Friday May 27th, 2-5 pm, Humanities 1 Room 202

Simone Browne, Draw a black line through it: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Situating blackness as an absented presence in the field of surveillance studies, this talk questions how a realization of the conditions of blackness— the historical, the present, and the historical present can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance.

Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and American Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Simon A. Cole, Identity or “Mere Identification”? Biometric Databases from Fingerprinting to DNA.

This talk traces the history of biometric identification technologies from their origins through to the present and the ethical and humanistic issues that have persistently been raised by them. It then discusses how we should understand these issues in the present moment of rapid technological advancement. It focuses in particular on the relationship between “mere” identification and broader notions of identity—behavioral, racial, and so on, and implications for the increasing expansion of genetic databases.

Simon Cole is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Director of the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine.

These talks will be followed by a conversation about research projects, new issues and directions, information exchange and coffee and cookies. The colloquium is open to the public, and graduate students are encouraged especially to attend. This colloquium is sponsored by the UC Biosurveillance Working Group, the UC Humanities Research Institute and the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research.

Click here for a live stream of the event.

The past decade or so has witnessed a rapid rise in scholarship that seeks to seize or transform the language of the “science” for liberatory ends. Such an attachment to the reparative and/or divisive logic of “science” is most evident in minoritized knowledge-formations such as sexuality studies and colonial/postcolonial studies. In the face of contemporary challenges about the limits of scholarship bowing out to the forces of globalization, the colloquium will examine what is at stake for sexuality studies and postcolonial studies to carve out a critical relationship to histories of science?

The types of issues we envisage participants addressing will engage three central questions:

What are the conversations instituted about sexuality in relationship to the colonial and postcolonial state in the global south?
How does sexuality studies’s own adherence/attachment to science studies parochialize key assumptions about freedom, rights and the subject?
What are the ways in which modalities of sentiment, affect, emotion entangle with the logic of state discourses and what role does sexuality play within such exchanges?

Schedule:

10:00am–10:15am: Introductory Remarks
Anjali Arondekar, Feminist Studies, UCSC

10:15am-10:30am: Poetic Techne
Ronaldo Wilson, Literature, UCSC

10:30-12:30: The Arabic Freud and the Invention of the Psychosexual Subject
Omnia El Shakry, History, UC Davis
Respondent: Alma Heckman, History, UCSC

12:30-1:30: Break

1:30-3:30: Origins and the Sexuality of Science in Colonial India
Durba Mitra, History, Fordham
Respondent: Megan Moodie, Anthropology, UCSC

Participants:

Durba Mitra, Department of History, Fordham University

Origins and the Sexuality of Science in Colonial India

Durba Mitra is an assistant professor of history at Fordham University. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania for the year of “Sex.”

Omnia El Shakry, Department of History, UC Davis

The Arabic Freud and the Invention of the Psychosexual Subject

Omnia El Shakry specializes in the the intellectual history of the Arab world and Europe, with a special emphasis on the history of the human sciences in Egypt. Her current book project, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, traces the lineaments of psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt.

CANCELLED – Duana Fullwiley, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University

The Racial Embrace: DNA Sequences meet Dream Sequences in Struggles for (Scientific) Liberation

Dr. Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine interested in how social identities, health outcomes, and molecular genetic findings increasingly intersect. She is the author of The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011), which examines how structural adjustment policies in Africa affected not only the lived experiences of sickle cell patients in Senegal, but also influenced the genetic science about them.

The Department of Feminist Studies and the Affect Working Group at UC Santa Cruz Present:

“Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of The Fantastic Four

DR. RAMZI FAWAZ, U. OF WISCONSIN – MADISON

Released to popular acclaim in 1961, Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four told of four anticommunist space adventurers who gain extraordinary powers when cosmic rays alter their physiology, respectively granting them control over living flame, invisibility, impenetrable rock-like skin, and physical pliability. In this talk, Ramzi Fawaz explores the surprisingly queer evolution of the series, which used the mutated bodies of its heroes to depict the transformation of the bread-winning father, doting wife and bickering male siblings of the 1950s nuclear family into icons of 1960s radicalism: the left-wing intellectual, the liberal feminist, the political activist, and the potential queer.

About the Author: Ramzi Fawaz is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), which received the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship award for best first book manuscript in LGBT Studies. Dr. Fawaz’s research has been published in American Literature, Callaloo, and GLQ.

Date/Time
March 9, 2016 | 12:00-1:30PM
Free and open to the public

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

“Wendy Chun: Current Research and Perspectives”
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author ofControl and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics  (MIT, 2006), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011). She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015). She is the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; she has been the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate. She has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled Habitual New Media ( forthcoming MIT 2016).

For more information see the Visual and Media Cultures website or email visualmedia@ucsc.edu.

Date/Time
March 3, 2016 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Porter D Building, Room 245
University of California, Santa Cruz