Fellows Talks

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Mark Healey

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position at UConn?
 
I have a doctorate in Latin American history from Duke University, and taught at NYU, the University of Mississippi, and the University of California, Berkeley before coming to UConn in 2011. I teach on the urban, environmental, and political history of modern Latin America. My strongest areas of interest are Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil, but I have the pleasure of teaching broadly about the region for both undergraduates and graduate students. There’s a lively community of Latin Americanists here, in Humanities and Social Sciences, which has made UConn an engaging place to teach.

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Talk by Charlotte Heath-Kelly

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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

 

“Who Deserves a Healthy Life?”

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“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).

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Daniel Hershenzon

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

My first degree, from the University of Tel Aviv, is a double major of Philosophy and History. Before getting this degree , I was studying industrial design. I left the world of design for the university when I realized that I was enjoying the history and theory classes much more than the design workshops. After receiving my B.A., I continued to study towards a Masters degree and in 2004 enrolled in a PhD program in the Department of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was lucky to spend two years of my graduate studies researching in Spain (in Madrid, Valladolid, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands!), and another year in Florence, Italy, with a postdoctoral fellowship after I graduated. Then, I took my current position at the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, where I mostly teach medieval and early modern Spanish history.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am completing a book that examines the entangled histories of early modern Spain, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers, and by extension the entangled lives of Christian and Muslim captives in the region. Captivity was a serious problem in the early modern Mediterranean, and scholars estimate the number of captives, Muslims and Christians, in 2 to 3 millions. The book argues that piracy, captivity, and redemption shaped the sea, a space integrated on the social, economic, and political levels. It demonstrates that despite confessional differences, the lives of Muslim and Christian captives were interrelated and formed part of a single Mediterranean system of bondage. These captivities were connected by a political economy of ransoming shaped by ecclesiastic ransom institutions; Spanish, Ottoman, and Moroccan rulers; captives and kin; and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian ransom intermediaries. They all interacted through texts that captives created and circulated across the sea. The history that emerges from these stories is both local and Mediterranean. It offers a comprehensive analysis of competing Spanish, Algerian, and Moroccan imperial projects intended to shape Mediterranean mobility structures. Simultaneously, the project reveals the tragic upending of the lives of individuals by these imperial maritime political agendas.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

I became interested in captivity when I wrote a seminar paper analyzing the autobiographies of former Spanish captives. I was fascinated by how ex captives sought to convince their readers that they did not convert to Islam during their captivity, and yet, their accounts abound with different forms of religious, cultural, and imperial boundary crossing. I also began to see how problematic the absence of Muslim captives from this history is. Finally, I was struck by the importance of writing for captives—not only as a medium to make claims about one’s past after ransom, but also during captivity. Captives constantly wrote letters trying to arrange their ransom, and in its turn, this epistolary circulation extended the boundaries of maritime communities across the sea, putting captives in charge of channeling information about community members who had died, converted as captives, or suffered martyrdom. As importantly, researching Mediterranean captivity allowed me to spend two years in the Mediterranean.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

As a historian, I engage in debates on the emergence of European territorial identities, cross-Mediterranean maritime networks, the political economy of forced migration, and the struggle between state and church over that mobility’s control and meaning. I do so by analyzing early modern interactions among 17th century Christian and Muslim captives, enslavers, redeeming friars, merchants, and rulers who struggled to shape piracy, slavery, and redemption according to their shifting vision – religious, economic, and political. The multiple cross-maritime interactions I explore do more than counter an image of a declining 17th-century Mediterranean dissolving into nation-states. They force us to rethink early modern Europe and its others questioning how seemingly European territorial identities were shaped by transnational maritime networks and their transformation. In this sense, the framework that my book proposes for the history of the early modern Mediterranean and Europe have repercussions beyond that specific history and can provide a lens through which to understand the current ongoing crisis surrounding mobility across the sea.

 

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Dimitris Xygalatas

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?
I am an Assistant Professor at UConn’s Anthropology Department and an affiliate of the Cognitive Science Program. Those two areas also reflect my background and training, which is interdisciplinary. I have conducted a combined 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork, but I have also worked in various social scientific laboratories. This allowed me to develop a research methodology which combines field and lab approaches and affordances.
 
  
-What is the project you’re currently working on? 
My research examines the effects of ritual participation at the individual and social level. One area of particular interest for me has been the practice of extreme rituals. I have studied some of the most intense rituals around the world, ceremonies that involve walking on fire, piercing the skin, altered states of consciousness, and other intense experiences. To do this, I often brought technological innovations into my field research, things like biometrics, cameras, motion detectors, and more. Using these quantitative methods has often raised important issues and questions. For example, as anthropologists, what are we to make of some of the discrepancies between our measurements and people’s phenomenological accounts? Say, when our quantitative observations about participants’ emotional reactions do not agree with what those participants report feeling, how do we reconcile these accounts? These are some of the questions that I am currently concerned with.
 
-How did you arrive at this topic?

I find ritual to be one of the most fascinating aspects of human conduct. It is a truly universal behavior, but we don’t think about it too much – we just do it. As an ethnographer, whenever I ask people why they perform their rituals, they typically respond along these lines: “that’s just what we do”; “we’ve always done it this way”; “this is who we are”. So, there is a sense of salience and sacredness about these practices; people agree that rituals are important to them, but more often than not they have no justification for why they are important. I find this quite puzzling, especially in the context of painful or stressful rituals, so the kinds of questions I am asking are concerned with what these costly activities offer to those who engage in them.

 

 
-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?
Anthropology studies some of the most meaningful aspects of human existence: the things we see as sacred or taboo, the things that unite and divide us, those that we see as worth fighting or dying for, the things that make us human. And yet, ironically, anthropologists often have a hard time reaching out to a wider public, beyond the world of academic conference rooms and obscure technical journals. In my own work, I try to keep this in mind, and to explore new ways of communicating ideas and findings, including electronic and visual media. I believe that as academics, especially those of us funded by taxpayers’ money, we have an obligation to engage with the public and make our findings available to everyone. Specifically with regards to my topic, I would like to contribute towards a realization that some of the cultural practices we might consider obsolete, superfluous, or even primitive, often play a very important role in who we are are individuals and communities, and that age-old traditions have been able to survive for so long because they are an inextricable part of our nature.

10 Projects, 1 Audacious Goal: Find Solutions to Help Cultivate Healthier Debate and Dialogue in America

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UConn’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life project announces $2 million in fellowship grants for projects that will delve into newsrooms, classrooms and the halls of Congress

Storrs, Conn. – A new $2 million fellowship grant program sponsored by the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and funded by the John Templeton Foundation will support 10 innovative projects that explore the broken landscape of American discourse and create enduring strategies to spur and sustain open-minded, reasonable and well-informed debate and dialogue.
The 10 interdisciplinary research projects focus on balancing two key features of democracy: intellectual humility and conviction of belief. Carefully curated out of an applicant pool of 110, not only for their individual merits, but also because they work in complementary fashion, each project will investigate how networks and institutions meant to connect us may be pushing people apart.
“Arrogance is easy in politics; humility is hard. These projects aim to rekindle the sense that we can learn from each other, and thus to help us restore a more meaningful public discourse,” says Michael P. Lynch, director of the Humanities Institute and Principal Investigator of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.
The research awards, ranging from $160,000 to $225,000, provide a substantial two-year fellowship to each grantee for an ambitious project that will put cutting-edge research to work on improving and revitalizing public discourse. In aggregate, the projects will not only examine how intellectual humility does or does not manifest in public discourse, but will also promote and assess humility at the individual and institutional levels.
Here are the thorny issues and pressing questions the grantees will tackle:
Defusing Extreme Views: What makes us argue so heatedly over things we know little about?
Phillip Fernbach of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team will look at how we can improve public discourse not by turning laypeople into experts, but rather by making people aware of the causes of extremism and ignorance.
Encouraging Democracy in Action: How can we make communication between elected officials and their constituents more constructive and meaningful?
Ryan Kennedy of the University of Houston and his team will work with 16 congressional offices to study how an online tool that encourages deliberation might help constituents and their representatives arrive at common ground solutions.
 
Tackling Caustic News Site Comments: Can online news comments sections be designed to promote intellectually humble discourse?
Graham Smith of the University of Westminster, UK, and his research team will look for technical solutions that make comments sections more conducive to intellectually humble discourse. The researchers will test the potential of the solutions by recruiting people who usually read online news and randomly assigning them to different types of comments forums.
Dismantling Echo Chambers: Which online platforms best foster public discourse, and how can we improve them?
Mark Alfano of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, and his research team will study how content flows in online communication networks and the interpersonal dynamics that influence online conversations about fraught issues.
Leaving ‘Expert Opinion’ to the Experts: Can people become more receptive to expert opinion?
David Dunning of the University of Michigan, Nathan Ballantyne of Fordham University, and team will look at how people interact with expert opinion and work to make people more receptive to it.
 
How Faith and Humility Can Coexist: Are religious convictions incompatible with intellectual humility?
Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso and her team will examine whether people of strong religious faith can be intellectually humble, and if not, will assess what biblical and non-biblical evidence might be effective in boosting their intellectual humility in public discourse.
Groupthink and Humility: How can groups and institutions become more humble and open to dialogue?
Benjamin R. Meagher of Franklin & Marshall College and Wade C. Rowatt of Baylor University will investigate how intellectual humility influences group performance and how groups can act with intellectual humility.
 
Humility on Campus: Can we teach students to engage in more productive dialogue?
John Sarrouf of Boston nonprofit Essential Partners and his team will develop new teaching strategies for promoting intellectual humility and constructively engaging differences in academia.
 
A Healthier Q&A: Can asking the right questions make political discussion more productive?
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University and his team will work to determine which questions, and which contexts, produce humility and civility in public discourse and which produce polarization and inflexibility, with the ultimate goal of finding ways to promote a culture of democratically engaged inquiry.
 
Eliminating the Shouting Match: How can we discourage arrogance in politics and public discourse?
Alessandra Tanesini of Cardiff University and her team will design and test practical interventions designed to combat the growth of pugilistic behaviors in public discussions, such as shouting, mocking, dismissing and rudely interrupting others.
The Humility and Conviction in Public Life project supports interdisciplinary research and outreach on the nature of productive dialogue about morality, science and religion. Detailed information on each grantee can be found at https://humilityandconviction.uconn.edu. For media inquiries, please contact Justine Morgan, morgan@teamsubjectmatter.com.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Daniel Silvermint

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What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?
I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona in 2012, with a dissertation that developed a theory of oppressive burdens, and asked whether victims owed it to themselves to resist.  Although my background was in political science and political philosophy, struggling with the agency and obligations of victims made a feminist philosopher out of me.  After Arizona, I was a GRIPP/RGCS postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University from 2012-2013.  I then joined the University of Connecticut in 2013 as an assistant professor, jointly appointed in Philosophy and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.
What is the project you’re currently working on?
The project is called Complicit Identities: The Ethics of Looking Out For Yourself.  While my earlier work focused on the obligation to resist oppression, this project investigates cases where victims stray into complicity simply because of who they are or what they aim to do in life.  None of these choices are inherently wrong, but they end up contributing to oppression because of the prior existence of stereotypes, unfair burdens, and other background pressures.  An example of a complicit identity is when a gay man or a person of color ‘passes’ as straight or white in order to escape oppressive treatment, but only escapes that treatment in virtue of participating in the very system that constraints them and others like them.  What should we say about such passing?  Is it wrong because it’s a form of deception or inauthenticity?  Does it reinforce stereotypes by removing counterexamples from the public’s view, or harm one’s fellow victims by opting one out of the fight against oppression?  These are the most common judgments you hear about passing, and I think they all miss the mark.On my view, passing and more traditional forms of resistance actually share an aim: they’re both attempts to improve one’s life or circumstances in the face of oppression.  But whereas resisting victims attempt to improve their well-being by undermining, changing, or escaping the oppressive system that constrains their well-being, passing victims keep those constraints in place, and make the most advantageous trade-off they can under the circumstances.  Passing might allow a person to advance her plans and projects, or to cultivate worthwhile connections, or to gain access to valuable goods, but at the expense of her security as she worries about discovery, or her sense of belonging as relationships with family and community fray, or her self-respect as she struggles with how she obtained those goods.  The trade-offs vary, but the strategy depends on making such a trade-off: giving up what you can live without to have the life you want.  Passing victims are thus complicit in their own oppression, benefiting from a system that’s still ultimately harmful to them.  But while that makes passing a limited strategy for improving one’s life, it doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.  These victims aren’t failing themselves.  They’re looking out for themselves in circumstances they shouldn’t even be in, and more often than not, they’re successful.  If we want to engage seriously with questions of victim agency, then we have to move beyond simple dichotomies of good resistance and bad complicity.  We need a new ethics of looking out for yourself.

How did you arrive at this topic?
Honestly, it was the realization I described in the last question.  Victim agency was more complicated than I was appreciating — maybe even too complicated for the straightforward principles and clean verdicts of academic philosophy.  I began my research talking about obligations to self, and why resistance was important for victims.  But the more I examined these cases, the more I understood that we don’t actually get very far by talking about resistance.  Of course it’s good.  The problem is that, for victims, complicity can also be good.  It can often unlock all the same benefits as resistance, and do so with diminished risk and fewer potential costs.  So we can’t just dismiss complicity as mere selfishness or an insensitivity to the demands of justice.  It’s a strategy for dealing with oppressive burdens, not a way to avoid dealing with them.

As you can imagine, I gradually stopped writing about resistance, and the focus of my research changed.  And while I was coming to this realization, ‘passing’ was the example I kept coming back to.  Partly because it presents a fascinating, messy, real-world dilemma for ethical systems.  Partly because it’s so timely, with many recent cases receiving national attention.  Partly because there are so many applications, like understanding so-called ‘reverse passing’ and the possibility of trans-race identities, reaching careful conclusions about how to navigate daily life with an ‘inauthentic’ identity, and making sense of invisible disabilities like mental illness.  And partly because, well, navigating the pros and cons of passing is personal for me.  (You should never 100% trust an academic whose research focus is passing.)

What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?
We badly need an ethics of looking out for yourself.  The trick is, the phrase ‘looking out for yourself’ has both negative and positive connotations.  It can be a term of reproach for individuals that shirk their obligations or opt out of a shared struggle against oppression.  But it can also be a term of praise for people that take care of themselves in circumstances that threaten their well-being, and for those who strive to live the life they want despite the burdens they face.  Complicit Identity cases are challenging because these individuals ‘look out for themselves’ in both senses of the phrase, upending simple verdicts about the importance of resistance and the impermissibility of complicity.  So while my project presents a framework for understanding victimhood and passing that moves beyond familiar, misguided debates about deception and authenticity, I hope it can also say something about a dilemma we all face: how to balance what we owe ourselves with what we owe others in times of injustice.