For more information, including a full schedule, please see our website: http://www.ucscpoetrypolitics.com
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Posted in Of Interest, Uncategorized.