Sophia Magnone “There is risk in dealing with a partner”: “Bloodchild” and Interspecies Encounter I focus on “Bloodchild,” Octavia Butler’s story of extremely intimate yet profoundly troubling relations between species. On an extraterrestrial world, refugee humans become reproductive partners with their insectoid hosts, a relationship that mixes familial and sexual love with coercion and objectification. Yet in Butler’s own words, […]

Andrei Tcacenco "Constructing Socialism From Within: Entertainment and Media in the Soviet Home" My talk will explore the daily lived condition of real existing socialism during the latter part of the Soviet period. I will engage with official ideology while also showing how Soviet citizens shaped political discourse from the bottom-up by writing letters to local newspapers,television journals […]

Amanda Reyes Dangerous Visibility: The Visual Epistemology of Eugenics In the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia statute allowing sterilization of people determined to have “hereditary” mental illnesses such as “idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy.” Key testimony asserted that her infant child had “a look about that is not quite normal” and descriptions of […]

Keith Spencer "What We Talk About When We Talk To Aliens" Throughout the history of the search for ET, strategies for sending radio signals towards potentially inhabited planetary systems have always made unscientific assumptions and projections about alien culture, language, society and even economy. In my presentation I will deconstruct some recent scientific attempts to actively send out radio […]

Laura Harrison "Rights Are Not Justice: A Case Study in Campus Segregation and How University Accessibility Policies Do Violence To the Spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act" “Rights Are Not Justice” is the product of a community facilitated project in public sociology and critical disability studies. This project outlines who and what is at stake when a […]