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Keith E. McNeal

Keith E. McNeal: Religion and the Alter-Nationalist Politics of Diaspora in an Era of Postcolonial Multiculturalism: Case Studies from Trinidad and Tobago

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The Religion, Culture, and Social Movements Research Cluster presents:

Keith E. McNeal: “Religion and the Alter-Nationalist Politics of Diaspora in an Era of Postcolonial Multiculturalism: Case Studies from Trinidad and Tobago”

Monday, April 5 / 12:15 PM / Humanities 210

Workshop:
Monday, April 5 / 3 PM / Humanities 210

Please download the following readings for the seminar and the workshop:
Readings Part 1
Readings Part 2
Readings Part 3

Keith E. McNeal’s research concerns the cultural history and moral politics of race, religion, and diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago. It traces interrelationships between contrasting racial ideologies of subordination and African and Hindu popular religions in the colonial period and their transformations in the independence period and beyond, developing an analytical distinction between Christianity as “visible” and “invisible” interlocutor. Professor McNeal will lead us in a discussion of his forthcoming book, Ecstasy in Exile: Spirits and Transculturation in the Southern Caribbean. He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego.

For more information, contact Josh Brahinsky at jbrahins@ucsc.edu.

Robert Meister: “After Evil: The Intertemporal Grammar of Human Rights”

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Professor Meister’s talk concerns his forthcoming book, After Evil: A New Discourse of Human Rights (Columbia, 2010). In what ways does a moral consensus that the past was evil require a political consensus that the evil is past? After Evil develops and criticizes the temporal logic of late 20th-century human rights discourse as an attempt to conceive the present as a time in which the project of putting evil in the past is also a postponement of justice.

Robert Meister is Professor of Social and Political Thought at UCSC; and Director of the Bruce Initiative for Rethinking Capitalism.

Qur'an

Brian Catlos: “The Paradoxes of Pluralism: Mediterranean Conflict and Collaboration in the Age of Holy War”

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Professor Catlos works on social relations in the premodern Mediterranean and is one of the scholars shaping the emerging interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies. His current projects include a history of the Muslim communities in Latin Christendom from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries; studies of Muslim and Jewish minorities in Medieval Iberia based on original archival research; and premodern Mediterranean ethno-religious identity and intergroup relations.

Brian Catlos is Associate Professor of History at UCSC; Co-Director of the UC Mediterranean Studies Multi-Campus Research Project and the UCSC Center for Mediterranean Studies.

Embodying Theory, Theorizing Embodiment: A Graduate Student Conference

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The Bodies and Embodiment Research Cluster presents:

Embodying Theory, Theorizing Embodiment: A Graduate Student Conference

Friday, May 28 / 9 AM – 5 PM / Humanities 210
Saturday, May 29 / 9:30 AM – 3 PM / Humanities 620

Click here to download the complete conference schedule.

The conference addresses how paying attention to bodies and embodiment in our academic work questions what theory is and does, and how this moves us to think differently. Building on work on the body as a material, signifying, experienced, and experiencing entity, the conference focuses on embodiment and critical practices of sense-making that include tactility and affective knowledge.

The first day of the conference consists of graduate student panels with respondents and a keynote speech. On the second day, the cluster will host a workshop for the speakers and respondents.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Jennifer Doyle (English, UC Riverside)

Respondents: Carla Freccero (Literature, UCSC), Wlad Godzich (Literature, UCSC), Jennifer González (History of Art and Visual Culture, UCSC), and Vanita Seth (Politics, UCSC)

For more information, contact Sara Orning at sorning@ucsc.edu.

Co-sponsored by the departments of Literature, Politics, History of Art and Visual Culture, Sociology, and Film and Digital Media, and the Graduate Student Association (GSA).

Love the Sin

Ann Pellegrini: “The Trouble with Sex: Bodily Vulnerability, Religionized Anxiety, and the Psychic Life of Tolerance”

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The Queer Theory Research Cluster presents:

Ann Pellegrini: “The Trouble with Sex: Bodily Vulnerability, Religionized Anxiety, and the Psychic Life of Tolerance”

Ann Pellegrini’s books include Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU, 2003), Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997), and Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz (Columbia, 2003). Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at NYU.

Please download the following readings associated with this event:
Reading 1
Reading 2

For more information, contact Trevor Sangrey at tsangrey@ucsc.edu, or Logan Walker at lwalker@ucsc.edu.

Co-sponsored by the departments of American Studies, Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, and Politics.

Stem Cells

Charis Thompson: “Stem Cells and Social Justice”

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The Science & Justice Working Group and the Center for Cultural Studies present:

Charis Thompson: Discussion “Stem Cells and Social Justice”

What are the connections between stem cell research and questions of social justice? Why should a group interested in science and social justice be interested in stem cell research, and what kind of research agendas might develop in this area? Professor Thompson addresses these questions in the local context of California and the UC system.

Charis Thompson is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies; and Co-Director of the Science, Technology & Society Center at UC Berkeley.

Charles Hirschkind: A Workshop on Ethics & Politics

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The Religion, Culture, and Social Movements Research Cluster presents:

Charles Hirschkind: A Workshop on Ethics & Politics

Charles Hirschkind focuses on religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. In The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia, 2006), he explores how a popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon—has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades.

Reading 1
Reading 2
Reading 3
Reading 4

Professor Hirschkind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

For information, contact Josh Brahinsky at jbrahins@ucsc.edu.

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores: “The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the U.S.”

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The Urban Studies Research Cluster presents:

Discussion with Miriam Jiménez Román & Juan Flores: The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History & Culture in the U.S.

For much of the past 500 years, Afro-Latinas/os have had to negotiate multi-dimensional expectations of shifting dominant ideologies and the realities of their everyday experiences. As Latinos and African Americans have been pitted against each other in a race for demographic supremacy, Afro-Latinas/os have emerged as a significant bridge across the social divide. Professors Román and Flores discuss their co-edited book, The Afro-Latin@ Reader (Duke, 2010).

Readings will be available at: www.wuala.com/Urban%20Studies%20Research%20Cluster

For more information, contact Miriam Greenberg at miriam@ucsc.edu.

Co-sponsored by the departments of Sociology, Latin American and Latina/o Studies, and American Studies.

Juan Flores

Juan Flores: “The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning”

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The Urban Studies Research Cluster presents:

Lecture/Seminar with Juan Flores: The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning

Professor Flores looks at how ‘Nuyoricans’ have transformed their cities of origin, focusing on the introduction of hip hop and modern New York culture to the Puerto Rican city of Mayaguez in The Diaspora Strikes Back (Routledge, 2009).

Readings will be available at: www.wuala.com/Urban%20Studies%20Research%20Cluster

For more information, contact Miriam Greenberg at miriam@ucsc.edu.

Co-sponsored by the departments of Sociology, Latin American and Latina/o Studies, and American Studies.

Barbara Epstein

Barbara Epstein: “Belorussians, the State, and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: Perspectives of Minsk Ghetto Survivors”

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Barbara Epstein, Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC, continues work emerging from The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (California, 2008), which described cooperation between Jews and non-Jews in World War II Minsk. Interviews with ghetto survivors in Minsk and Israel yield assertions that relations between Jews and Belorussians were excellent before the war and deteriorated afterwards as a result of exclusively state-driven anti-Semitism.