Events

Helene Moglen: “From Frankenstein to Facebook: Reflections on the Dissolution of the Humanities”

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UC Santa Cruz Emeriti group presents an Emeriti Faculty Lecture cosponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the Department of Literature.

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Are accounts of our love affairs with our machines stories of imprisonment or empowerment? Are we in charge of our avatars, personal profiles and robots, or have they actually mastered us? Drawing on Mary Shelley’s iconic science fiction novel, Frankenstein, Moglen explores the relation of humanism to technology and considers the various realities that pleasures of the virtual have concealed.

Helene Moglen is a literary, feminist, and psychoanalytic critic. In addition to the books and articles she has published in the area of literary studies, she has written about literacy, pedagogy, competition among academic women, power, and the erosion of the humanities. She is the author of The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel(UC Press 2001) and the co-editor of Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (UC Press, 1997).

FREE parking is available in the Performing Arts lot. For questions or accommodation requirements, contact UC Santa Cruz Special Events Office at 831.459.5003 or specialevents@ucsc.edu.

April 9 – Bruce Lawrence: “Minor Matters – Asian/African, Muslim/Christian”

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How do Muslims and Christians together meet the challenge of majority-minority identity politics in the 21st century? I will assess the status of minority citizenship in places of Africa and Asia that have mixed communities where Muslims are the majority, Christians the minority. Though these communities might be religiously marked as Muslim and Christian, they also have other cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and locational markings that are consequential. More than minority identity, I will argue that the litmus test for good will, comity and collective benefit in each case is citizenship rights as well as access to public space. How are these rights negotiated and maintained, monitored and modified in diverse settings with disparate resources? I will pay special attention to the circumstances and options for Copts in Egypt, Kristens and Katolics in Indonesia, while at the same time linking them to other communities in both Africa and Asia where a similar Muslim-Christian proportionality prevails.

Bruce Lawrence earned his PhD. from Yale University in the History of Religions: Islam and Hinduism. His research ranges from institutional Islam to Indo-Persian Sufism and also encompasses the comparative study of religious movements. He is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His recent books have included On Violence – A Reader (with Aisha Karim); Messages to the World, The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; The Quran, A Biography; and, with his spouse, Dr. Miriam Cooke, Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop.

Cosponsored by UCSC Departments of Anthropology, History, and Literature.

“Occupation Affect: On Political Emotion” Conference

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The Affect Working Group Research Cluster of the IHR presents :

“Occupation Affect: On Political Emotion” Conference

“Occupation Affect” seeks to take the emotional pulse of the current moment. Staging a day of public talks and a roundtable discussion, followed by a half-day meeting, we will gather a group of scholars to investigate the feelings that permeate both this era of economic collapse and the modes of adaptation as well as rebellion that have arisen in its midst. We want to explore the affective dimensions of the Great Recession and jobless “recovery,” of bail-outs and sell-outs, of tea parties and coffee klatches, of magnificent inequality and vanishing public services, of the growing concentration of wealth and the emergence of autonomous, decentralized social movements, of hopes dashed and hopes raised, of diminishing faith in government and expanding political imaginaries, of economic freefall and resurgent activist energy. We will, in short, investigate the current conjuncture through the lens of political emotion.

In this moment of economic restructuring toward an uncertain future and growing rebellion against the neoliberal global order, we are curious about ordinary and extraordinary affects: their circulation and effects, how we feel them and what we do with them, what they signal and what they obscure, how they use us and how we might use them. We want to better understand the conditions of possibility for political hope and despair; the sources and effects of apocalyptic feelings; and how senses of impossibility sometimes fade and new horizons suddenly emerge. What do we all do to stay afloat, what new subjectivities are arising amid ongoing crises, what new social relations, new ways of thinking, feeling, and doing, are being generated in the current conjuncture?

Feelings, emotion, and affect have continued for over a decade now to fascinate scholars across the disciplines. The terrain is slippery, taking as its object of research viscerality, nonrationality, the sensed, that which is bodily, inchoate, ineffable, and to the side of consciousness. We wish to investigate the theoretical, philosophical, and political trajectories the affective turn opens up for making sense of, and figuring out how to intervene in, the contemporary moment.

