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.
The UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies presents:
A creative presentation, Karen Tei Yamashita will read excerpts from her novel, I Hotel, forthcoming book of performances, Anime Wong, and the essay “Borges & I,” as an opportunity think about the past 45 years of Asian American and Ethnic Studies with respect to our present and future. This will be followed by an informal conversation with Aimee Bahng and Alondra Nelson.
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA. He is an expert on political discourse, human greetings, verbal and musical improvisation, human agency, intentionality, and intersubjectivity. He has carried out fieldwork in (Western) Samoa and the United States. His books include From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village (Univ. of California Press, 1994), Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), and A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Blackwell, 2004). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of various awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the UCLA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award, and the American Anthropological Association/Mayfield Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
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.
Donna Haraway is Professor of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include feminist theory, cultural and historical studies of science and technology, relation of life and human sciences, and human-animal relations. In her refusal of human-exceptionalism, Haraway explores multi-species entanglements and is a leading thinker in the post-humanities. She is author of many books including, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), which has become an authoritative text in theorizing the politics of the post-human, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997), and her most recent book, When Species Meet: Encounters in Dogland (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Dame Marilyn Strathern was the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University from 1994 to 2008. She has written about new reproductive technologies and intellectual property law and her most recent work focuses on the complexities of transparency, accountability, and audit, especially within the academy. She is the author many books among which the most influential are The Gender of the Gift (University of Calfornia Press, 1988) Partial Connections (Altamira Press2004 [1991]); Kinship, law and the unexpected: Relatives are often a surprise (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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.
Friday, October 26/ PRE-WEBINAR DISCUSSION of Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century/3-4:30 PM/ Women’s Center
Thursday, November 8/ WEBINAR with Grace Lee Boggs, Room TBA
A legendary activist for social justice, Grace Lee Boggs—now 97 years old—has participated in social and political movements against war and on behalf of labor, civil rights, environmental justice, Black Power, Asian Americans, and women. In her writing and through her organizing, Boggs has helped to transform the lived experience of work, community and politics. Someone who perceives a vacant lot to be a space of possibility rather than an occasion for despair, Boggs has been a leader in the nationally recognized movement to construct a new kind of economy “from the ground up” in Detroit and to effect a paradigm shift there in the concept of education.
In order to prepare for the webinar with Grace Lee Boggs on November 8th at 2 PM, there will be a discussion of her book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (UC Press, 2011.” Chapter Two of the book—“Revolution as a New Beginning”—is available here or here. Copies of the book are available at the Literary Guillotine.
Participants in the two events are urged to read the book, which includes autobiographical and theoretical chapters in addition to chapters about the economic and educational movements in Detroit, and a conversation between Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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.
James Clifford taught in UCSC’s History of Consciousness Department for 33 years and was founding director of the Center for Cultural Studies. Clifford is currently completing Returns, a book about indigenous cultural politics that will be the third in a trilogy. The first volume, The Predicament of Culture (1988) juxtaposed essays on 20th-century ethnography, literature, and art. The second, Routes (1997) explored the dialectics of dwelling and traveling in post-modernity.