“Credulity and Circumspection: Epistemological Character and the Ethics of Belief “.
UConn Humanities Institute
Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor
369 Fairfield Way, Unit 1234
Storrs, CT, 06269
Maps & Directions
Phone +1 (860) 486-9057
Email: uchi@uconn.edu
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024
12:15 PM - 01:15 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
Spanning decades of familial memories, TEN SECONDS OF SUGAR is a personal essay documentary film chronicling a legacy of caretaking, motherhood, and silence of Black women’s mental health. Reimagining the past as a form of trauma recovery, employing an essayistic approach illustrating the historical relationships between Black American women and the American health system.
SECONDS is a portrait disrupting generational divisions, seeking care, what it means to overcome structural inequalities, and what we pass down. Guided by my narrative voice, captured mainly by an analog tape recorder, the film presents a series of conversations between three generations of women: myself, my mother, and my maternal grandmother. The camera’s presence is a catalyst, paving the way for us to make space to speak openly and without judgment.
Through this talk, I’ll screen excerpts from work-in-progress scenes that render my family’s lineage of caretaking professions, nurses, mental health practitioners, and funeral directors as a form of care reformation and the accompanying research.
Martine Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Connecticut, focusing on documentary filmmaking with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She produces films that weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, and discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities.
Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and Gladstein Chair of Human Rights. He is a scholar of transitional justice and his recent scholarship has focused on hate speech and incitement in international and U.S. law. His books include The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, and Incitement on Trial. He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of Connecticut and he is writing a book about the challenges in reporting, investigating, and prosecuting bias-motivated crimes in the United States.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024
03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
On the May souvenir page of her 1814 copy of Hommage aux dames, Henriette François Louise Rigano recorded that her husband, Albert Prisse, had traveled to Paris on May 19. On that same page, she wrote that “the French left Maastricht on May 4,” juxtaposing the movements of her family members with the history of the collapse of Napoleon’s European empire. Hommage aux dames was one of a series of very similar almanac titles (Almanach des dames, Almanach dédié aux demoiselles, etc.) produced in France and marketed to women in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This talk will explore how these almanacs, which were primarily poetry anthologies with calendars and sometimes souvenir pages attached, shifted the almanac’s relationship to locality and to time, not only because of their content and format, but also because of how they were used.
Elizabeth Della Zazzera is an assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut’s History department and Director of Communications & Undergraduate Outreach at the UConn Humanities Institute. A historian of modern Europe, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her scholarship focuses on how ideas move on the ground—how their method of transmission and dissemination affects the ideas themselves—with a particular emphasis on the intellectual history of material texts and urban environments in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. Her current book project explores the role of the periodical press, the theatre, and literary sociability in the bataille romantique: the conflict between romantics and classicists. She is also working on a project about French literary almanacs in the early nineteenth century. Her article, “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States” was awarded the 2015 Book History essay prize.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
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MoreFriday, March 22nd, 2024
12:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
The spread of online racism, homophobia, and misogyny continues to wreak havoc in our homes, our schools, and our streets. Media coverage has illuminated how the toxic masculinity of the Proud Boys and other hate groups function in these spaces. Most of us—students and faculty alike—know to avoid these openly hateful spaces, and often take refuge in seemingly frivolous posts about wellness, beauty and self-care. Yet the spread of white nationalism continues unabated, often with “recruits” emerging in surprising places.
Join us for an interdisciplinary workshop and panel discussion that explores how mommy blogs and beauty influencer posts offer “innocent” vehicles for white supremacist tenets of purity, and rigid bodily surveillance.
The day will begin with a writing workshop (12:30-2:00 pm) in which all researchers working on adjacent topics will be invited to join us in group writing and discussion in response to a pre-circulated article. Join us for lunch and the opportunity to think and write with other scholars thinking through these thorny issues. This workshop is open to faculty and graduate students.
Register to attend the workshop and download the article.
The workshop is followed by two panel discussions, open to all, including undergraduate students; we are eager to learn from their perspectives on contemporary online culture. Like the workshop, the panels will take place in the UCHI conference room and will also be livestreamed over Zoom with automated captioning.
Schedule:
12:30-2:00 Writing Workshop with Lunch
2:00-3:30 Panel 1: Unexpected Crossovers to Conspiracy
“Conspiracism” Eric Berg, Philosophy, UConn
“Romance” Alexis Boylan, Art History, Africana Institute, UConn
“Wine Mom” Beth Marshall, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser U, Vancouver, CA
3:30-3:45 Coffee Break
3:45-5:00: Panel 2: So What’s the Problem with Self-Care?
“Retreat” Leigh Gilmore, English, The Ohio State University
“It Girls” Tracy Llanera, Philosophy, UConn
“Microbiome” Rebekah Sheldon, English, University of Indiana
Wednesday, March 27th, 2024
12:15 PM - 01:15 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
“Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma” chronicles 15-year-old Ruth’s migration from Honduras to the US upon discovering her pregnancy. Through interviews and home videos, the documentary intimately reveals the struggles of millions of undocumented migrants, emphasizing their contributions to the nation. Beyond the journey’s challenges, it delves into reuniting with family, adapting to new lives, and confronting anti-immigrant sentiments. The film critically examines mental health barriers, offering a timely and empathetic portrayal of the often-overlooked struggles faced by this vulnerable sector of American society.
Oscar Guerra is an Emmy® award-winning director, researcher, and educator. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Video at the University of Connecticut and a producer at PBS FRONTLINE. Dr. Guerra’s focus is storytelling that promotes critical thinking and social investment. He aims to produce media that provides a way for underrepresented groups to share and disseminate counterstories, contradict dominant and potentially stereotypical narratives, and strengthen their voices and identities. Dr. Guerra’s career spans the spectrum of television environments, music, multimedia production, documentaries for social change, promotional video, immersive media, and vast international experience. Follow him @guerraproduction.
Ana María Díaz-Marcos is a Professor of Spanish Literature at the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages. Her research interests include Spanish literature and theater, feminism and gender studies, and Hispanic antifascism in the press. She has published a monograph on representations of fashion in modern Spanish literature entitled The Age of Silk (2006). Her book Thinking out of the Box: Spanish Writers and the Quest for Emancipation (2013) examines the rising of a feminist consciousness in Spain. She is the editor of an open-access anthology of plays written by contemporary Spanish women playwrights: Escenarios de crisis: dramaturgas españolas en el nuevo milenio (2018). Her latest Digital Humanities projects include a bilingual exhibition about the history of the antifascist newspaper La voz (1937-1939) that was published in New York, a collection of articles from that newspaper that illustrate the intersections of Pan-Hispanic feminism and antifascism in the thirties, and a collection of cartoons from the press entitled “Sketches of Harlem” by Puerto Rican artist José Valdés Cadilla, that is on display at CUNY this Fall.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
Wednesday, March 27th, 2024
03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
Although these are common phrases, it is somewhat unclear what it is to “be something one is not” or to “not be one’s authentic self.” There is, after all, no other source of selfhood than who one actually is. One also owes to no-one a particular way of being other than to oneself. But given that therefore the self is its own’s only yardstick, how can there be an inauthentic self? Towards an answer, I explore a conception of selfhood as meaning-making. One’s self-narrative creates meaning from bare facticity and is hence is not just something we tell about ourselves, but it is how we articulate our very self. Self-narratives can apprehend themselves as more or less coherent meaning-makers, so a self can fall short of its own standards. From this theoretical standpoint, I explore how stereotypes inflict damage onto selves by standing in the way of meaning-making, and how coming out as a queer identity is to create meaning from incoherence.
Julian J. Schlöder is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. They studied philosophy, mathematics, and logic at the Universities of Bonn and Amsterdam, receiving their doctorate in 2018. They are a co-author of the monograph Reasoning with Attitude (Oxford UP, 2023).
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
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