Author: Matarazzo, Tiziana

April 6th. UCONN Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research on Women and Girls of Color Symposium

A research symposium at which Collaborative faculty and student fellows will present their research conducted this year, will be held in the Student Union (SU) Auditorium on April 6th, from 10am to 5pm. Please feel free to distribute it as widely as possible and encourage your colleagues and students to attend

UCONN Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research on Women and Girls of Color Symposium

“Building Knowledge about Women and Girls of Color: Issues in the Environment, Public Health, and STEM”

Thursday, April 6, 2017
Student Union Theater
10:00AM – 5:00PM
Researching Women and Girls of Color in the U.S.: The Significance of the UCONN Collaborative.

CLAS BOOK FUND IN ACTION

Victor Zatsepine, Assistant Professor in History received a CLAS book fund award. Here are his thoughts on the award:

CLAS book award allowed me not only to cover the partial cost of my book, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850-1930 (Vancouver, UBC Press: 2017), but also to raise matching funds from other institutes and organizations. Publishing one’s own first book is an unpredictable process. First-time authors face the challenge of raising money in a tight and competitive environment. UConn’s Department of History and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute timely alerted me about this funding opportunity. As a result of careful financial planning, the publisher produced high quality images, maps and index, making this book’s format appealing not only for specialists, but also for the general reader. I would highly recommend UConn tenure-track faculty to apply for this award, which, subject to successful outcome, is distributed directly to the publisher.” (Victor Zatsepine)

For more information and how to apply to the CLAS Book Support fund, please visit our page.

Resistance, Play, and Memory

Resistance, Play, and Memory

Artist Joseph DeLappe engages the intersections of art, technology, social engagement/activism and interventionist strategies exploring geo-political contexts. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, his work in online gaming performance, sculpture and electromechanical installation has been shown internationally. His creative works and actions have been featured widely in scholarly journals, books and in popular media—his most familiar work is a performative and memorializing intervention into the US Army video game recruitment website, “America’s Army.”
 
Tuesday, April 4, 2017 at 5:30 pm
Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Center
 
Sponsored by
School of Fine Arts’ Art & Art History and Digital Media & Design Departments
Humanities Institute’s Digital Humanities and Media Studies
 Thomas J. Dodd Research Center
Human Rights Institute


ADDITIONAL ARTIST INFO

 

Talk by Charlotte Heath-Kelly

Taking Pierre Nora to the Bombsite: Memory, Death and Capital

Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Associate Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, Warwick University UK

 

Thursday April 6, 4-5:30

Humanities Institute Seminar Room, 4th floor of Babbidge Library

 

Pierre Nora has argued that: ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’. For Nora, industrialisation and capitalist acceleration were the destroyers of traditional societal structures. Memory industries emerged as methods by which societies could then imagine continuity and identity in response to social dislocation. This talk takes Pierre Nora, and other scholars of memory’s political economy, to the terrorist bombsite. Building upon their historical sociologies of memorialisation, and using her fieldwork from the reconstruction efforts which followed the 9/11 attacks and European bombings, I explore the sublimation of the memorial (and the dead human) to economic agendas and broader rationales of ‘regeneration’ and urban renewal. In post-terrorist reconstruction, the human subject is profoundly displaced by governance which triages economic injury and blight. Economy thereby emerges as the terrain upon which counterterrorism is fought.

 

Heath-Kelly’s research focuses on critical analysis of terrorism. Among her publications is Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite (Manchester University Press: 2017) and “The Foundational Masquerade: Security as Sociology of Death,” in Masquerades of War, Christine Sylvester, ed. (Routledge: 2015). She is currently principal investigator on two funded research projects: “Resilience at the Bombsite: Reconstructing Post-Terrorist Space” and “Counterterrorism in the NHS: Prevent Duty Safeguarding and the New ‘Pathology’ of Radicalisation.”

Ssponsored by the Humanities Institute and the Department of Political Science

 

Re-Reading, Re-Thinking, and Re-Seeing Comics: Language, Cognition, and Culture

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE 

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

“Re-Reading, Re-Thinking, and Re-Seeing Comics: Language, Cognition, and Culture”

March 24 – 25, 2017

 

March 24, 2017 Location:       Room 4-153 (UCHI, Homer Babbidge Library)
5:30 – 6:45 PM
Opening Reception
7:00 – 8:30 PM
 Hillary Chute (Keynote): “Time, Space, and Reading the Visual in the Graphic Novel”
 
March 25, 2017 Location:       Room 4-153 (UCHI, Homer Babbidge Library)
10:30 – 11:00 AM
Coffee Hour/Meet & Greet
11:00 – 12:15 PM
Gene Kannenberg, “Architecture of the Comics Page” (Presentation)
12:15 – 12:30 PM
Lunch / Break
12:30 – 1:45 PM Ken Foote, “Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Insights of Graphic Narrative for Cartographic Visualization” (Presentation)
1:45 – 2:00 PM Coffee Break
2:00 – 3:45 PM

#1: Sara Johnson, “A Weapon Called Poseidon and a Lost City Called Xerxes: Exotic Worldbuilding with Western Classics in Japanese Manga and Anime”


#2: Andrea Kantrowitz, “What Artists Do (& Say) When They Draw”

3:45 – 4:00 PM Coffee Break

4:00 – 5:45 PM

 

#1: Harry van Der Hulst, “Re-Reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: Thoughts on Formal Properties of the Language of Sequential Graphic Narrative.


