This talk examines how National Book Award-winning poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky and poet-essayist Wendy S. Walters explore the relationship between capitalism and racialization through poetics of spatial boundary formation. Mobilizing innovative poetic forms, Borzutzky's recursive, translational syntax mirrors capitalist processes of abstraction and Walters' sonnets are mapped onto suburban planning documents. Borzutzky's poetry offers […]

The extraction of ecological value from nature, labor value from workers, and social value from communities constitutes the root cause of pollution, poverty and social domination. Indigenous traditions, commons-based production and related alternatives offer models in which value is not extracted, but rather circulated back to the human and non-human agencies that generated it. In […]

The history of hinterland communities is largely written in remote landscapes that today are often targeted for infrastructural development that forcibly relocates existing residents and transforms the land, obliterating those histories, and weakening communities. In 1984/5 the Iban longhouse at Nanga Jela on Sarawak’s Engkari River in Malaysian Borneo, along with twenty-one other communities and […]

Carleton Watkins, an iconic photographer of the 19th Century American West, is best known for his images of Yosemite that were used as testimony in the formation of the National Park system. This paper explores his previously understudied photographs of Alcatraz, taken over approximately three decades beginning in 1861. Through close readings of the changing […]

This event has been postponed. An updated date will be announced in the coming weeks. The History of Consciousness department invites you to the next talk in their Fall 2025 Research Colloquium series. Stephen David Engel will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, he meditates on a 2,200-year-old redwood round […]