Prof Musiol in a room

May 3 – Hanna Musiol – Wounded Landscapes and Maps of Hurt: Breaths, Scars, and Tender Story-Sharing  

This event is co-sponsored by Film and Digital Media

Maps always sense and often cut. Much has been written about their violence, as an overture for the genocidal touch, as a prospecting tool priming landscapes for material and narrative extraction, or as an instrument of attritional social neglect (Lo Presti). Hegemonic cartographies live off of elisions of “disposable bodies” and on demarcation lines which construct architectures of harm (Lambert). This talk focuses instead on scars, gasps of pain, cartographic story-sharing, and maps of hurt. It is thus an homage to marginalized but not marginal bodies, stories and breaths, all demanding oxygen, care, delight, and a “right to co-existence” (Holmes). Drawing on the work of feminist, diasporic, and critical race thinkers, architects, poets, human geographers, and Indigenous Arctic mixmedia practitioners—Katherine McKittrick, Olga Lehmann, Pia Arke, Afaa Weaver, Laura Lo Presti, Johnny Pitts, Eliane Brum, Viktorija Bogdanova, among many others—Musiol will center on site-specific cartographic acts of “tender narration” involving artivists, architects, mappers, students, and literary scholars working together in art galleries, on the page, in our classrooms, and in the streets (Tokarczuk). Specifically, she will meander across several sites and rehearsals of remapping: Afaa Weavers’s and Viktorija Bogdanova’s poetic maps of spaces that “hurt us” and Sissel Bergh’s textual cartographies of South Sámi coast; monumental, yet ephemeral urban-scale poetic storytelling actions taking over the streets, pages, bodies, and facades in Trondheim and Hiedanranta; and, finally, site-specific pedagogies of cartographic story-sharing, which draw on the ambulatory, resuscitative, biosocial oxygen-delivery affordances of poetry (in polylingual urban poetic ensembles and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening seances). The talk will conclude with reflection about the cartographic acts of “repair,” tenderness, and “unlearning” (Azoulay), asking, after Josie Billington and Pia Arke, how we, literary and cultural scholars and students, can attend to the wounded bodies and landscapes “personally,” using our meager disciplinary tools and “enfleshed” cartographies of hurt (Sharpe). 

Hanna Musiol (PhD, Northeastern University) is Professor of Modern/Contemporary Literature at NTNU (Norway) and a 2022–2023 Human Rights Fellow at SUNY Binghamton (US). Her research interests include transnational literary studies, site-specific transmedia storytelling and reparative reading practices, and critical theory, with emphasis on migration, environmental humanities / political ecology, and environmental and human rights. She publishes frequently on aesthetics and justice, and her work has appeared in DHQ, ASAP/J, Environment, Space, and Place, Technology of Human Rights Representation, Journal of American Studies, and Writing Beyond the State. Musiol regularly co-organizes city-scale curatorial, public humanities, and civic-engagement initiatives and exhibitions, such as Narrating the City, Of Borders and Travelers, Spectral Landscapes, and Resist as Forest. She is based in Trondheim, where she frequently collaborates with grassroots urban storytelling initiatives such as Literature for Inclusion & Poetry without Borders. She is currently involved in several transborder research projects devoted to spatial storytelling: Narrating Sustainability, One by Walking, Environmental Storytelling, and Environmental Practices Across Borders

Date | Time
May 3, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location 
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Please note: this is a hybrid event. To receive a link, RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.

Abaca fabric detail

May 10 – Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez – Vernaculars of Plant Knowing: Woven Transformations in the Early 20th-Century Davao Gulf

In this talk, Gutierrez will share from her first book project on the history of colonial botany in the Philippines. The book argues that vernaculars of plant knowing made and unmade botany at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when imperial Anglo-European botanists banded together to steady the philosophical and practical tenets of the science under an internationalist banner. Taking as her case study the contrapuntal story of Bagobo weavers and the acceleration of abacá plantations in the Philippines, Gutierrez demonstrates the disciplinary makings of the science that enabled transformative settler-colonial currents in the Pacific colony’s southern gulf.

Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2021 and 2022, she completed Mellon-funded postdoctoral and interdisciplinary residencies at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. A specialist of the history of science and the plant humanities, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming special issue “Science and Technology Studies in the Philippines” in Philippine Studies. Since joining UCSC, she has also served as co-PI on the interdivisional campus-community research initiative, Watsonville is in the Heart

Date | Time
May 10, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location 
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Please note: this is a hybrid event. To receive a link, RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.

Prof. Shanahan explaining Marx's general theory of capitalist production.

