Claudia Lopez "Contesting 'Double Displacement': Rural displaces Persons, informal Settlements, and the 'Medellin Miracle'" This presentation examines the Comuna 8, a sector of the city of Medellin resisting displacement by urban renewal. I highlight a historic voting process in 2014, lead by a committee of displaced persons, to contest the implementation of the redeveloped plan. […]

Andrew Woods "Punk the Academy (aka. Punk as Method) With a particular emphasis on the non-hierarchical, ambiguous, and D.I.Y. ethos of punk cultures, this paper makes the case that punk can be used as a lens informing our investigations of other objects, scenes, themes, and theories. The information of punk as method is not assuming […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]