Tuesday, May 26 / DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES / Warren Sack / “Digital Humanities Working Group/Reading Group: A Conversation with Warren Sack” / 4:00-6:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
Wednesday, May 27 / POLITICS SPEAKER SERIES / Michael K. Brown / “Contesting Equality of Opportunity: Race and Liberalism in the Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865-1872” / 3:30 – 5:00 / Charles E. Merrill Lounge
Wednesday, May 27 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Public Lecture: “Akron Apocalypse: Religion, Rubber, and Devo” / 6:00-7:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
Thursday, May 28 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Reading Seminar: “Technologies of American Secularism” / 10:00am-12:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 408
Thursday, May 28 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Sarah Manguso & Maggie Nelson / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206
Friday, May 29 / COMPLICATED LABORS RESEARCH CLUSTER / Complicated Labor: Feminism, Maternity and Creative Practice Presents a Conversation with Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson / 12:00-2:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
Friday, May 29 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Ann Drevno / “Unintended Consequences of Regulatory Spotlighting Pesticides: The Case of California’s Central Coast Agricultural Waiver Program” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202
Friday-Saturday, May 29-30 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / Global Islam: A Weekend of Film and Video / Communications 150, Studio C
* To advertise your unit or department’s event in the “Of Interest” section of this weekly bulletin, please e-mail complete event information in text format (no PDFs) to cult@ucsc.edu no later than noon on Friday of the prior week.
* Additional information and regular updates on “Of Interest” events can be found on the IHR website and on the Cultural Studies website.
Tuesday, May 26 / DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES / Warren Sack / “Digital Humanities Working Group/Reading Group: A Conversation with Warren Sack” / 4:00-6:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
Warren Sack (Film & Digital Media) will lead a conversation about his article, “A Storytelling Machine: From Propp to Software Studies” (Les Temps Modernes (novembre-décembre 2013)). Join us to consider a genealogy of narrative construction, interactive storytelling, software studies, and the place of technology in “understanding.” This discussion will prompt us all to think beyond the tools of Digital Humanities to explore the ways thinking is tangled up with technology.
Sack’s article is available online from Digital Studies in French. To receive a copy of Sack’s article in English, email digitalhumanities@ucsc.edu.
Wednesday, May 27 / POLITICS SPEAKER SERIES / Michael K. Brown / “Contesting Equality of Opportunity: Race and Liberalism in the Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865-1872” / 3:30 – 5:00 / Charles E. Merrill Lounge
What did equality of opportunity mean during Reconstruction? Political leaders in the U.S. have assumed that voting rights combined with equality of opportunity would rectify a tortured history of slavery and racial oppression. Yet there is no consistent meaning of equality of opportunity as political elites and activists have struggled to impose their meaning on the idea. Historically, we may distinguish at least two different meanings of equality of opportunity: anti-privilege egalitarianism and the rehabilitation of subjugated populations. I argue that rehabilitation is the template for the Freedmen’s Bureau though the idea is contested by the freed people, who voice a conception of equality of opportunity based on “Negro agrarianism,” and of course deeply opposed by white southerners. I show how racial ideology and conceptions of race influenced the institutionalization of equality of opportunity and the consequences for the freed people.
Michael K. Brown, professor emeritus of Politics, is the author of Race, Money, and the American Welfare State and co-author of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. His current research focuses on race and equality of opportunity during three moments of madness—Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society—in six southern states.
Wednesday, May 27 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Public Lecture: “Akron Apocalypse: Religion, Rubber, and Devo” / 6:00-7:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
The end of the world occurred in Akron, Ohio, in the mid-1970s, when the “Rubber City” lost all its tire manufacturing. Modern narrates the sense of doom deindustrialization brought through Akron’s punk scene and the televangelist Rex Humbard’s Cathedral of Tomorrow.
Dr. John Lardas Modern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, will be visiting UCSC in a few weeks for a series of lectures and a reading seminar. Dr. Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), an eclectic, discipline-shattering book on spiritualism and religion, science and technology, and American secularism. He is currently at work on two new projects: the first explores the intersections of religion and cognition in American history and the second is a meditation on entropy, tentatively entitled “Akron Devo Divine: A Delirious History of Rubber.”
Thursday, May 28 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / John Modern / Reading Seminar: “Technologies of American Secularism” / 10:00am-12:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 408
We will read selections from Secularism in Antebellum America and a short piece on American colonial-capitalist modernity.
Please contact pxalvare@ucsc.edu for more information and/or readings for the reading seminar.
Dr. John Lardas Modern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, will be visiting UCSC in a few weeks for a series of lectures and a reading seminar. Dr. Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), an eclectic, discipline-shattering book on spiritualism and religion, science and technology, and American secularism. He is currently at work on two new projects: the first explores the intersections of religion and cognition in American history and the second is a meditation on entropy, tentatively entitled “Akron Devo Divine: A Delirious History of Rubber.”
Thursday, May 28 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Sarah Manguso & Maggie Nelson / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206
Sarah Manguso is an essayist and poet. Her new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, is out now. Her five other books include The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, named one of the top ten books of 2012 by Salon, and The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the Independent, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and Time Out Chicago. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, and Spanish. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, and her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. She grew up near Boston and now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design. She can be found online at: http://www.sarahmanguso.com/
Maggie Nelson is a nonfiction writer, critic, scholar, and poet. Her works of nonfiction include The Argonauts, a work of “autotheory” about gender, sexuality, (queer) family, and the limitations and possibilities of language; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors’ Choice; the cult hit Bluets (2009); a critical study of poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007); and a memoir about sexual violence and media spectacle titled The Red Parts (2007), which will be reissued by Graywolf in Spring 2016. Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007); Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001). Her awards include a 2007 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2013 Literature grant from Creative Capital. Since 2005 she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. She currently lives in Los Angeles. She can be found online at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maggie-nelson
Friday, May 29 / COMPLICATED LABORS RESEARCH CLUSTER / Complicated Labor: Feminism, Maternity and Creative Practice Presents a Conversation with Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson / 12:00-2:00pm / Humanities 1, Room 210
The Complicated Labor Research Cluster is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together artists and scholars around questions of feminism, maternity, and creative process. It seeks to center questions of care in our research and art whether they are explicit sites of inspiration and study or simply important to the conditions in which we undertake expressive practices.
Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Her five other books include The Guardians, named one of the top ten books of the year bySalon, and The Two Kinds of Decay, named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the Independent, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and Time Out Chicago. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize.
Maggie Nelson is the author of five books of nonfiction and four books of poetry. Her most recent book is The Argonauts, a work of “auto-theory” about gender, sexuality, sodomitical maternity, queer family, and the limitations and possibilities of language. Her 2011 book of art and cultural criticism, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors’ Choice. Her other nonfiction books include the cult hit Bluets. Recent awards include a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 Innovative Literature grant from Creative Capital.
Friday, May 29 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Ann Drevno / “Unintended Consequences of Regulatory Spotlighting Pesticides: The Case of California’s Central Coast Agricultural Waiver Program” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202
The most common sources of water column toxicity in California’s Central Coast are diazinon and chlorpyrifos, both organophosphate pesticides. The Conditional Waiver of Waste Discharge Requirements for Discharges from Irrigated Lands (“The Conditional Agricultural Waiver”) is the primary regulatory mechanism to achieve Clean Water Act TMDL requirements for water toxicity in California. Using policy documents, monitoring and enforcement data, meeting minutes, interviews, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, Drevno describes the rise and fall of the two pesticides spotlighted for regulation in the Central Coast Region. Results from this study indicate that the 2012 Central Coast Conditional Agricultural Waiver successfully reduced the use of diazinon and chlorpyrifos, but several unintended consequences, such as pesticide switching and continued toxicity, remain.
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.
For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com
Friday-Saturday, May 29-30 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / Global Islam: A Weekend of Film and Video / Communications 150, Studio C
Friday, May 29
4:00-5:30pm: Videos by Mounir Fatmi including Mixology (2010), Technologia (2010), and Rain Making (2004); Discussion with Tarek El Haik, Assistant Professor, Cinema, San Francisco State University & Peter Limbrick, Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz.
7:00-9:00pm: The feature film is Dernier Maquis/Aden, dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (France, 2008); Discussion with Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz &
Peter Limbrick, Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz.
Saturday, May 30
10:00am-12:30pm: Film screening of New Muslim Cool, dir. Jennifer Maytorena-Taylor (USA, 2009); Discussion with director Jennifer Maytorena-Taylor, Assistant Professor, Social Documentation, UC Santa Cruz
1:30-3:30pm: Videos by Monira Al-Qadiri featuring Abu Athiyya (Father of Pain) (2013), Behind the Sun (2013), Prism (2007-ongoing); Discussion with Monira Al-Qadiri
4:00-6:00pm: Film screening of Descending with Angels, dir. Christian Suhr (Denmark, 2013); Discussion with Christian Suhr & Mayanthi Fernando