The Political Theory Workshop Presents Dabney Waring

Posted on November 3, 2021November 4, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

Transnational Identity and Historical Development

Dabney Waring, Political Science, UConn
with commentary by Justin Theodra, Political Science, UConn
November 5, 2021 from 3:00-4:30p.m. EST, VIRTUAL

The structure-agency debate has long been central to social theory and remains a site of controversy. This paper makes two main interventions in this debate. First, expanding the critical realist approach to social ontology, it argues that group identities can be fruitfully theorized as structures – “collectivities” – that generate causal effects. Collectivities, as socio-symbolic structures, cut across and interact with states and societies, socio-material structures with their own causal effects. This formulation offers a richer account of global social space, displacing the domestic/international distinction that defines traditional statist frameworks of International Relations as well as many sociological and constructivist approaches. Second, it argues that, even with this expansion, there remains a theoretical void within social ontology, an intermediary gap between the natural/physiological and social structures that overdetermine individuals from “below” and “above.” Although it has long been rejected, ignored, or theoretically bracketed in a liberal conception of the subject, it argues that social theorists need a better account of the nexus that links natural and social structures, i.e., the psyche, and its general causal significance.

Dabney Waring is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His research interests include IR theory, social and political theory, critical realism, and transcendental materialism.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Download the Poster

DHMS: Daniel Rosenberg on the Origin of the Keyword

Posted on November 3, 2021November 1, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

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:

Machine/Language: The Origin of the Keyword

Daniel Rosenberg (University of Oregon)

November 10, 2021, 11:00am–12:30pm
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Live. Online (with automated captioning). Registration required.

There may be no word more emblematic of our information age than keyword itself, but the ubiquity of the term belies its complexity. Distinct concepts of the keyword were articulated in information theory and in cultural studies beginning in the late 1950s. With the rise of the Web in the 1990s, however, these differing concepts were bound together. The story of this hybridization provides insight into the process by which computers became mediators of culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the importance of cultural studies to our understanding of computers.

Cosponsored by the History of Science Reading Group.

Daniel Rosenberg is an intellectual historian with a research focus on the history of information and information graphics. In addition, he writes on a wide range of topics related to historiography, epistemology, language, and visual culture. His books are Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline with Anthony Grafton (2010) and Histories of the Future with Susan Harding (2005). Rosenberg is Editor-at-Large of Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, where he is a frequent contributor. He also directs a digital project on historical graphics supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled Time Online. Rosenberg has received grants and fellowships from ACLS, NEH, Stanford Humanities Center, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and American Academy in Berlin among other institutions. Recognitions at the University of Oregon include the Coleman-Guitteau Teaching Fellowship, Fund for Faculty Excellence Award, Williams Council Grant, Faculty Research Award, and Lorry Lokey Award for Science and the Human Condition. Among other subjects, Rosenberg has published on paleolithic calendars, the concept of sloth, the history of Jell-O, and the languages of planet Mars.

20 Years of Fellows: Allison Horrocks

Posted on November 2, 2021November 1, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

What was your fellowship project about?

I completed and defended my dissertation "Good Will Ambassador with a Cookbook: Flemmie Kittrell and the International Politics of Home Economics" in March 2016.

During my fellowship year, I was writing a new history of Home Economics in the 20th century. My research focused on work by academics within the discipline who taught at historically black colleges and served in the field of international relations. One of my larger goals was to shift conceptions of what it might mean to study domesticity at home and abroad. This was the culmination of several years of archival work and study in the history of Home Economics.

Would you give us an update on the project?

I am no longer pursuing the project, though the finished dissertation is publicly available on OpenCommons.

I periodically receive inquiries about the project from journalists or people working in Home Economics today. Some of my much-delayed FOIA requests also continue to come in the mail, all these years later.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

I think there is a misconception that a fellowship year is a year “off.” My fellowship year allowed me to be even more intentional about my time management, particularly with regards to how I engaged with others in the UConn community. Instead of working alone, in an archive or in my home study, I had a much-needed chance to connect with other scholars.