The Affect Working Group draws together faculty and graduate students from across the University—American Studies, Anthropology, Art, Computer Science, Feminist Studies, Film and Digital Media, History of Art and Visual Culture, History of Consciousness, Latin American and Latino Studies, Literature, Politics, and Sociology—who are interested in the felt dimensions of social life. With this conference, we hope to advance our discussions with one another and contribute to a larger discussion among similar research/art/activist collaboratives around the country, including Feel Tank Chicago and Public Feelings groups in Austin, Texas and New York City.

 

Conference Schedule, Saturday, Humanities 210

9:00 a.m. – Breakfast

9:30 a.m. – Introduction

 

10 – 11:30 a.m.

Panel 1: Political Emotion and Activist Affect: Occupy and other Social Movements

Moderator: Dean Mathiowetz (Politics, UCSC)

Elizabeth Freeman (English, UCD)

Debbie Gould (Sociology, UCSC)

Lyn Hejinian (English, UCB)

Rei Terada (Comparative Literature, UCI)

 

11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Panel 2: Affective Technologies and New Media

Moderator: Sharon Daniel (Film & Digital Media, UCSC)

Herman Gray (Sociology, UCSC)

Kim Lau (Literature, UCSC)

Soraya Murray (Film & Digital Media, UCSC)

Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Compute Science, SOE, UCSC)

 

1 – 2:15 p.m. – Lunch

 

2:30 – 4 p.m.

Panel 3: The Politics of Ordinary Affect

Moderator: Carla Freccero (Literature, History of Consciousness, Feminist Studies, UCSC)

Mel Chen (Gender & Women’s Studies, UCB)

Arlie Hochschild (Sociology, UCB)

Jerry Neu (Humanities, UCSC)

Sianne Ngai (English, Stanford)

 

4 – 4:15 p.m. – Coffee break

 

4:15 – 5:30 p.m. – Concluding Roundtable

Karen Barad (Feminist Studies, UCSC)

Vilashini Cooppan (Literature, UCSC)

Sharon Daniel (Film & Digital Media, UCSC)

Dee Hibbert-Jones (Art, UCSC)

Dean Mathiowetz (Politics, UCSC)

Vanita Seth (Politics, UCSC)

Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC)

 

Organizational Meeting of UC Affect Network, Sunday, Humanities 202

9:00 a.m. – Breakfast

9:30 – 12 noon – Meeting

12:15 p.m. – Lunch

 

Contact: 

Carla Freccero / freccero@ucsc.edu or
Debbie Gould / dbgould@ucsc.edu

 

Funded in part by UCSC’s Institute for Humanities Research and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Staff assistance provided by the IHR.

January 9 – Roderick Ferguson “Comparative Ethnic Studies: Retrieving, Redistributing, and Holding the Institution Under Erasure”

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Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Speaker Series

This talk looks at the question of comparative ethnic studies through the critique and the rearticulation of comparative projects. It goes on to ask the question of how one might institutionalize and let one’s institutional practice and project be shaped by the critique of institutionalization.

Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of race and critical theory. He is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique(2004) and The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012). He is also the co-editor with Grace Hong of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011).

January 16 – Aminda Smith “Remolding Minds in Postsocialist China: Maoist Reeducation & 21st-century Subjects”

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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.

January 23 – Donna Haraway “Playing String Figures with Companion Species: Staying with the Trouble”

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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.

January 30 – Christopher Connery “Is China Socialist (And Why Are We Asking This Question)?”

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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

February 6 – Lyn Hejinian “The Avant-Garde in Progress”

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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.

March 4 – Anthropology Colloquium – Ashley Carse “The Machete and the Freighter: Exploring Political Ecology and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal”

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This event was originally scheduled for February 11. It has been rescheduled for March 4.

Ashley Carse is interested in the intersection of of nature, culture, and technology. His research in rural and urban Panama integrates theories and methods from environmental and science technology studies.

February 13 – Sharon Kinoshita “Re-Orientations: The Worlding of Marco Polo”

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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.