Modern utopias and nuclear wastelands come
together in Professor Brown’s “Plutopia”
about the first two cities in the world to produce
plutonium—Richland, Washington and
Ozersk, Russia. New postwar communities
of high-risk affluence alongside plutonium
disasters and public health catastrophes were
thus created on two of the world’s most radiated
landscapes.

Co-sponsored by The History Department and The Anthropology Department.

Kate Brown is an Associate Professor of History in the University of Maryland,
Baltimore.

Histories of sexuality routinely mediate geopolitical
difference(s) through the narrative
forms of marginality, disenfranchisement and
loss. What happens if we shift our attention
from the reading of sexuality as marginality
to understanding it as a site of vitalized
abundance–even futurity?

Anjali Arondekar ia an Associate Professor in Feminist Studies at UCSC.

While critics have dismissed an image of the Renaissance humanist Petrarch as a nature lover, this talk reconsiders a poetics of the living in his work. Professor Ursell looks at how Petrarch’s “life writing” and “life reading” have been understood in relation to global ecology and world literature.

Michael Ursell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Literature at UCSC.

Professor Tsing’s current research tracks the commerce and ecology of a high-value wild mushroom to illuminate contemporary dilemmas of capitalism and multispecies life. Her in-progress Living in Ruins explores the consequences of building capitalist supply chains among cultural and biological histories of disturbance and precarious survival.

Anna Tsing is a Professor of Anthropology at UCSC.

Author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota 2007), Professor Hoad is working on a book about representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. He focuses on A.S. Mopeli-Paulus and Peter Lanham’s Blanket Boy’s Moon to amplify the dissonances between culture and law on the terrain of sexuality.

Neville Hoad is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin.

Professor Yang examines the legal reasoning of the former Justice Department lawyer’s “torture memos” and his arguments that Al Qaeda and Taliban members were not entitled to protections under the Geneva Convention. She explores how Yoo and his critics relied on different historical memories during debates about torture and executive authority.

Alice Yang is an Associate Professor of History at UCSC, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories.

The French ban on the burqa and niqab is only one example of the primacy accorded the face in modern western societies. Professor Seth here argues that the fortunes of the face are tied to the birth of modern individuality, and that the face is both the grounds and the reflection of the modern expressive self.

Vanita Seth is an Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.

In 2010 gays and lesbians of the U.S. Communist Party began publishing a newsletter, The Queer Communist, whose emblem is a pink triangle superimposed on a hammer and sickle, marking an extraordinary moment relative to the homophobic history and politics of the CPUSA. The paper analyzes this history.

Bettina Aptheker is a Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies and History at UCSC.

Professor Moodie studies the sociality engendered by legal and economic projects for uplift and empowerment, including affirmative action, microfinance, and gender-based rights assertions. Her in-progress book, based on ethnographic work with the Dhanka, examines the gendered impact of affirmative action-based upward mobility.

Megan Moodie is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC.

Professor Caldwell examines the politics of poverty, social welfare, care and intimacy in Russia through ethnographic research in Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (California 2011). Her new research is on Russian-African assistance and development relations in the twentieth century. She also studies changing food practices in the postsocialist world.

Melissa L. Caldwell is a Professor of Anthropology at UCSC, and Co-Director for the UCMRP on Studies of Food and the Body.