Overall, my fellowship year at UCHI was essential to my project. I was able to finish along the timeline I had set out for myself and to take care with my final writing and editing stages. While I was at the Institute, I appreciated how the group of fellows was managed. The general approach was non-hierarchical, but not so casual as to be counter-productive. It is hard to find that kind of environment when working as a graduate student.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

Before I was a fellow and during my fellowship year, I spent many hours in a chair against one of the walls or bookcases in the UCHI conference room. I loved learning from the visiting fellows and seeing new and compelling work presented to a group of peers. I don't know that it was my favorite moment, per se, but I do have a vivid memory of one of these talks. It was from a presentation on logic, given by a philosopher. I did not fully understand all of it, nor did I need to in order to appreciate what was happening in front of me. People were striving to understand, together, and that is an important and rare thing. On my way home that night, I remember realizing that I would never think about doubt in the same way, again. What a gift that speaker gave to me—to all of us.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I am a public historian and I work for the National Park Service. I am currently a Park Ranger at Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park in Pawtucket, RI. I will be working with a team of colleagues on new exhibits and public programs at Slater Mill, a property very recently acquired by NPS.

I am also the co-host of the podcast American Girls, which draws upon my background as a historian of gender and domesticity.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

I work at the intersection of historical research and interpretation. I talk to people of all ages and backgrounds about complex concepts such as capitalism and exploitation while also providing a basic orientation to the site where I am employed. Why did I choose to do this line of work given my background as a historian? I have become a public historian in part because being in a classroom did not entirely suit me. I wanted to be immersed with other people in a landscape and to work with them to understand it better. To really do this requires that one actually believe in shared wisdom, and be committed to collective, experiential learning. It also means being out in the world in a way that is necessarily different from serving and educating in a classroom environment. I bring a lot of knowledge to my job, and so do the people who come to my place of work. Sometimes I am convinced that the challenge is not so much learning any one thing in particular but simply acknowledging that we can all teach one another. How do we do this without losing all grip on concepts of authority, and expertise, especially during a crisis? My hope is that we build a better sense of mutual respect between all people, or knowledge alone will not be worth very much.

Fellow’s Talk: Sarah Willen on Journaling the Pandemic

Posted on November 1, 2021October 29, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Journaling the Pandemic: What 20,000 Journal Entries Can Tell Us About COVID-19—and Ourselves

Sarah Willen (Associate Professor, Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Erik Freeman (History, UConn)

Wednesday, November 10, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

To attend virtually, register here

What does it mean to keep a journal, and why might someone choose to journal about COVID-19? What belongs in a pandemic journal, and what might journalers hope to accomplish by keeping one? In this talk, anthropologist Sarah Willen engages these questions by introducing the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a combined journaling platform and research study she co-created in May 2020 that lets anyone around the world produce a weekly record of their pandemic experiences by uploading text, audio, and photographs using a smartphone or other device. By October 2021, over 1,600 people in more than 50 countries had contributed over 20,000 journal entries. How are members of PJP’s diverse journaling community using this online space to chronicle the impact of the pandemic on their everyday lives? What can we learn—about COVID-19, our times, ourselves, and scholarship itself—by studying the COVID-19 journals people keep? Join us and find out.

Sarah S. Willen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UConn and Director of the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the university’s Human Rights Institute. A critical medical anthropologist with a strong phenomenological bent, she has published widely on topics ranging from the sociopolitical dynamics and lived experiences of illegalized migration and human rights activism, to everyday understandings of deservingness, dignity, and flourishing in Israel/Palestine and the U.S. She is author or editor of four books, five special issues, and many articles and book chapters, including the multiple award-winning monograph, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Sarah is Principal Investigator of ARCHES (the AmeRicans’ Conceptions of Health Equity Study), a three-year, interdisciplinary study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project—the focus of her UCHI talk and project.

Erik Freeman is the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and a doctoral candidate in UConn’s Department of History. He earned a B.A. in French at Brigham Young University in 2008 and an M.A. in History at Brandeis University in 2013. Since 2013, he has served as an instructor of history at Choate Rosemary Hall, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he has taught courses on environmental history, environmental policy, American history, European history, and the American West. Erik’s article “‘True Christianity’: The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France,” won the Best Article Award at the Communal Studies Association’s annual conference in 2018, and the Best International Article Award from the Mormon Historical Association in 2019.

Fellow’s Talk: Anna Ziering on Masochism as Queer Technique

Posted on October 28, 2021October 29, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Beyond Healing: Theorizing Masochism as Queer Technique

Anna Ziering (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Shiloh Whitney (Philosophy, Fordham)

Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

To attend virtually, register here

Defined in 1886 as a “peculiar perversion of agency,” masochism is one of many pathologized sexual interests, activities, and identities that have begun to shift into the mainstream. This talk contextualizes masochism within histories of racial violence, imperialism, and sexology, and engages new cultural texts that employ these histories for purposes of healing, pleasure, comedy, and social justice. Moving from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) to the “Feminist Sex Wars” and the Fifty Shades phenomenon, the talk traces the cultural shift from seeing masochism as a pathology or symptom to understanding it as a technique for individual healing in a neoliberal context. The talk concludes with readings of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play (2019) and Tina Horn’s SFSX (2020) for their illumination of masochism’s undertheorized potential as a queer world-building technique.

Anna Ziering is an English PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she has completed graduate certificates in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her teaching and research center on intersectional feminist questions of racial and gender justice in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her writing, published in MELUS and The Black Scholar, has received the Susan Porter Benson Graduate Research Award (2020) and the Aetna Graduate Critical Writing Award (2017). This year, she is a UCHI Fellow, a PEO Public Scholar, and a recipient of the Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust Fellowship. Her work has also been recognized by the American Association of University Women.

Shiloh Whitney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Her current research is on emotional labor and affective injustice. Her research draws on Feminist Philosophy, 20th-century French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Fanon, and Affect Theory to develop a critical phenomenology of affect and theorize uniquely affective forms of injustice. Her work can be found in journals such as Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Chiasmi International, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and PhaenEx. Look for her contribution in the Northwestern University Press edited collection 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology and Philosophies of the South.

DHMS and FoT: Discriminating Data Book Discussion Group

Posted on October 25, 2021October 25, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

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 and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative and the Future of Truth project invite you to a book discussion group about:

Discriminating Data

by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
led by Alexis L. Boylan and Yohei Igarashi

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November 15, 2021, 3:00–4:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209

To participate, please email uchi@uconn.edu. The first twenty participants to sign up will receive a free copy of Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press, 2021).

In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighborhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.

How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.

[Book description from MIT Press site]

In conjunction with this event, Wendy Chun will give a virtual book talk on November 18, 2021 at 1:00pm. To attend the talk, register here.

Publishing Now: Publishing about Politics after (?) Trump

Posted on October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Publishing NOW

Publishing about Politics after (?) Trump

with Susan Herbst (Political Science, UConn)

November 1, 2021, 4:00pm

Live • Online • Registration required.

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In conversation with Alexis L. Boylan, Susan Herbst will discuss her new book, A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion. A Troubled Birth explores the decade “public opinion” became a commercial and political commodity, and how the circumstances of its origin undergird challenges to democracy today.

Susan Herbst is University Professor of Political Science and President Emeritus. She is author of five books, most recently, A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion from the University of Chicago Press. Before coming to UConn, she was Professor and Chair of Political Science at Northwestern University, Dean of Liberal Arts at Temple University, and CAO for the University System of Georgia. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Duke University and a doctorate in Communications from the University of Southern California.

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.

Dissertation Grant Writing Workshop

Posted on October 21, 2021October 18, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

This event will provide the option for automated captions. 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 8, 2021, 4:00 pm

Live. Online. Registration is required.

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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.

20 Years of Fellows: Anke Finger

Posted on October 19, 2021March 18, 2022 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

2006–2007 faculty fellow Anke Finger is professor of German, Media Studies, and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in the department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at UConn. A co-founder and co-editor (2005–2015) of the multilingual, peer reviewed, open access journal Flusser Studies, Anke Finger’s closely related scholarship in media studies originates from her work on the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser. She co-authored the 2011 Introduction to Vilém Flusser, and she is a member of the Flusser project team at Greenhouse Studios. She edited Flusser’s The Freedom of the Migrant and co-edited the collection KulturConfusão: On German-Brazilian Interculturalities (2015). From 2016 to 2019 Anke Finger served as the inaugural director of the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative at the Humanities Institute; she also co-founded the CTDH network. Together with Christoph Ernst (University of Bonn), she organized a symposium on “Radical Futures” in March 20–21, 2021. All presentations are available on youtube.

What was your fellowship project about?

Initially, my fellowship project was to be a book about my own family, a case study of former East Germany from an everyday perspective that included education, family dynamics, and politics, focused on my father’s escape via the Baltic Sea in 1974. Turns out that family dynamics were ongoing. It was difficult gathering data and materials, and it became this rather endless tunnel of new discoveries that required constant re-evaluation. To not lose sight of my time at the UCHI, I worked on two other books, The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork (The Johns Hopkins University Press) and the co-authored introduction to Vilém Flusser (University of Minnesota Press) that came out at the same time. The first is a collection of essays about the idea of intersecting art disciplines within modernism and moving well into contemporary art; the second is the first guide to the multilingual, multidisciplinary work of the communication philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) that has generated a great many studies on his international oeuvre.

Would you give us an update on the project?

The research about my family, including interviews and archival work, is only now finished so that I can write Memoryland during my sabbatical. Frankly, the timing, 60 years after the building of the Berlin Wall, 30 years after reunification, is better today for a number of reasons. The other books have been followed by another Flusser project that is just coming out with the University of Minnesota Press, What If? Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images (2022), and I continue to publish on the idea of the total artwork—I guess the topic just keeps holding my passions and interest.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

It was the very first occasion I ever had this much time to dedicate to my work. At first, I was a bit paralyzed, I suppose: what to do? A plethora of options. But once I realized I was not able to produce what I had planned I fell into a rhythm and went with the flow. The year certainly shaped my scholarship in that I learned to take a phenomenological approach to my projects and have worked like that ever since: always have several projects in different stages of production since they all need their own time, perspective, and attention.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

One of the delights of being an early UCHI fellow was the relatively tight quarters in Austin that just made you hang out quite a bit. I remember conversations standing in door frames with my fellow fellows, Michael Lynch and Mark Overmeyer-Velasquez or Robin Greeley, just shooting the breeze and enjoying a cup of coffee we brewed at the end of the hallway. It was intimate and relaxed at the same time.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I am currently promoting or publishing four books, the aforementioned What If? by Vilém Flusser (I introduced, edited and translated the work); a just-out collection on The Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities (Open Book Publishers, 2021), with Virginia Kuhn; a collection on Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism (University of Michigan Press, 2022), with Julie Shoults; and a collection on Bias, Belief, and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts (Routledge, 2022), with Manuela Wagner, that is still part of the “Humility and Conviction in Public Life” initiative. I want to focus next on Memoryland, finally, and a monograph on German Expressionism and Colonialism.

Interesting question! UCHI just supported a symposium I organized with a colleague from the University of Bonn that was focused around Flusser’s What If? with the title “Radical Futures: Imagining the Media of Tomorrow.” To me, the future of knowledge has a lot to do with media and mediation, a vantage point that holds both challenges and promises. Who will create, hold, disseminate and dialogue about knowledge? Which media will create pathways and bridges, which mediation structures will withhold and divide knowledge pools? Today, if you create knowledge without communicating with a variety of audiences it will remain silenced. The biggest challenge is the definition of knowledge, I think, given that humans can know in numerous ways; the biggest promise is acknowledging the continuous balancing act between bias, fake facts, and knowledge diversity. Media has a lot to do with this. . .

Tell us a little about your experience as inaugural director of the DHMS initiative at UCHI.

The Humanities Institute, and especially Michael P. Lynch, awarded me the rare opportunity to develop two deep interests of mine, digital scholarship and humanities outreach and advocacy. I was able to build, structure, and inaugurate the new Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative, merging two fields that still have some difficulty talking to each other. My colleague Yohei Igarashi is now continuing the programming, for graduate students and interested faculty who are pursuing research methods with qualitative and quantitative computing.

Why the Moon Travels

Posted on October 18, 2021October 19, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

As a follow-on to the UCHI-facilitated UConn Reads panel on Irish Travellers (April 2021), Oein DeBhairduin, multi-award-winning Irish Traveller activist, scholar, and co-founder of LGBT+ Tara (Traveller and Roma Alliance) will discuss Why the Moon Travels (Skein, 2020), his retelling of Irish Traveller oral lore illustrated by Traveller artist Leanne McDonagh. This is the first book of Traveller folktales by a member of that indigenous and historically non-literate and nomadic Irish minority. In a public event open to all, DeBhairduin and McDonagh will speak to Mary Burke’s Honors Short Story online class about the opportunities and challenges of gathering and illustrating the oral tales. Contact mary.burke@uconn.edu for WebEx link and accommodations.

Sponsored by Irish Studies/English Department.

Tuesday, October 26, 2:00–3:00pm on WebEx

Humanities Institute

The Political Theory Workshop Presents Dabney Waring

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

Transnational Identity and Historical Development

DHMS: Daniel Rosenberg on the Origin of the Keyword

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents: