Aminda Smith’s forthcoming book, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People focuses on Chinese Communist reformatories, where agents of the state worked to transform beggars, prostitutes, and other “vagrants” into new socialist citizens. She explores reeducation centers as both institutions and symbolic spaces through which “The People” were created.

Aminda Smith is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.

This paper insists on working, playing, and thinking in multispecies cosmo- politics in the face of the killing of entire ways of being on earth that characterize the age cunningly called “now” and the place called “here.” Thinking with work- ing homing pigeons leads us into needed knots of SF – string figures, science fic- tion, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, so far.

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz.

Christopher Connery’s recent work has centered on the global 1960s and its aftermaths, Chinese urbanism, and Shanghai studies. He is currently working on a psychogeographical study of Shanghai. His talk is part of a series of reflections on left and anti-capitalist critical discourse on contemporary China, in China and internationally.

Christopher Connery is Professor of World Literature and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz

Lyn Hejinian is currently at work on a book-length essay, tentatively titled The Positions of the Sun, and exploring practical as well as conceptual possibilities for avant-garde and quotidian practices under conditions of late (or perhaps, now, triumphant) capitalism.

Lyn Hejinian is Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

In her new translation of Marco Polo’s Travels, Sharon Kinoshita reorients a text typically read as a western narrative of first contact, by returning it to its original context, the midpoint of the century chronicled in Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, and to its original title, The Description of the World.

Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, and Co-Director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Janette Dinishak’s work explores how Wittgenstein’s concept “noticing an aspect” can provide a frame for capturing and understanding commonly neglected phenomena that are characteristic of autistic experience. She also traces the inter-relations between scientific, cultural, and first-person perspectives on autism and how these perspectives interact in shaping our understanding of autism.

Janette Dinishak is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz.

Marc Matera is finishing a book, London and the Black International, on the wider Atlantic and imperial horizons of black activism, intellectual work, and cultural production in London between the world wars. His most recent work examines the Jamaican visual artist Ronald Moody’s agonistic relationship to modernism.

Marc Matera is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.

Going beyond the assessment that Asian American men in the movies embody asexuality/effeminacy/queerness, or a manhood that falls short of the norms, Celine Shimizu’s Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012) explores how Asian/American men in US film history sought to formulate masculinities in, through, and beyond constricting notions of their identities.

Carla Freccero has taught at UCSC since 1991.This paper, a chapter of the in-progress Animate Figures, explores the long genealogy of human wolf eradication and figuration in the west, from economic competitor in Plautus’s “homo homini lupus,” to sovereign double in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign.

Carla Freccero is Professor and Chair of Literature and History of Consciousness and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC.

Through a study of the Haitian Revolution, James Martel’s recent work not only questions the liberal universalism of the French Revolution, but also the myriad ways in which Haitians appropriated, subverted and radicalized Enlightenment principles.

James Martel is Professor and Chair of Political Science at San Francisco State.