Friday Forum For Graduate Research: A weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities. Join us for light refreshments and weekly presentations by your fellow graduate students. Fridays from 12:00 – 1:30pm in Humanities 1, Room 202.   Winter 2015 Schedule: January 16th - Jesica Siham Fernández, Social Psychology, "Latina/o Children as Cultural Citizens: Membership, Sense of Belonging, Space and Rights" January 23rd - Wes Modes, DANM, "A Secret History of American River People" January 30th - Aubrey…

Friday Forum For Graduate Research: A weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities. Join us for light refreshments and weekly presentations by your fellow graduate students. Fridays from 12:00 – 1:30pm in Humanities 1, Room 202.   Winter 2015 Schedule: January 16th - Jesica Siham Fernández, Social Psychology, "Latina/o Children as Cultural Citizens: Membership, Sense of Belonging, Space and Rights" January 23rd - Wes Modes, DANM, "A Secret History of American River People" January 30th - Aubrey…

Conference organized by Jordi Aladro, Professor of Literature Wednesday 18th 7:00pm - Welcome for participants with a “vino español” (a generous donation from Instituto Cervantes, New York) Thursday 19th University of California, Santa Cruz. Humanities 1, Room 202 9:45am Introduction: Jordi Aladro Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz 10:15am “The Indefinite Garden: Ovid’s Metaphors and Metamorphoses in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale” Edward Milowicki Emeritus Professor, Mills College 10:45am "La traducción del hexámetro latino de Petrarca en castellano" Alejandro Higashi Área de…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

In Loving Memory of Chris Chitty: We mourn the loss of a friend and vibrant member of our academic community. However, his work is not lost and will continue to act on this world. We would like to invite everyone to join us for a reading and celebration of Chris’s academic writing in place of the presentation that he would have given on this day. This is an invitation to get to know Chris through his work or get to…

Hanna will present her recent work, We are History: A People's History of Lebanon, a digital interface that collects varied oral histories of a people and presents them in a disruptive but dialogical manner. Using contemporary oral histories about the 1981 siege of Zahle, Lebanon, the software is given the goal of generating a narrative from the transcripts of said oral histories. Learn more online at http://fabiolahanna.com/weAreHistory.html Fabiola Hanna is a new media artist, software designer and activist currently using her skills to address…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available. For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com   Spring 2015 Schedule: 10 April…

Join us Friday, October 2, at 12:00 PM in Humanities 1, Room 202, for the first Friday Forum for Graduate Research​ of 2015-16​! The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30 PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. The first meeting of the year…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature Candy Martinez (LALS) presenting her talk “In Search of Decolonizing Representations: Learning from indigenous visual media in Oaxaca, Mexico". For more info, or to inquire about…

UCHRI's Assistant Director Kelly Brown will provide an overview of UCHRI's funding opportunities for the 2016-17 year, with special attention to the four new calls for funding (digital humanities grant, supplemental graduate student funding grant, graduate dissertation support grant, and the junior faculty manuscript review grant). Kelly will be available to meet individually with faculty who would like to talk through potential projects. Please sign up for 1:1 meetings with IHR in advance of the workshop.

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature Matthew Edwards (History of Consciousness). For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the 2015-16 academic year, contact: fridayforum.ucsc@gmail.com

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature AK Morais (History of Consciousness) presenting his talk "Blundering Empire: The Smithsonian African Expedition of 1919-1920". For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature Trey Highton (Literature) presenting his talk "Surfing the Third Wave: Women's Professional Surfing & the Ethics of Instagram". For more info, or to inquire about joining…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature Samuael Topiary (Film & Digital Media) presenting his talk "The Anti-Representational Mode". For more info, or to inquire about joining the roster of presenters for the…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature Maya Iverson (Sociology) presenting her talk "Re-reading the Black Civil Rights Documentary 'Sit-In'". Maya Iverson is a PhD student in Sociology. Her research focuses on black…

Antoinette Wilson is a PhD candidate in Developmental Psychology. Her work investigates ways in which in-group members judge and validate racial authenticity (e.g., accusations of “acting White” and bias based on skin tone). Central to her research is exploring adolescents’ perceptions of “Who fits in?”, “Who is typical of our group”, and “Who is ‘really’ one of us?” Her dissertation research focuses on how two aspects of racial-ethnic typicality-- appearance and behavior--relate to variation in peer belonging and stereotyping among…

The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:30pm to 2pm and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. This meeting will feature Lara Galas (Literature) presenting her talk "Languaging the Landscape: A Translational Analysis of the Geopolitical in Nineteenth Century American Literature". For more info, or to inquire…

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 stress (PTSD) as ‘moral injury’, I argue that the traumatic experiences of American soldiers in the Iraq War resulted from flawed cultural and institutional indoctrination.   Friday…

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 that the grotesque sculptures make visible the violence done to both humans and Orcas in the conceptions of nature, culture, and relationship manifested in the Shamu spectacle.  …

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 as quintessentially "American": North, South, and Central.   Friday Forum Winter 2015 Schedule Fridays, 12:30 – 2:00pm Humanities 1, Room 202 A weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for…

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, “Bloodchild” is a story of love, not slavery; she insists on the possibility of maintaining true affinity between profoundly different and unequal beings. What would it take…

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 and local local radio stations.   Friday Forum Winter 2015 Schedule Fridays, 12:30 – 2:00pm Humanities 1, Room 202 A weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate…

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 Carrie as “poor in looks” formed the basis of the argument that Carrie’s “feeble-mindedness” was hereditary. Thinking through the ways that representations of the Bucks were curated and…

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 signals to other star systems and the hegemonic assumptions that are tied to the content of these radio compositions.   Friday Forum Winter 2015 Schedule Fridays, 12:30 –…

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 campus elevator/building is inaccessible by uncovering the answers to thefollowing three questions: 1) who is affected by building segregation; 2) which bureaucratic structures maintain or operationalize the necessary…

Bristol Cave La-Costa "Sexual Policing and Immigration Policy in the United States at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" While much research has focused on Chinese Exclusion laws as mostly male-oriented, I consider how the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1875 Page Act, which excluded “immoral” immigrants, contributed to categories of sexual morality for Chinese women.   Friday Forum Winter 2015 Schedule Fridays, 12:30 – 2:00pm Humanities 1, Room 202 A weekly interdisciplinary colloquium series for sharing graduate research across the humanities. Join us for…

Hands on (Digital) Humanities with Prof. Anne MacNeil Anne MacNeil will give a demonstration of her digital humanities project, IDEA Music, and the new software toolkit, Prospect, that powers it. In the last year, MacNeil’s close collaboration with programmer Michael Newton (UNC Digital Innovation Lab) and other members of the DIL community in developing Prospect has resulted in a powerful platform that has transformed IDEA Music into a multi-dimensional, multi-media publication that challenges the tradition concept of “critical edition”. The…

With Craig Deitrich and Tara McPherson. This workshop will serve as an introduction to Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing platform designed for scholars writing media-rich, long-form, born-digital scholarship. Developed by The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California, Scalar allows scholars to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose that media with their own writing in a variety of ways; to annotate video, audio, images, source code and text using the platform’s built-in…

Marjorie Agosin is the Luella La Mer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies and Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. Professor Agosin's poetry is inspired by social justice and the dedicated to the remembrance and memorialization of traumatic historical events in the Americas and in European holocaust. As a Chilean-American of Jewish heritage Agosin's poetry enshrines women's human rights. As a literary scholar she has published work on Pablo Neruda, María Luisa Bombal, and Gabriela Mistral. She is especially well known for preserving and…

At least once a quarter the Philosophy Department hosts a Works-in-Progress presentation by a member of the faculty. The format may vary from a traditional talk to a communal environment allowing for ideas to be tested and feedback solicited. All members of the campus community and interested public are welcome to attend. Jonathan Ellis Motivated Reasoning, Heavy and Light Thursday, May 19, 2016 Location: Humanities 1, Room 202 Time: 4:00 - 5:30 Coffee, tea, and cookies served.

"Homozionism: 'From the Closet into the Knesset'" My project focuses on the role of sexual politics in Israel's settler colonial occupation of Palestine, international (queer) complicities, and anti-colonial queer resistance. For this presentation I look forward to discuss the first chapter of my dissertation that charts the globally celebrated genealogy of Israel's gay movement from "the closet into the Knesset" (Kama 2011). I argue that this move enabled what Palestinian queer activist call Israel's pinkwashing campaign to emerge. Pinkwashing describes…

"Enemy Inside Out: Birth Defects in Fallujah" Hotly debated and widely misunderstood is the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq. While the possibility of knowing the exact cause of this epidemic is diluted by ongoing war, layers of chemical toxicity, and mass displacement/destruction of doctors, patients, and medical facilities; the surrounding enviro-medical discourse is informative. It indexes a broader debate about the politics of scientific research: guilt, responsibility, and the question of reparations to the Iraq people in the…

"Polemics of Disintegration: Advaita Metaphysics in the Works of Alejandro Jodorowsky" The Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929) often engages with non-linearity and non-sense as narrative devices in his work. Throughout his career Jodorowsky's thematic repertoire has adopted elements of the Kabbalistic science of the Marseille tarot, European alchemy, and New Age formulations of Hindu and Zen Buddhist thought. I attempt to trave the genealogical articulation of Jodorowsky's brand of filmmaking and artistic practice by working through his depiction of…

"Historicizing Interviews: A Mode of (Re)living and (Re)writing Memories of the Korean War through Documentary" How can we write a history of the officially unsaid and the unsayable? My talk focuses on the case of the Korean War whose language of antagonism and ideological conflict remains very much alive in Korean society today. I will present parts of MemoRandom, my most recent documentary project based on inconsistent accounts of events during the war involving an alleged communist family, and examine…

"Black Storm Clouds and a Queer Yellow Light: Reading the Affective Edges of Symbolism in Maru" My project is to read postcolonial novels that have typically been analyzed as representations of postcolonial politics and instead attend to the nonrepresentational aspects of their language: namely, their affect and literariness. In this talk I focus on Bessie Head's novella Maru (1971), which itself is concerned with identity, racial prejudice, and tribal politics, as well as representation as mode of signification and figuration,…

"Writing Hawai'i into the Nation: Narrative Re-mapping in Mark Twain's Letter's s a Colonial Prelude to Annexation" This portion of my dissertation project examines the 1866 letters written by Mark Twain (while dispatched by The Sacramento Union in Hawai'i) as engaged in the colonial process of cartographic incorporation by encouraging American ambitions in, and imaginings of, Hawai'i as a space for continuing expansion westward. In viewing the letters through the lens of cartography, their function as re-making Hawai'i into an…

American Philanthropy and "Aggressive Altruism" in Richard Wright's Native Son and Miguel Angel Asturias' The Green Pope My dissertation interrogates the narrative power of American philanthropy in the story of the United States' rise as a global superpower in the twentieth century. For this presentation, I will present an excerpt of a chapter that considers how philanthropy permeates representations of hemispheric American relationships in the interwar period. I read Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Miguel Angel Asturias's El Papa…

Sustainable Happy cows: Change and Sustainability in California Dairies  California dairy advertisements often feature happy cows, but they mask social and environmental concerns over industrial milk production. Currently, California dairy producers face a mix of challenges with severe drought, regulation of methane emissions from cows, uncertain changes in milk pricing policies, and future implementation of more robust framework labor laws. These converging pressures challenge the industrial mode of dairy production utilized by many California dairies, and may pave a path…

Sewing the Forest like a state: Forest Management, Wildlife Conservation, and Center-Periphery Relations in Northeast China, 1949 - 1965 My research aims to counter the prevalent premise that Mao-era China (1945-1976) was devoid of environmental consciousness or concern with environmental protection, and places Chinese policy in the context of the international development of environmental consciousness during that time. It will show the ways in which early Mao-Era Chinese scientists actively participated in and were influenced by the global discussion of…

Israel and Palestine: The Landscape of Separation The Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank not only live under the occupation of Israel but also, contained behind the Wall that Israel erected, populate a space of physical, social, and cultural isolation. The Wall severs communities, people's access to services, livelihoods and religious and cultural amenities. It fragments not only the land, but also the very social fabric of the Palestinian people. In search for a landscape of hope, Yulia…

"Its Ok,  We're Safe Here": Cultural and Eco Activism in the Film Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$) Since 2008, the Karrabing Film Collective has made four films about the various cultural, political, and social realists of being Aboriginal in twenty-first century Australia. Their 2015 film, Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$), highlights how social inequalities experienced every day in Aboriginal communities are inseparable from environmental destruction. Both issues are intertwined in Australia's colonial history; due to the centrality of landscape and environment in…

Many theories have viewed reason and reasoning as essential to making moral judgments. In contrast, recent psychological proposals have contested the centrality of reasoning, arguing that most or many moral judgments are based on automatic, emotional reactions (sometimes termed "institutions," e.g. Greene, 2013; Haidt 2013). These proposals are based on experiments taken to show that people are sometimes unable to justify their moral evaluations and that such evaluations are sensitive to factors presumed morally irrelevant. In this talk, I will…

Creative Ecologies of Practice: Collaborative Agential Modes of Eco-Aesthetic Pedagogy This presentation will discuss two collaborative environmental art projects aimed at creating experimental and experiential trans-disciplinary pedagogical practices. Both projects are examples of "creative ecologies of practice" enabling and requiring multiple modes of thought, multiple modes of encounter, and multiple modes of pedagogy. They are imaginative and speculative, require resonance and creative response, and include practices and discourses of eco-aesthetics to foster sites of refuge, sites of agency and cities…

IHR PUBLIC FELLOWS Deadline: April 30, 2017 Amount: Up to $5,000 Number of Fellowships: 3 or more (based on the availability of funds) These fellowships will provide the opportunity for humanities doctoral students to contribute to research, programming, communications and fundraising at non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, or companies and are meant to allow the students to apply and expand their skills in a non-academic setting while engaged in graduate study. Majority of the work should be completed during Summer 2017.…

Advertising Female Futurity: Children's Books Printed as Advertisements in the U.S., 1850-1870 In this presentation, I examine children's books printed as advertisemtns between 1850 and 1870 that were directed at female children. Beginning around 1850, companies produced books that served as advertisements but took the shape of children's primers, rhymes, or storybooks. This presentation carefully studies these books to uncover consumerist lessons directed at children as well as contemporaneous understandings of the women of the future. By examining how female…

Do Lenders Value the Right Characteristics?: Evidence from Peer-to-Peer Lending Using a unique dataset of peer-to-peer lending with detailed loan and borrower information, I study the following research questions:|1) What are the borrower characteristics that lenders value when choosing which loans to fund?; and (2) Do lenders value the correct characteristics with respect to minimizing to probability of default? In this online context, the researcher observes everything that the lender does, enabling unbiased estimation of the borrower characteristics that lenders…

Shooting Cameras and Shooting Weapons: U.S. Military Violence and Ecological Ruin in Coppola's Apocalypse Now This presentation examines the shooting history of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), which was shot on the Philippine island of Luzon. I investigate the collision between Hollywood's shooting of cameras and the U.S. military's shooting of weapons, and the ways these forms of violence intertwine on the set of this Vietnam War film. While the film attempts to blur the geographic boundaries between Vietnam…

From Maidservant to Anomalous Aristocrat: Imaging and Imagining Dido Elizabeth Belle The double portrait of cousins, entitled, Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray, is truly an anomaly in 18th century British art. Depicting two aristocratic women, one back and one white, the painting inspired the 2014 film, Belle. Incorporating the fancy and flair of period dramas, the creators of Belle fabricated a largely fictional account, envisioning Dido with a generous measure of agency and influence despite being black and…

Nietzsche claims that in realating the "advent of nihilism," he is relating "the history of the next two centuries." He also claims that he himself has been a nihilist, but that he had now left it behind, "outside of self." In this paper, I offer an account of how Nietzsche understands nihilism and of how to understand his own (early and middle-period) work as nihilistic. I argue (against Bernard Reginster) that the nihilism of interest to Nietzsche is not, or…

Pidgin Comedy in Hawai'i: The Queer Resignification of Settler Culture In 1970s Hawai'i, Pidgin, also known as Hawai'i Creole english, was the major medium of comedy because it was the language, visual culture, and attitude of the islands, a stark contrast to imported U.S. settle norms. Rap Reiplinger was a household name with his 1982 TV special Rap's Hawaii, which addressed local culture, politics, and tourism. Analyzing Reiplinger's TV special, I claim that his Pidgin comedy resignifies settler culture and…

The IHR Research Cluster on Race, Violence, Inequality, and the Anthropocene presents Dr. Nikhil Anand Associate Professor of Anthropology University of Pennsylvania. Nikhil Anand’s research focuses on the political ecology of urban infrastructures, and the social and material relations that they entail. He is the author of Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Duke, 2017). His talk is based on a new project that focuses on the uncertain boundaries of land and water in Mumbai, looking…

"This is Your Life": Hiroshima Maidens and the American ideological superiority in the midst of the Cold War In 1955, twenty-five female victims of the atomic bombing flown to the United States and received extensive plastic surgery to correct severe deformity from keloids. Initiated by the American journalist Norman Cousins and the Japanese minister Tanimoto Kiyoshi, this project was supported on multiple fronts in the United States. This paper analyzed the American capitalistic mode of generosity from the TV program,…

"Delinquency As Labor" Chrissy Anderson-Zavala Chrissy Anderson-Zavala is a PhD candidate in education with designated emphases in critical race and ethnic studies and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, How to Write ‘Trouble/d Youth,’ bridges participatory ethnographic work in a continuation high school and reading practices that “track the figure” of “trouble/d youth” in district and state-level archives to explore how narratives of young people as “trouble” (threat) or “troubled” (at-risk) inform the limits and possibilities of schooling.     "BioRobotics: Surveillance at the…

"Mom, can you help me with my homework?" Identifying Tools and Conditions for Intergenerational Dialogue Among Southeast Asian Refugees and Their Children The collective memories of the Southeast Asian diaspora are interwoven with histories of war and colonial violence that continue to be felt in everyday experiences as hauntings. Post-war generations are often without access to resources for contextualizing and deconstructing these lived realities. I discuss my reflexive process while interviewing my family about their experiences with the American-Vietnam War…

The Puzzle of Transparency As you and I are out for a walk, I notice that the sky is getting cloudier and so I ask you "do you believe that it's going to rain?" In response to this question, you normally do not pay attention to your own states of mind, but rather to the way the sky looks and the air feels. But if I'm asking about what you believe, then shouldn't you pay attention to your own state…

Cathy Davidson will offer a hands-on workshop on engaged pedagogy with the Teaching and Learning in the Humanities Now research cluster, working with the research group to address a topic of their choice. Students from Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts are all encouraged to attend. Come prepared with a pedagogy question to dive into. For copies of Cathy Davidson's book The New Education, please email the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning at citl@ucsc.edu Presented by UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute and…

The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics is pleased to present: “IPAs are Like a Hoppy Craft Beer: Acquiring a Taste for Task-based Language Teaching and Integrated Performance Assessments” Jill Pellettieri, Ph.D. This workshop focuses on the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) as simply one specific model of task-based language learning and assessment. Like the hoppy beer, it pairs well in some settings but not in others. We will critically examine the IPA with an eye towards identifying its strengths and…

Jeffrey Santa Ana is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Asian & Asian American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, the State University of New York. He is the author of Radical Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Temple University Press, 2015). He is currently writing a book entitled Transpacific Ecological Imagination: Environmental Memory in the Asian-Pacific Diaspora.  For pre-circulated readings, please email Christine Hong at cjhong@ucsc.edu.

“Realism and Instrumentalism in Metaphysical Explanation” Ori Simchen is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Professor Simchen works mostly in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. Most recently he's been working on metasemantics, or foundational semantics, and its relation to formal semantics. He is particularly interested in how to think about intentionality (or aboutness) in light of the pronouncements of contemporary semantic theory.

“Metaphysics and A Priori Vindication” Is there reason to expect any interesting kind of a priori access to metaphysical truths of the sort often in dispute in contemporary philosophy? In this paper I zero in on truths about what is metaphysically necessary and about the essences or natures of things as key topics in metaphysics and aim to delineate a well-motivated thesis about a priori access to such. After examining a few approaches that don't succeed, I introduce and defend…

  In this talk, I highlight variation in second-person singular pronoun use (vos, tú, and usted) by local residents of a rural Nicaraguan community experiencing linguistic and cultural contact driven by tourism. I demonstrate that pronoun selection can vary according to the amount of contact locals have with outsiders in their community, providing evidence that locals use tú, a variant reported as virtually absent from Nicaraguan Spanish, with both outsiders and other locals. Utilizing local commentary, I show that this…

Join us as Jai Sen discusses his ambitious anthology on social movements with a panel of commentators including Michelle Glowa (CIIS), Deborah Gould (UCSC), and Patrick King (UCSC). Jai Sen is an activist/researcher/author on and in movement. Earlier an organizer, then a researcher into popular movement, for the past decade and more he has worked to promote critical engagement with the World Social Forum and emerging world movement - as moderator of the listserv WSFDiscuss and as coeditor of several books including…

"Welcome to Gaza: On the Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism" Jennifer Kelly, Associate Professor, UCSC  In between Israeli military incursions, Palestinians in Gaza have described their colonial condition and navigated their cleavage from the rest of Palestine through virtual collaborative projects that rehearse, satirize, and reimagine tourism. These projects refuse to position Gaza as solely a site of suffering, a site where tourism could never flourish; they instead ask what it would mean if Palestinians in Gaza…

An informal conversation and open Q & A with Barry Lam about his work as a public scholar, launching a podcast, and his advice about getting started in public scholarship.

Veda Popovici’s work explores the limits of political imagination. In this talk, she presents her latest political art project: a mapping of collective dreams and desires of revolutionary events in the context of post-1989 Romania. Laying out seven radical future pasts, these are stories that could have been, but never happened...feminist unions, Eastern European migrants antifascist organizing, anticapitalist campaigns, solidarity movements between students and coal miners. Based in Bucharest, Veda Popovici holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from…

Please join David L. Eng for a discussion of his new book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019), co-authored with Shinhee Han. The book draws on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice, Eng and Han develop the concepts of racial melancholia…

Much work in syntax suggests that there is a strong preference --- given two or more options --- for shorter dependencies over longer dependencies, often referred to as a locality condition. Cases where these conditions are apparently violated are therefore a general topic of interest. This talk presents two case studies of apparent violations of locality in A-movement which prove problematic for current approaches to the phenomenon. In both Luganda and Haya , as well as Tongan , A-movement is able to cross…

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Recent political trends not just in the United States but globally have led to speculation about the resurgence of authoritarianism and an “authoritarian personality.” As the usual orientations of Left and Right held in place by a liberal status quo begin to falter, social science looks for new frameworks through which to describe these political phenomena and to analyze the kind of challenge they pose to existing liberal or neoliberal institutions. With this paper, I argue that these contemporary political…