February 8 – Jarrod Shanahan – Skyscraper Jails

How did a campaign to end the humanitarian catastrophe of New York City’s Rikers Island penal colony culminate in the planned creation of skyscraper jails across the city, with no closure of Rikers in sight? The tragic story of recent jail reform efforts in New York City is at once novel, and indicative of broader trends in “humanitarian” jail reform, growing activism big big philanthropy in the supposed reform of mass incarceration, and the evolution of non-profit organizations promoting the extension of the carceral state — all conducted under the auspices of “social justice.” Tracing the contours of this new moment of carceral boosterism, Dr. Jarrod Shanahan will present on a work in progress, Skyscraper Jails, co-authored with criminal justice scholar Dr. Zhandarka Kurti. This work draws from extensive archival research, years of collaborative scholarship, and participation in the campaign against the new jails.

Jarrod Shanahan is an activist-scholar and Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, IL. He is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022), co-author with Zhandarka Kurti of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion, 2022), and an editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity (Verso, 2022), a Noel Ignatiev reader.

Date | Time
February 8, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 8, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

 

Prof. Ganguly in front of a watery background

February 15 – Keya Ganguly – Reason and the Image: On Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players)

This talk focuses on Satyajit Ray’s cinematic treatment of an episode from India’s late colonial history in Shatranj Ke Khilari (“The Chess Players,” 1977). Through his portrayal of the betrayal of reason under the pretext of law, Ray makes an appeal on behalf of the visual image as a critique of reason rather than its lure.

Keya Ganguly is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity (2001) and Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (2010). She served as Senior Editor of Cultural Critique from 1998-2010, and her essays have appeared in Cultural Studies, New Formations, Race and Class, South Atlantic Quarterly, and History of the Present. Recent and forthcoming essays have explored Mahasweta Devi’s radical politics, the aesthetics of exile, and world cinema in dialectical perspective. She is currently writing a book on the revolutionary utopianism of the early Indian nationalist Aurobindo Ghose entitled Political Metaphysics.

Date | Time
February 15, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location 
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 15, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

photo of speaker, Louise Meintjes

October 12 – Louise Meintjes – Giving Voice to a Politics of Breath

This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Music and Anthropology

This paper draws on long term ethnographic study of South African Zulu song and dance traditions. It revisits instances of ngoma vocal performance in order to explore the sonics and concept of the sound of breath, and connects that to popular political expression in the USA during the global turbulence of the last two and a half years.

Louise Meintjes is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She has worked as an ethnographer in Johannesburg and rural KwaZulu Natal for three decades, authoring Sound of Africa!: Making Music in a South African Studio (Duke UP, 2003) and Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (Duke UP 2017), which won the Gregory Bateson and Alan Merriam prizes.

Date | Time
October 12, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location 
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Events of Interest for the Week of January 20, 2020

Tuesday, January 21, 2020
UCSC Center for Racial Justice
Refugee Returns
Hồng-Ân Trương, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
4:30 PM – 6:30 PM
Humanities 1, Room 210

Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Science & Justice Research Center and Institute for Social Transformation
Racial Reconciliation & the Future of Race in America
Alondra Nelson, Social Sciences Research Council
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St

Thursday, January 23, 2020
The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies
Beyond the End of the World Public Lectures
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Music Recital Hall

To include your event in the “Of Interest” section of our email, fill out this form by noon on the Friday before your event.

January 17, 2019 — Ralina Joseph, “Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity”

Flyer for Ralina Joseph's talk, "Postracial Resistance"

January 17, 2019, 1:30-3:30 pm, Humanities 1 Room 210

Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. How African American women celebrities, cultural products, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse — the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over — in order to resist its very tenets.

April 5, 2017 – Matthew Fuller, “In Praise of Plasticity”

Plasticity, in neurology, is the ability to adapt, change, grow and find new forms at multiple scalar levels whilst retaining, rerouting or developing function. Professor Fuller examines the notion of plasticity as it is articulated by cybernetics, machine learning, and anarchism.

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Date/Time

April 5, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

January 18, 2017 – Susan Buck-Morss, “History as Translation”

Susan Buck-Morss’s current project, Year 1, dives into recent research on the first century in order to topple various conceptual givens that have shaped modernity as an episteme (and led us into some unhelpful post-modern impasses), and argues there is no way forward without retracing our steps and charting another course (while discovering surprising fellow-travellers along the way).

Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and Professor Emerita of Government at Cornell University.

Date/Time

January 18, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

January 25, 2017 – Emily Mitchell-Eaton, “What’s Free About ‘Freely Associated Statehood’? Preserving Colonial Legacies in the Marshall Islands”

Emily Mitchell-Eaton’s work explores imperial citizenship forms and statecraft in the U.S. Pacific territories. Her research follows territorial migration policies from their enactment in the islands to the new sites of diaspora where imperial migrants resettle, exposing new racial formations, modes of (un)belonging, and immigrant solidarities.

Mitchell-Eaton is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Non-citizenship, LALS/Chicano Latino Research Center at UCSC.

Date/Time

January 25, 2017 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz