Author: Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

SEWing Circle: Manuel Almagro on Affective Polarization

Posted on by

The Social Epistemology Working Group Presents a SEWing circle workshop: The Concept of Affective Polarization and the Ways to Measure It, Manuel Almagro, Visiting Scholar, UConn Humanities Institute. December 15, 2022. 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

Manuel Almagro

December 15, 2022, 2:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

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

Affective polarization is usually defined as a tendency to dislike those from other party/parties while holding positive feelings toward the in-group, and it is usually measured by asking citizens if they have cold or warm feelings toward certain political leaders, political topics, or political parties. Thus, the claim “many contemporary democracies have become affectively polarized” usually means that their citizens have become more negative in their feelings toward the other party, moving from moderate levels of sympathy toward increasingly strong dislike. Here I will argue that feelings are just an element—possibly not the most relevant one—of the complex, multidimensional concept of affective polarization. I also review the main challenges the techniques to measure affective polarization face, and discuss the possible benefits of focusing on other dimensions of the concept in order to detect it at an early stage.

Manuel Almagro is a “Margarita Salas” postdoctoral fellow at the University of Granada (Spain), currently visiting the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut and working with Professor Michael P. Lynch. He will join the University of Valencia (Spain) in the summer of 2023 as a “Juan de la Cierva” postdoctoral fellow. He works on political epistemology, philosophy of language, and experimental philosophy. Most of his current research is focused on affective polarization and disagreement.

The Political Theory Workshop Presents Dana Francisco Miranda

Posted on by

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

“The Conspiracy of Peace”

Dana Francisco Miranda, Philosophy, UMass Boston
with commentary by August Shipman, Political Science, UConn
December 5, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.

In the 1968 documentary drama, Tell Me Lies, the Pan-African organizer Kwame Ture states: “There is a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace. Isn’t that correct? You can have peace and be enslaved. So, peace isn’t the answer. Liberation is the answer.” Political orders free from disturbance or “at peace” have long served as the ideal. Yet, states can be functional, can even thrive, through the production of social interactions wherein some are subject to non-relations, or treated as nonbeings. The maintenance of non-relations often requires the subjection and violent subordination of such groups. Peace is maintained through disorder. Drawing on the works of Martin Luther King, Jr, Frantz Fanon, Roseann Liu, and Savannah Shange, this work interrogates how “peace” functions in conspiracy with domination and oppression and describes the solidarities necessary to combat and upend dysfunctional orders.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Publishing Now: Access, Representation, Collaboration

Posted on by

Publishing Now and DHMS present: Publishing Now: Access, Representation, Collaboration Victoria Hindley (MIT Press) and Allison Levy (Brown University Digital Publication) November 30, 2022, 2:00pm Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

Publishing NOW and the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative present

Publishing Now: Access, Representation, Collaboration

Victoria Hindley (MIT Press) and Allison Levy (Brown University Digital Publications)

November 30, 2022, 2:00pm

Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

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

Victoria Hindley and Allison Levy will be talking about publishing in the context of larger concerns such as diversity, access, and collaboration and their work with their “On Seeing” series—an experiment in multimodal publishing that hopes to shape new conversations about how we see, comprehend, and participate in visual culture.

Victoria Hindley is Acquisitions Editor of Visual Culture and Design at the MIT Press and the founding organizer of the Press’s Grant Program for Diverse Voices. Known for its forward-looking intellectual rigor and distinctive design, the MIT Press has been publishing groundbreaking work since the 1960s.

Allison Levy is the Director of Brown University Digital Publications.

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.

DHMS: The Ends of Knowledge

Posted on by

The Ends of Knowledge. Seth Rudy and Rachael Scarborough King, with a response from Michael Lynch. November 16, 2022, 1:00pm. UConn Humanities Institute Conference Room. This even will also be livestreamed.

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 Ends of Knowledge

Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy

November 16, 2022, 1:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room
Add to Google calendar Add to Office 365 calendar Add to other calendar

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

Toward interdisciplinary exchange, this event addresses the following questions: What would you say your discipline’s goals are, when it comes to advancing knowledge? How are they like or unlike the “ends” of other disciplines? The speakers, Rachael Scarborough King (UC Santa Barbara) and Seth Rudy (Rhodes College) put such questions to a historian, a physicist, a literary scholar, a computer scientist, a biologist, a digital humanist, a legal scholar, a journalist, an AI researcher, an activist, as well as scholars working in gender studies, environmental studies, Black studies, cultural studies, and more. Each scholar wrote up an essay in response, and these are collected in the forthcoming volume, The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (Bloomsbury).

UCHI Director, Michael Lynch, will be acting as respondent to the two speakers.

Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is the Principal Investigator and Project Director for the Ballitore Project, an archives- and digital humanities-based research project.

Seth Rudy is Associate Professor of English at Rhodes College. He is the author of Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (2014).

Fellow’s Talk: Joseph Darda on Race and Fantasy Sports

Posted on by

UCHI Fellow's Talk 2022–2023. Owning Le'veon Bell and other White Fantasies. Associate Professor of English, Texas Christian University, Joseph Darda, with a response by Sandy Grande. November 16, 2022, 3:30pm. UConn Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Owning Le’Veon Bell and Other White Fantasies

Joseph Darda (Associate Professor, English and Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies, Texas Christian University)

with a response by Sandy Grande (Political Science and Native American & Indigenous Studies, UConn)

Wednesday, November 16, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Add to Google calendar Add to Office 365 calendar Add to other calendar

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk situates the rise of fantasy sports––a now $20 billion industry––in a post–civil rights, post-feminist moment of retrenchment. Telling the stories of boardgame inventors, early fantasy leagues, moneyball statheads, billion-dollar gambling startups, and the fans who consume it all, Joseph Darda asks whose fantasy we are living when we draft, trade, and cut real-life professional athletes. While some celebrate the rise of fantasy sports and sports analytics as a “revenge of the nerds,” in which unathletic math whizzes stormed the gates of a world dominated by former prom kings, Darda shows how it has functioned as something else: a racial managerial fantasy, a fantasy inviting an audience of mostly white men to imagine themselves not as their favorite athletes but as owners of predominantly Black teams.

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.”

At UCHI, Darda is writing “The Sporting Public: Race, Labor, and the Miseducation of the Fan,” a book investigating what our most popular culture, sports, an industry premised on the sorting and hierarchizing of bodies, has taught the nation about race, gender, and labor since civil rights.

This is his third tour in Storrs. He attended fourth grade at Goodwin Elementary and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2015.

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 2022. She has also published numerous book chapters and articles including: Accumulation of the Primitive: The Limits of Liberalism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street, The Journal of Settler Colonial Studies; Refusing the University in Toward What Justice?; “American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power,” Harvard Educational Review; and, “Red-ding the Word and the World” In, Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis. She is also a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence. As one of their projects, they published the Standing Rock Syllabus. In addition to her academic and organizing work, she has provided eldercare for her parents for over ten years and remains the primary caregiver for her 94-yr. old father.

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.

Dissertation Grant Writing Workshop

Posted on by

UConn Humanities Institute. Dissertation Grant writing workshop. November 7, 2022, 3:00pm. UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209). A workshop to assist graduate students in the preparation of dissertation fellowship applications in the humanities and associated disciplines.

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.

Dissertation Grant Writing Workshop

November 7, 2022, 3:00 pm

UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library. Registration is required.

The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) is offering a workshop to assist graduate students in the preparation of dissertation fellowship applications in the humanities and associated disciplines. Any UConn graduate student interesting in applying to UCHI’s dissertation research fellowship is especially encouraged to attend. UCHI Director, Michael Lynch (Philosophy), and Director of Academic Affairs, Alexis Boylan (Art History and Africana Studies), will lead the workshop.

Two Talks by Distinguished National Phi Beta Kappa Scholar Ricardo Padrón

Posted on by

A lecture from a distinguished National Phi Beta Kappa Scholar sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa. The Location of China: Spanish Encounters with the Middle Kingdom, 1521–1621. Ricardo Padron. Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia. November 3, 2022, 4:00pm. UCHI Conference Room.

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.

A lecture from a distinguished National Phi Beta Kappa Scholar sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa:

The Location of China: Spanish Encounters with the Middle Kingdom, 1521–1621

Ricardo Padrón

November 3, 2022, 4:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

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

Spain’s colonization of the Philippine Islands led to an encounter with Ming China that was somewhat different from those experienced by the Portuguese and the Jesuits, one that generated questions about the location of China both in the geography of the globe and in the emerging hierarchy of the world’s cultures, as imagined from Europe. Were the Chinese as civilized as they seemed to be? Or were they just another version of the “barbarian” countries that the Spanish had already conquered in Mexico and Peru? What did it mean to be civilized anyway, and how could one tell? In this lecture, I introduce this little-known episode in the history of early modern European, arguing that it was the nature of Chinese government, not religion, that proved to be crucial.

In addition to the talk sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa, Ricardo Padrón will be giving a talk hosted by UVA’s Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures

The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West

Ricardo Padrón

November 4, 2022, 10:00–11:30am
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

This event will also be livestreamed. Register to attend virtually.

The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (Chicago 2020) examines the place of Pacific and Asia in the Spanish concept of “the Indies.” Padrón’s research for this book has taken him to China, Japan, and the Philippines, and has been sponsored by U.Va.’s Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Arts & Sciences at U.Va., and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ricardo Padrón is a specialist in the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world who has published extensively on questions of empire, literature, cartography, and the geopolitical imagination. His 2004 book, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain, has become a touchstone for the study of early modern Hispanic cartography. His recent monograph, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (2020) challenges established narratives of “the invention of America” by looking at the various ways that sixteenth century Spaniards attempted to imagine the New World and Asia as connected spaces. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America.

SEWing Circle: Neftalí Villanueva Fernández on Crossed Disagreements

Posted on by

The Social Epistemology Working Group Presents a SEWing circle workshop: Crossed disagreements: semantical and epistemological issues. Neftalí Villanueva Fernández, Professor of Philosophy University of Granada.October 6, 2020, 2:00pm. UCHI conference room.

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

Crossed Disagreements: Semantical and Epistemological Issues

Neftalí Villanueva Fernández

November 1, 2022, 2:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

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

Crossed disagreements are instances of public discourse where the parties involved give clear signs of conceiving the debate under different lights. One might be thinking of the dispute in factual terms, for example, while the other might be taking the dispute to be one of a normative nature. An overwhelming presence of these disagreements can be linked to the rise of polarization. Because of its connection with polarization, they can be identified as forms of political propaganda. The purpose of this talk is to reflect on two different questions: 1. Do crossed disagreements stand in the way of knowledge? 2. What kind of restrictions do crossed disagreements impose on a theory of meaning? We will also dwell on the connection between epistemological and semantical issues, both with respect to the past literature on disagreement, and the future research on the topic. We will argue for a “promiscuous” approach, one in which epistemological and semantical questions remain intertwined.

Neftalí Villanueva is Profesor Titular and Head of the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada in Spain. Most of his work focuses on applying the philosophy of language to classical questions in the history of philosophy and to political and social problems. He is currently Principal Investigator on three separate research projects on polarization and disagreement: “Contemporary Expressivisms and the Indispensability of the Normative Vocabulary: Scope and Limits of the Expressivist Hypothesis,” “Public Disagreements, Affective Polarization and Immigration in Andalusia,” and “Offensive language, Inverse Planning, and the ‘Abstract/Concrete’ Dissonance: New Proxies to Measure Affective Polarization.”

Picturing the Pandemic Exhibition Opening

Posted on by

Exhibition Opening

Thursday, October 27th 5–7 p.m.
Downtown Library in Hartford

Register

Hartford Public Library and UConn are excited to host an opening reception for “Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project,” the first public exhibition of photos and journal entries collected by the team at the Pandemic Journaling Project detailing the experience of ordinary people during COVID-19. Speakers include Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin; UConn President Radenka Maric; Jasmin Agosto, education and community outreach manager, Hartford Public Library; Michael Lynch, director of UConn’s Humanities Institute; Kathryn Libal, director of UConn’s Human Rights Institute; Ty Hughey, executive director of Haddam-Killingworth Youth and Family Services; Melina Das, 10th grader, Wethersfield High School; and UConn faculty and Picturing the Pandemic Co-Curators Alexis Boylan & Sarah Willen

Since its launch in May 2020, the Pandemic Journaling Project has given ordinary people a place to chronicle and preserve their pandemic experiences. Over the following two years, more than 1,800 people in 55 countries created nearly 27,000 individual journal entries—for themselves, and for the history books.

“After collecting photographs, audio recordings and written journal entries from people around the world for two and a half years, we’re honored and thrilled to be partnering with the Hartford Public Library in launching what we think is a quite unusual exhibition,” said Sarah S. Willen, co-founder of PJP and co-curator, together with fellow UConn Professor Alexis Boylan, of the exhibition. “Our PJP team often describes PJP as a form of grassroots, collaborative research and history-making. In this exhibition, we’re expanding that mission to show how all of us, no matter our age, background or life stage, can find strength, solidarity and maybe even healing in creative expression and in recording, and sharing, our stories.”

Select submissions from the project will be displayed at Hartford Public Library through December alongside a selection of images from the library’s Hartford 2020 collection, a collection of photographs by Hartford-based photographers Andy Hart, Jasmine Jones, and Ray Shaw that capture Hartford’s public sphere in 2020: protests, parks, buses, testing clinics and outdoor performances.

In addition to journal entries collected digitally, the project hosted a series of in-person programs this summer at Hartford Public Library locations across the city where children were encouraged to create art that captured their thoughts and feelings about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their daily lives. Selections from those programs will be displayed in the Children’s Department at the Downtown Library as well as at Hartford Public Library branches across the city.

“A core part of Hartford Public Library’s mission is providing resources to encourage individual exploration, as well as preserving and recording Hartford’s history,” said Hartford Public Library President and CEO Bridget E. Quinn. “We are proud to partner with the team at the Pandemic Journaling Project on this exhibition that not only chronicles a tumultuous time in our collective history, but hopefully sparks conversation about claiming our voices, learning from others and creating meaningful change in the world, as well as inspiring others to share their stories.”

The opening reception at the Downtown Library will include remarks from the exhibition curators, as well as from project participants. Refreshments will be served and guests will be invited to view the exhibition that has been installed throughout the library.

Future public exhibitions of Pandemic Journaling Project materials are planned at Providence Public Library in Rhode Island; the Mark Twain Center for Transatlantic Relations in Heidelberg, Germany; and the Centro de Estudios de Género, el Colegio de México in Mexico City, Mexico.

For more information about the Pandemic Journaling Project visit www.pandemicjournalingproject.org. To register for the event on October 27th visit www.bit.ly/PJPatHPL.

Download press release

The Political Theory Workshop Presents: Erin Pineda

Posted on by

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

“Displays of Force Black Rebellion and the Spectacular Violence of Police”

Erin Pineda, Government, Smith College
with commentary by Bianka Adamatti, Political Science, UConn
October 17, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.

“The whole world is watching.” Perhaps no phrase better encapsulates our hopes for what might be politically possible when the ordinary violence of police becomes an extraordinary public spectacle. But what is the shape of the world that is watching, and what is the political work performed by such a spectacle within it? This paper interrogates the spectacle of police violence against Black rebellion as an ambivalent multiplicity: a set of complex displays and encounters that solicit a variety of affective responses and inaugurate contradictory political possibilities. Fed through the logics of white supremacy, the scene of the “protest” is never fully free from the scene of the “riot”; the victims of the violence are also readily interpretable as aggressors; and the retaliatory and repressive violence of policing invites not just moral outrage but also rationalization, distancing, and eager identification with cruelty.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu