Colloquium Series
In winter 2006, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.
ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM
January 18
Martin Fuglsang
(Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
Critique and Resistance–In the Midst of the Biopolitical Production of the Socius
January 25
Peter Steeves
(Philosophy, DePaul University)
Monkey SeeFebruary 1
Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel
(Feminist Studies, UCSC)
Colombian Women and Pliable Bodies: Mobility through Beauty and Foreign MarriageFebruary 8
Anne Norton
(Political Science and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania)
The School of Baghdad: Neoconservatives and American Empire
February 15
Karen Barad
(Feminist Studies, UCSC)
Experimental Meta/physics and the Matter of Time
February 22
Philip Steinberg
(Geography, Florida State University and Rockefeller Fellow, Center for Cultural Studies)
Thomas Chapman
(Ph.D candidate, Geography, Florida State University)
Contesting Connectedness: Performances of Difference in Key West, Florida
March 1
Julie Guthman
(Community Studies, UCSC)
Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment
March 8
Minghui Hu
(History, UCSC)
Linear Progression Is Not Always Modern: A History of Astronomical Accuracy in Late Imperial China
Participants
MARTIN FUGLSANG is Associate Professor in Organisational and Social Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. His talk is drawn from his research project, a social-philosophical investigation of contemporary work-life which focuses on how late capitalism in the realm of globalization transforms the workforce into a multiplicity of “immaterial labor,” an assemblage of Work-Life-Existence. He posits a transformed world where “the binary segmentation, by which traditional thought has given our existence its definite content and its boundaries, has given way to zones and passages of imperceptibility. In this sense we have to reinvent ourselves in order to become. The question then becomes: how is critique and resistance possible when there no longer is a secluded ‘outside’ and when the ‘liberating’ ideology of humanism has become the fundamental component in the biopolitical technologies of contemporary management?” Martin Fuglsang is the author of four books, in Danish and in English, the latest of which is Gilles Deleuze and the Social, forthcoming in the Deleuze Connections series from Edinburgh University Press in May 2006.
PETER STEEVES, Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, is a Visiting Scholar this year at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies. His main areas of teaching and research include applied ethics, especially animal/environmental and bioethics, social and political philosophy (especially communitarianism), philosophy of culture, philosophy of science, and phenomenology. He has written often on popular culture, including Las Vegas, Disney, Andy Kaufman, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, and The Passion of the Christ. His books include Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Kluwer, 1998), and he is the editor and a contributor to Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (SUNY, 1999). His talk is from a forthcoming book from SUNY Press, and takes up the question of animal language/consciousness by looking to a phenomenology of nonspecies-specifc language, as well as the appearance of animals in fiction by Franz Kafka and
Ursula Le Guin.
FELICITY SCHAEFFER-GRABIEL is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her talk will be from her book manuscript, “Cyber-brides between the United States and Latin America: Transnational Imaginaries, Migration, and Marriage.” She writes, “In this chapter I use interviews with women and men at the Romance Tour in Cali, Colombia and in chat-room discussions alongside the popular discourse of beauty in Colombia to theorize women’s use of their body capital as a form of mobility. I discuss women’s marriage migration alongside beauty because it demonstrates a shift in the perception of women from objects of trade to their strategic use of the biological and popular rendering of their body within the transnational marketplace.” Her articles include “Planet-Love.com: Cyberbrides in the Americas and the Transnational Routes of U.S. Masculinity,” forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 2006), and “Cyberbrides and Global Imaginaries: Mexican Women’s Turn from the
National to the Foreign,” in Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Sciences (Feb. 2004).
ANNE NORTON, Professor of Comparative Literature and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the most important political theorists writing today. Her Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004) made a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary neo-conservatism and its connection to Strauss’s thought. Other books include 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (Yale, 2003), Reflections on Political Identity (Johns Hopkins, 1988), and Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago, 1993). She is currently working on questions of states and sovereignty, political theology, a political alphabet, and on a book entitled “Citizen of the Empire.”
KAREN BARAD is Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She previously taught at Rutgers University. Her Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics, and her research in physics and philosophy has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She is the author of numerous articles on physics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, cultural studies of science, and feminist theory, including “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” in Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society (Spring 2003), and “Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter,” in Marianne DeKoven, ed., Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice (Rutgers, 2001). Her Meeting the Universe Halfway, from which her talk is taken, is forthcoming from Duke.
PHILIP STEINBERG is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University and Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001) and co-author of Managing Cyberspace: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion (Temple, forthcoming). THOMAS CHAPMAN is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Florida State University, where he is presently writing his dissertation, “Antidiscrimination Ordinances and Urban Political Economy: Constructions of Moral Landscapes and the Sexual Citizen.” Their talk will be drawn from ongoing research on how Key West’s historical and contemporary residents and visitors use discourses of isolation and connectivity to continually cross and redefine boundaries of sexual, American, Caribbean, and island identities.
JULIE GUTHMAN is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research centers on sustainable agriculture and alternative food movements, the international political economy of food and agriculture, political ecology, and the economic geography of California. Her work on organic food culminated in her book Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (California, 2004). In her current research on obesity, Professor Guthman argues that “understanding both the causes and effects of the current so-called epidemic of obesity requires us to consider neoliberalism as both a political economy project an a form of governmentality. Specifically, obesity is both a spatial fix to contemporary capitalism and a reflection of impossible subject formation such that the neoliberal subject is compelled to participate in society as both out-of-control consumer and as self-controlled subject.” Her talk will reflect on the unusual student discomfiture she encountered while teaching an undergraduate course on this material.
MINGHUI HU is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. Previous affiliations include a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Chicago and visiting positions at UC Irvine, Korea University, and Qinghua University in Beijing, China. With degrees in Engineering, Science and Technology Studies, and History, Minghui Hu writes on the history of Chinese science, China in the early modern world, and Chinese philosophy. His work promises to be a major revision to the dominant view of late imperial Chinese Western style science as fundamentally reactive to the West. He has written on late imperial Chinese astronomy in several publications. His “Xixue zai Qingdai Zhongguo de sange jieduan (Three Stages of Western Learning in Qing China), recently published in three parts in Dushu, China’s foremost intellectual journal, has had a major impact in Chinese science studies.
