James Beneda "The Morally Incoherent Indoctrination of the American Soldier in Iraq: An Institutional Theory of Traumatic Experience" I take up an issue that most of us cannot help but see as a problem of individual psychology and restate it in terms of institutional politics and political ideologies. Starting from cognitive sociology and recent clinical research that reframes post-traumatic […]

Alex Moore "Captive Natures: Grotesque desire in the performative sculptures of Amber Hawk Swanson" In this paper I examine two projects by the artist Amber Hawk Swanson, Tilikum, 2011 and Lolita, 2013. Through a process of radical identification with the captive Orca whales Tilikum and Lolita, Hawk Swanson explores the ethics of aquatic theme park performances. I argue […]

Whitney Devos "After Lives, After Palimpsests: Aimé Césaire & Claudia Rankine's (Caribbean) 'American Lyrics' " My project seeks to frame certain forms of poetry as attempts at experimental, non-linear historiography, examining the ways in which lyric and documentary impulses—so often pitted against one another critically—are intertwined from the inception of documentary poetics, an emerging multi-genre'd genre I read […]

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 […]