#2: Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, “Representing Modern Spain: Javier Mariscal’s Comics and Design”

 

 
 
March 24-25, 2017
 
 
 
This interdisciplinary workshop builds on the discussions facilitated by the UGNI Study-Reading Group (hosted by the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI)); it brings practitioners from across campus (inclusive of different departments, colleges, and schools) into conversation with recognized scholars from other institutions. The two-day workshop will commence with a keynote address by Hillary Chute on March 24, 2017, 7 PM.  The following day, March 25, 2017, includes a discussion of short position papers by invited academic experts and UConn scholars from multiple disciplines.  (Maxine – you could probably break-out the highlighted info in a more graphic way)
 
Featured Visiting Speakers:
 
Frederick Luis Aldama (Professor, Department of English, Ohio State University) has published numerous articles and monographs; he co-edits the series World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction (University of Texas Press) as well as Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture (University of Nebraska Press) and Global Latino/a Studies (also with University of Nebraska Press). He is author of Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2010), Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez (2008), and Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach (2008).
 
Hillary Chute (Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago) is the Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (2011) which won the National Jewish Book Award and an Eisner Award. She is author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, and Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016).
 
Gene Kanneberg (graphic artist) co-hosts the Comics Alternative podcast, which features book reviews and interviews with cartoonists (http://comicsalternative.com and http://comicsmachine.tumblr.com). His book 500 Essential Graphic Novels was published by Collins Design in 2008, and he has provided editorial and production assistance on several other studies of comic art.
  
Andrea Kantrowitz (Assistant Professor of Art Education and Community Arts Practices, Temple University) is an artist, researcher, and educator who has lectured and given workshops on art and cognition. As director of the Thinking through Drawing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, Professor Kantrowitz organized a series of international drawing and cognition research symposia (Zyphoid.com).
 
 

Homer Babbidge Library 4th floor – Room 4-153

March 23th Opening Reception new exhibitions 4:30pm

FREE
Music by Murderous Chanteuse
Cash Bar and Hors D'Oeuvres by University Catering

LIZ WHITNEY QUISGARD An Installation

WORK IT Women Artists, Ellen Emmet Rand, and the Business of Seeing

Progression: Then and Now (Stanwyck Cromwell)

“This exhibition, is a visual documentation of my journey as a Guyanese-born artist, living in a multi-cultural America. Despite my lengthy absence from my country of origin, my memories of Guyana are very rich and abundant. A visual kaleidoscope from this exotic place is referenced in my art. These references serve as visual footnotes to my art-making practice, by allowing me a rich palette of diverse sights to draw from. Saturated colors, patterns and textures reveal themselves in my collages, paintings and drawings.”

-Stanwyck E. Cromwell, Artist

The Caribbean Initiative, El Instituto, and the Africana Studies Institute are pleased to collaborate with the William Benton Museum of Art to showcase the work of local artists at the University of Connecticut through our artist-in-residence program. Stanwyck Cromwell’s work demonstrates how art serves as a medium for capturing and expressing the range of immigrant experiences and voices in the United States.

Progression: Then and Now (Stanwyck Cromwell) is on display March 23 – May 10, 2017.

Thursday, March 23 @ 7:30 pm SANAM MARVI

 

VOCAL WARRIOR SANAM MARVI IS THE NEXT, GREAT DIVINER OF SOUTH ASIA’S HUMANIST, FOLK, AND SUFI TEXTS

With compelling interpretations that draw deeply from one of the world’s great music traditions, Sanam Marvi is Pakistan’s next, inspiring diviner of South Asia’s humanist, folk and Sufi texts. A vocal warrior for tolerance, spirituality and peace, this contemporary daughter of interior Sindh can urge sweeping clarion calls or disarm with nuance. “Deeply resonant. Sublime. Transporting.” (The International News/Pakistan)

Whether singing in Urdu, Sindhi, or Saraiki, Marvi finds comfort in the wisdom of Sufis, and in the couplets on divine love and devotion of the great poets. Reaching across generations and cultures with her sultry voice, she creates an inspiring experience … meditative and trance-inducing one moment, and thrillingly ecstatic the next.

The presentation of Sanam Marvi is part of Center Stage, a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations, with support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. Center Stage Pakistan is made possible by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc.

This is Sanam Marvi’s only stop in Connecticut! New York is the next closest location where she will appear.

 

Watch Sanam Marvi here:

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3 Documentary trailer Marvi: The Mystic Muse
JORGENSEN
Center for the Performing Arts
On the UConn campus in Storrs

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Blog: Ruff Draughts. Visualizing English Print at the Folger, by Gregory Kneidel.

In December I spent two days at the at the Folger’s Visualizing English Print seminar. It brought together people from the Folger, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow; about half of us were literature people, half computer science; a third of us were tenure-track faculty, a third grad students, and a third in other types of research positions (i.e., librarians, DH directors, etc.).

Over those two days, we worked our way through a set of custom data visualization tools that can be found here. Before we could visualize, we needed and were given data: a huge corpus of nearly 33,000 EEBO-TCP-derived simple text files that had been cleaned up and spit through a regularizing procedure so that it would be machine-readable (with loss, obviously, of lots of cool, irregular features—the grad students who wanted to do big data studies of prosody were bummed to learn that all contractions and elisions has been scrubbed out). They also gave us a few smaller, curated corpora of texts, two specifically of dramatic texts, two others of scientific texts. Anyone who wants a copy of this data, I’d be happy to hook you up.

From there, we did (or were shown) a lot of data visualization. Some of this was based on word-frequency counts, but the real novel thing was using a dictionary of sorts called DocuScope—basically a program that sorts 40 million different linguistic patterns into one of about 100 specific rhetorical/verbal categories. DocuScope might make a hash of some words or phrases (and you can revise or modify it; Michael Witmore tailored a DocuScope dictionary to early modern English), but it does so consistently and you’re counting on the law of averages to wash everything out.

After drinking the DocuScope Kool-Aid, we learned how to visualize the results of DocuScoped data analysis. Again, there were a few other cool features and possibilities, and I only comprehended the tip of the data-analysis iceberg, but basically this involved one of two things.

  • Using something called the MetaData Builder, we derived DocuScope data for individual texts or groups of texts within a large corpus of texts. So, for example, we could find out which of the approximately 500 plays in our subcorpus of dramatic texts is the angriest (i.e., has the greatest proportion of words/phrases DocuScope tagges as relating to anger)? Or, in an example we discussed at length, within the texts in our science subcorpus, who used more first-person references, Boyle or Hobbes (i.e., which had the greater proportion of words/phrases DocuScope tags as first-person references). The CS people were quite skilled at slicing, dicing, and graphing all this data in cool combinations. Here are some examples. A more polished essay using this kind of data analysis is here. So this is the distribution of DocuScope traits in texts in large and small corpora.
  • We visualized the distribution of DocuScope tags within a single text using something called VEP Slim TV. Using Slim TV, you can track the rise and fall of each trait within a given text AND (and this is the key part) link directly to the text itself. So, for example, this is an image of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing-World (1667).

Here, the blue line in the right frame charts lexical patterns that DocuScope tags as “Sense Objects.”

The red line charts lexical patterns that DocuScope tags as “Positive Standards.” You’ll see there is lots of blue (compared to red) at the beginning of Cavendish’s novel (when the Lady is interviewing various Bird-Men and Bear-Men about their scientific experiments), but one stretch in the novel where there is more red than blue (when the Lady is conversing with Immaterial Spirits about the traits of nobility). A really cool thing about Slim TV that could make it useful in the classroom: you can move through and link directly to the text itself (that horizontal yellow bar on the right shows which section of the text is currently being displayed).

So 1) regularized EEBO-TCP texts turned into spreadsheets using 2) the DocuScope dictionary; then use that data to visualize either 3) individual texts as data points within a larger corpus of texts or 4) the distribution of DocuScope tags within a single text.

Again, the seminar leaders showed some nice examples of where this kind of research can lead and a lots of cool looking graphs. Ultimately, some of the findings were, if not underwhelming, at least just whelming: we had fun discussing the finding that relatively speaking, Shakespeare’s comedies tend to use “a” and his tragedies tend to use “the.” Do we want to live in a world where that is interesting? As we experimented with the tools they gave us, at times it felt a little like playing with a Magic 8 Ball: no matter what texts you fed it, DocuScope would give you lots of possible answers, but you just couldn’t tell if the original question was important or figure out if the answers had anything to do with the question. So formulating good research questions remains, to no one’s surprise, the real trick.

A few other key takeaways for me:

1) Learn to love csv files or, better, learn to love someone from the CS world who digs graphing software;

2) Curated data corpora might be the new graduate/honors thesis. Create a corpora (e.g.s, sermons, epics, travel narratives, court reports, romances), add some good metadata, and you’ve got yourself a lasting contribution to knowledge (again, the examples here are the drama corpora or the science corpora). A few weeks ago, Alan Liu told me that he requires his dissertation advisees to have a least one chapter that gets off the printed page and has some kind of digital component. A curated data collection, which could be spun through DocuScope or any other kind of textual analysis program, could be just that kind of thing.

3) For classroom use, the coolest thing was VEP Slim TV, which tracks the prominence of certain verbal/rhetorical features within a specific text and links directly to the text under consideration. It’s colorful and customizable, something students might find enjoyable.

All this stuff is publicly available as well. I’d be happy to demo what we did (or what I can do of what we did) to anyone who is interested.

 

Gregory Kneidel
Associate Professor. Hartford Campus.
Specialties: Renaissance (poetry and prose), law and literature, textual editing.
View Gregory Kneidel’s Faculty Bookshelf page.

“Who Deserves a Healthy Life?”

Who Deserves a Healthy Life?” A community conversation and emerging research study led by former UCHI fellow

Last spring, a leading U.S. health foundation approached UConn medical anthropologist Sarah Willen, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, former UCHI Fellow, and Director of the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute (HRI), to learn more about her work on “health-related deservingness” – the crucial but often unspoken question of “who deserves what, and why” in the health domain.

Since then, Willen has assembled a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Cleveland State University, Trinity College, the University of South Florida, Brown University, and Case Western Reserve University to explore this question in the contemporary United States. The two-phase, collaborative study they have developed hinges on two linked concepts: individuals’ (1) sense of deservingness, defined as the experience of feeling valued in and by society, and (2) deservingness assessments, defined as their evaluations of what different social groups, including their own, do or do not deserve in the health domain. The team plans to investigate how Americans from diverse backgrounds conceptualize health-related deservingness; how those conceptions can change; and how such changes might affect individuals’ willingness to take concrete action to promote health equity.

In the first study phase, the team plans to “capitaliz[e] on an available opportunity to generate new knowledge that can inform policy intervention” (Williams & Purdie Vaughns 2016: 640) by studying a multi-sectoral, county-wide health equity initiative called Health Improvement Partnership-Cuyahoga (henceforth HIP-Cuyahoga) that is currently underway in the county that encompasses Cleveland, Ohio.

In January 2017, with support from CSU along with UConn’s Humanities Institute, Human Rights Institute, and the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Prevention (InCHIP), Willen and her colleagues convened in Cleveland for a two-day planning workshop. Yet one string was attached: the group needed to hold a public event of some sort.

Since they were meeting for the first time, it seemed premature to hold a public event casting the researchers as experts. Instead, they took the somewhat unusual step of partnering with HIP-Cuyahoga and the county-wide Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) to sponsor and co-facilitate a community conversation about racism and health inequity at the community center of a local public housing community on the evening before their workshop.

Designed as a screening and discussion of clips from the documentary “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?,” the event attracted an audience of over 60 participants, including about 45 community residents, 10 local public health leaders, and the research team. For community members, the evening provided an opportunity to activate the community’s Social Justice Subcommittee, a healthy meal from a local African American-owned café, and a lively conversation about racism, inequality, and the moral obligations involved in community based research. For the research team, the event also offered an illuminating window onto Cleveland and HIP-Cuyahoga – and a powerful prelude to their collaborative work over the next two days. Their research proposal has now been submitted and, if funded, the study will launch in mid-2017.

Sponsored by Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, HIP-Cuyahoga, Cleveland State University, and UConn’s Humanities Institute, Human Rights Institute, and Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Prevention (InCHIP).

“Must the Revolution be Digital?” March 9, 2017

“Must the Revolution be Digital?” is a panel discussion featuring Zakia Salime and David Karpf. With the events of the Arab Spring and recent mobilization around the Movement for Black Lives, it is generally accepted that digital and social media have become crucial for activism and resistance. However, the debates around digital and online activism are fraught and complicated. One side argues that these new forms are inherently lazy, youth oriented, and remain embedded in neoliberal structures that foreclose revolution from reaching its full radical potential. Yet another argument claims these activisms are not disconnected from bodies on the ground and do the necessary work of generating immediacy and building community around shared causes. Zakia Salime is Associate Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers and currently Visiting Associate Professor at Yale’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department. Her co-edited volume, with Frances Hasso, Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (2016, Duke University Press) investigates the embodied, sexualized and gendered spaces that were generated, transformed and reconfigured during the Arab uprisings.

David Karpf is Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (2012, Oxford University Press) and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (2017, Oxford University Press).

Sponsored by the UConn Humanities Institute’s Digital Humanities Reading Group and moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure.