Author: Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

SEWing Circle: Kareem Khalifa on An Ontology of Race

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The Social Epistemology Working Group presents a Sewing Circle Workshop. "Thin Biological Realism: An Ontology of Race for the Working Social Scientist." Kareem Khalifa, professor of Philosophy, UCLA; Future of Truth Fellow, UCHI. April 6, 2023, 2:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library

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 interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Social Epistemology Working Group presents:

A SEWing Circle Workshop

The Concept of Affective Polarization and the Ways to Measure It

Kareem Khalifa

April 6, 2023, 2:30pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

This event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning. Register to attend virtually.

Ontological discussions of race seek to answer two questions, “Do races exist?” and “If so, what are they?” In this talk, I’ll answer a slightly different question: “What must race be in order for social science to be empirically successful?” This change in questions has three surprising results. First, the standard philosophical methodology of first determining the meaning of race terms and then ascertaining whether those terms refer is not the most fruitful way of answering my question. Second, despite the obvious attraction of social constructionist accounts of race for the social sciences, an approach that construes races as groups of people with common geographic ancestry is more fruitful for empirical research. Finally, while this amounts to a kind of biological realism about race, it is “thin” in adopting no substantive commitments to biological theory.

Kareem Khalifa is a professor of philosophy at UCLA (2022–present). Prior to that, he was at Middlebury College in Vermont (2006–2022). His research interests include general philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology. In addition to authoring over 30 articles, he authored the book, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, 2017) and co-edited Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge, 2022). He is currently extending his previous work in these areas to social-scientific conceptions of race and segregation. He is currently a Future of Truth Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. In 2025, he will be the Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. In 2017, he received the American Council of Learned Societies’ Burkhardt Award, which funded a five-year project, Explanation as Inferential Practice.

Young Adult Publishing

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Young Adult Publishing with Peter Knapp, Partner & Agent, Park & Fine; Crystal Maldonado, novelist; and Stephanie Stein, Senior Editor, HarperCollins. Live, online, registration required. April 3, 2023, 5:00pm. A publishing Now event. UConn humanities Institute

Publishing NOW presents

Young Adult Publishing

with Peter Knapp, Crystal Maldonado, and Stephanie Stein

April 3, 2023, 5:00pm

Live • Online • Registration required

Peter Knapp (partner and agent, Park & Fine), Crystal Maldonado (author and UConn alum), and Stephanie Stein (Senior Editor, HarperCollins), answer your questions and demystify the world of young adult publishing. 2022–23 UCHI/CLAS Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellow Rylee Thomas will moderate the discussion.

Please submit any questions you have for our panel of experts via this google form.

Peter Knapp is a partner and literary agent at Park & Fine Literary and Media, where he oversees the children’s and young adult fiction department. His clients include the New York Times bestselling authors Soman Chainani, Ayana Gray, Adalyn Grace, Rachel Griffin, Shelby Mahurin, Ginny Myers Sain, and Amélie Wen Zhao, and award winners and critically acclaimed authors such as Emily Bain Murphy, Julia Drake, Ryan La Sala, and Kate O’Shaughnessy. Peter first began his foray into publishing while interning in the book-to-film departments of several film studios and production companies, including New Line Cinema and Overture Films. Upon graduating, he began work as a story editor at Floren Shieh Productions, a literary scouting agency that consulted on film and TV adaptations for Los Angeles-based studios and production companies. He joined Park & Fine, then the Park Literary Group, in 2011. Peter is a graduate of New York University, and now lives in Brooklyn with his husband.

Crystal Maldonado is a young adult author with a lot of feelings. Her debut novel, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, is a 2021 New England Book Award winner, a Cosmopolitan Best New Book, and a POPSUGAR Best New YA Novel. Her newest novel, No Filter and Other Lies, explores teenage life in the social media age—and the lies we tell to ourselves and others.

Stephanie Stein is a senior editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, where she acquires middle grade and YA fiction and graphic novels for the Harper and HarperTeen imprints. In her eleven years at Harper, she has worked with critically acclaimed, bestselling, and award-winning authors including Rena Barron, Kiera Cass, Femi Fadugba, Cynthia Hand, Michael Leali, Mark Oshiro, Ava Reid, Misa Sugiura, and Shveta Thakrar. She is also the lead editor of the #1 New York Times bestselling Warriors series by Erin Hunter.

ACCESS NOTE

This event will offer automated captioning. 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 interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

New Deadline for Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowships

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The deadline to submit applications for the CLAS and UCHI Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowship has been extended to March 10, 2023.

The fellowship supports a year-long research project supervised by a UConn faculty member. The project should explore big questions about human society and culture and should lead to an original contribution to your area of study. For details on eligibility and how to apply, please see the call for applications.

Seeing Truth Presents: Possible Knowledge with Debapriya Sarkar

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Seeing Truth presents Possible Knowledge, a book launch with Debapriya Sarkar, Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies, UConn. March 7, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library. This event will also be livestreamed.

This event will include automated captioning. 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 interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Seeing Truth presents:

Possible Knowledge

A book launch

with Debapriya Sarkar

March 7, 2022,  3:30pm
Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor

This event will also be livestreamed. Register to attend virtually

Debapriya Sarkar will discuss her new book, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Penn Press). Possible Knowledge offers a new account of literature’s role in the intellectual history of early modernity, a period beset by uncertainty as older frameworks of knowledge were questioned, even upended. Showing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, the book argues for early modern literature’s significance as a vital philosophical endeavor. It theorizes “possible knowledge” as a distinct intellectual paradigm, exploring the imaginative habits of thought that enabled early modern thinkers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Bacon, Spenser, and Cavendish—to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we term a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at UConn. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections. Her new book, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. She is the recipient of the Huntington’s 2021–22 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship.

Fellow’s Talk: Heather Cassano on The Fate of Human Beings

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2022–2023 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-progress scenes from The Fate of Human Beings. Assistant Professor, Digital Media and Design, Heather Cassano, with a response by Cornelia Dayton. March 1, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room and livestreamed on Zoom.

Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-Progress Scenes from The Fate of Human Beings

Heather Cassano (Assistant Professor, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Cornelia Dayton (History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS is a feature-length documentary film uncovering the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States. Through a multiple narrative approach utilizing archival and present-day material, the film unpacks the ramifications of these cemeteries, seeking to understand our past and present relationships with the “otherness” of those interred. This talk will present work-in-progress scenes from the film and discuss the research behind the project. The selected scenes will include characters from multiple narratives featuring stories of improper burials, activism, and memorialization; all relating to mental institution cemeteries across the country.

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film/Video at the University of Connecticut. Her films blend an observational style with deeply personal narratives, striving to tell authentic stories through her personal experiences. Heather’s first feature documentary THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD (2018), followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system into adulthood. The film screened at numerous festivals internationally, winning three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize. Heather is now working on her second feature documentary THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS, which uncovers the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States.

Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.

Access note

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.

DHMS Presents: The Lab Book

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The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative Presents The Lab Book, Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler. February 27, 2023, 11:00 am. Live. Online. Registration required.

This event will include automated captioning. 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 interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

The Lab Book

with Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler

February 27, 2022, 11:00am
Live. Online. Registration required.

In this talk, we will discuss our recently published The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies, offering insights into how the book emerged and how it resonates with contemporary developments regarding “labs.” While our focus is on media and humanities labs, we expand the discussion to the broader field of research in STS on laboratories as sites of knowledge production which, however, are also thoroughly embedded in questions of imaginaries, politics of infrastructure, as well as social relations and power. Our book uses historical and contemporary case studies to discuss changes in how academic and non-academic practices are conceived and what sorts of techniques sustain the spaces we come to call “labs.” As we acknowledge in the book, “the first difficulty in talking about labs with any precision is that the metaphor of the lab has permeated contemporary culture to the degree that it can apply to just about anything.” With this starting point, we outline what we call the hybrid lab—a particular kind of a constellation that also applies to historical examples: labs have always already been hybrids.

Lori Emerson is Associate Professor in the English Department and the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program (IAWP). She is also Director of IAWP and the Media Archaeology Lab. Emerson is co-author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press 2022) with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka, author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press June 2014), and editor of numerous collections.

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is also visiting professor at Winchester School of Art and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture. His books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016) and A Geology of Media (2015) Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and he is the co-author (with Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler) of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). Jussi is also on the curatorial board of the next Helsinki Biennial as well as the curator (with Daphne Dragona) of Weather Engines (2022, 2023). http://jussiparikka.net.

Darren Wershler is Professor of English, Affiliate Professor of Communication Studies and Cinema and Acting Director of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. With Lori Emerson and Jussi Parikka, he is an author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

UCHI Awarded Grant to Create Global Humanities Institute

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The UConn Humanities Institute is excited to announce that its joint application with Rutgers University for a Global Humanities Institute on Design Justice AI has been awarded funding. The project, which is led by the Rutgers Center of Cultural Analysis, has three (co-PI) partner institutes: the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, the Center for Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. Supported by the Mellon Foundation via the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the project will fund an interdisciplinary series of workshops and conferences dedicated to building sustainable global research partnerships that address the ethics of artificial intelligence, including a two-week long institute held at the University of Pretoria in 2024.

The rapid diffusion of so-called “Generative AI”—machine learning technologies that simulate human languages, communication, arts, and cultures through the statistical modeling of vast troves of “scraped” internet data, including ChatGPT and Dall-E3—signals the importance of bringing humanities scholars into conversations about “ethical AI.” The challenge of studying “generative AI” is to lay out the stakes, human as well as humanistic, of commercial technologies that aim to influence—even “revolutionize”—the practices and political economies that bear on human cultural production. The Global Humanities Institute on Design Justice AI will ask:

What would be lost from human creativity and diversity if writers or visual artists come to rely on predictive models trained on selective datasets that exclude the majority of the world’s many cultures and languages?

What frameworks or evaluation practices might help to concretize what is meant by “intelligence,” “understanding,” or “creativity”—for machines as well as humans? How might such humanistic interventions help diverse citizens to participate in the design and implementation of generative technologies and the benchmarks that evaluate them?

If evidence suggests that “generative AI” is harmful—and/or counter to the professed object of enhancing human lifeworlds—what alternatives might be forged through community participation in research that rearticulates goals, and reframes design from the bottom up? What kinds of teaching, research, community practices, and policies might sustain these humanist-inflected and justice-oriented design processes?

These research questions go to the heart of what inclusive collaborations can contribute to the study of resource-intensive technologies that aim to monetize and “disrupt” human communication and creativity.

This project is an exciting reaffirmation of UCHI’s dedication to addressing crucial issues on a global scale.

Fellow’s Talk: Sandy Grande on Indigenous Elders

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2022-2023 UCHI Fellow's talk. Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures. Professor of Political Science and NAIS Sandy Grande, with a response by Joseph Darda. February 22, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures

Sandy Grande (Professor, Political Science & NAIS, UConn)

with a response by Joseph Darda (English, Texas Christian University)

Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In this talk, Prof. Sandy Grande troubles the prevailing narrative of global aging as a crisis wherein older adults are conceived as a threat to current systems of governance and infrastructure. Against this narrative she asks: What if instead of crisis, we imagine global aging as a condition of possibility? More specifically, her work considers the rising tide of older adults as providing a portal for reconsidering some of the central dichotomies and contradictions of a settler society built on the exigencies of capital: the conflation of work with existence; the tying of economic growth to production; the limiting of production to wage labor; and association of old age with declining yield. In this work, she centers Indigenous Elders as both subject and analytic, considering how they intervene in and ‘refuse’ the dominant formulations of aging. Her central claim is that Elder ways of being and knowing will become increasingly important as we conceptualize the end of settler hegemony and the possibilities of decolonial futures.

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019–2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2023.

Joseph Darda is an associate professor of literature at Texas Christian University and the author of three books on the cultural life of race in the United States: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars (California, 2021), and Empire of Defense (Chicago, 2019). He has published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, and Critical Inquiry, among other journals, and contributed essays to the Los Angeles Review of Books. With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he is coediting a forthcoming special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”

Access note

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.

#IndigiReads 2023

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The #IndigiReads working group, organized by Cristina Connolly, Sandy Grande, and Amy Safran, invites UConn community members from across the university to join students, staff and faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) to meet regularly across the spring semester 2023, to read and discuss texts related to food sovereignty, Indigenous knowledge systems, agriculture, and the environment. In acknowledgement that Connecticut is home to several Tribal Nations and the University sits on Indigenous lands, this group will work to increase understanding of the history and current state of these relations. Participants will grow their perspectives and deepen their interdisciplinary understandings with an aim to develop better working relations across academic units and with Native American and Indigenous students/communities.

This semester the group is reading Hi′ilei Hobart’s book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, which, “connects the colonialist introduction of ice and refrigeration to Hawaii to current Native Hawaiian food sovereignty.”

Join them in ODI Commons, SU 103, NACP student space on

Friday, February 24, 2023 at 12:30pm
Friday, March 10, 2023 at 12:30pm
Friday, March 24, 2023 at 12:30pm
Friday, March 31, 2023 at 3:00pm

The Political Theory Workshop Presents: Roberto Alejandro

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THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

“Political Disorientation, Legibility, and Trumpism”

Roberto Alejandro, Political Science, UMass Amherst
with commentary by Justin Theodra, Political Science, UConn
February 20, 2023 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu