Fellows Talks

Fellow’s Talk: Xu Peng on Caribbean Chineseness

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2023–24 Fellow's Talk. Reading Caribbean Literature: A Literary Migration. Xu Peng, Ph.D. Candidate, Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. with a response by David Evans. September 20, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor.

Reading Caribbean Chineseness: A Literary Migration

Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

with a response by David Evans (History, UConn)

Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Since the first wave of indentured Chinese laborers arrived in the Caribbean in the mid- nineteenth century amid the abolition of slavery, Chinese migrants have appeared repeatedly in Caribbean histories and literatures. While historians of the Caribbean have unearthed the Chinese presence from government decrees, census records, local newspapers and magazines, nuanced articulations of Chineseness have also been rehearsed yet remained understudied in Caribbean literature and culture. Drawing on fictional and artistic representations of Sino-Caribbean experiences, this talk proposes a framework that Peng terms “literary migration” to study Caribbean Chineseness. Attentive to the fact that the Chinese not just physically crossed national borders in the past, they have also metaphorically “migrated” into contemporary Caribbean narratives of nation-building and people-making, Peng illuminates the literary functionality of Sino-Caribbean relationality. Using Cuban writer Lourdes Casal’s 1972 short story “Los Fundadores: Alfonso” as an example, this talk demonstrates how Chineseness is narrativized and repurposed in Caribbean literature to reconsider national histories, reconstruct national identities, and envision national futures.

Xu Peng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the articulation of Asianness, and Chineseness in particular, in Latin America and the Caribbean. He will work on his dissertation, “From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican Literatures and Cultures,” as a dissertation fellow at UCHI. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, Hispanic American Historical Review, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies.

David Evans is a doctoral candidate in the history department whose research focuses on the history of the human right to food and United States foreign relations. Prior to entering academia, he served eight years in the United States Marine Corps as an infantry, reconnaissance, and special operations leader and deployed to Southeast Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan. David went on to earn his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Since starting his studies at University of Connecticut he has presented his work at several conferences, most recently the 2022 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Conference. In 2020, David received the UConn Human Rights Institute Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Gerald R. Ford Scholar Dissertation Award from the Ford Presidential Library.

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Fellow’s Talk: Karen Lau and Rylee Thomas

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2022-23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows. Karen Lau, “Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning” and Rylee Thomas, “The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”. Wednesday April 19, 2023, 5:00pm, UCHI Conference room, Homer Babbidge Library. This event will also be livestreamed.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Karen Lau, “Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

and Rylee Thomas, “The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 5:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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“Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

Karen’s public humanities project examines the link between ethnic studies and social-emotional learning. She will share conclusions from a series of Asian American history workshops she led at EO Smith High School and their impact on students’ mental health and sense of identity.

Karen Lau, from Norwich, CT, is a Day of Pride Scholar majoring in political science and economics with a minor in Asian American studies. As an inaugural UCHI Undergraduate Research Fellow, her project’s aims are two-fold: 1) pilot a qualitative study that implements a novel Asian American history curriculum at a local high school and 2) investigate how the curriculum affects students’ mental health, social-emotional learning, and sense of identity. With funding from UCHI, the UNH Center for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, her fellowship will produce publicly engaged humanities scholarship, culminating in a student-curated exhibit and a journal publication. Karen’s research interests include ethnic studies, curriculum development, digital humanities, and education policy. She pursues these interests as an intern for Make Us Visible, a member of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium, and the Secretary of the Human Rights Symposium. Karen is also a 2022 Holster Scholar, a UConn@COP27 Fellow, a Campaign Fellow for Joe Courtney for Congress, and a member of the Special Program in Law. She aspires to serve the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as a public interest attorney. In her free time, Karen enjoys curating Spotify playlists, exploring trails, visiting farmers’ markets, and shopping for corduroy pants.

“The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

Throughout history, a disturbing trend in social perceptions of domestic abuse and violence against women is a tendency to blame the victim. While feminist movements have changed this culture for the better, contemporary society continually criticizes women for behaving in ways that bring tragedy upon themselves. To explore this dichotomy, Rylee is writing a contemporary young adult horror novel that plays upon the conventions of both the gothic novel and the modern true-crime drama. Her novel, titled The Ghostly Dynasty, will explore the double standards that society places on women in both literary and criminal justice.

Rylee Thomas is a junior at UConn double majoring in English and communication with a creative writing concentration. After graduation, Rylee plans to get her masters in English and pursue a career in publishing. She’s incredibly grateful to have won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest, the Collins Prize in Poetry, and the Aetna Prize for Creative Writing for Children. When not writing, she can be found figure skating, drinking matcha lattes, and rereading Austen novels. For her project, Rylee wants to explore the culture of victim-blaming double standards that contemporary society continues to place on women through tropes of nineteenth-century gothic novels. She hopes to explore this dichotomy by writing a contemporary young adult fantasy novel that plays upon the conventions of both the gothic novel and modern true-crime drama.

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Fellow’s Talk: Anna Mae Duane on Contested Meanings of Slavery

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2022–23 Fellow's Talk. “God can sometimes Make a Prison a Palace:” Unexpected Engagements in the Contested Meanings of Slavery from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Moment. Professor of English, UConn, Anna Mae Duane, with a response by Hassanaly Ladha. Wednesday April 12, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library. This event will also be livestreamed.

“God can sometimes Make a Prison a Palace:” Unexpected Engagements in the Contested Meanings of Slavery from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Moment

Anna Mae Duane (Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Hassanaly Ladha (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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How is that one word—slavery—can be deployed to completely opposite ends? Even as it evokes divisive racial and colonial histories, the term slavery has the capacity to accommodate an incredibly diverse, and often paradoxical, set of political arguments and legal practices. This talk, taken from Duane’s book in progress, Like A Slave: Slavery’s Appropriation from The Revolution to QAnon, explores how slavery has been deployed as a metaphor, and in the process, the ways Americans have continually reshaped the collective memory and historical meaning accorded to the most brutal—and central—institution in the history of the United States. Duane contends that slavery’s shifting meanings have emerged as an ongoing dialogue between white supremacist appropriations of slavery’s threat and Black authors’ insistent rewritings of slavery’s meanings. As white writers imagined everything from seduction, to drunkenness, to imprisonment as a form of “slavery,” they were also implicitly shifting the parameters of what constituted freedom. Thus, when nineteenth-century Black writers insisted on alternate ways of defining and remembering slavery, they are offering rhetorical, legal and imaginative redefinitions of not only the crime of enslavement, but also the possibilities of freedom. This talk will focus on how literary depictions of prison—the very status that animates slavery analogies for prison abolitionists today—were sometimes imagined by nineteenth-century African American authors as sites of respite and resistance from the alleged freedom offered by the white household.

Anna Mae Duane is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has written or edited six books, including Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence Race and the Making of the Child Victim; The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities; Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child Centered Slavery Studies. She co-edited Who Writes for Black Children: African American Children’s Literature before 1800 with Kate Capshaw. She is the co-host, along with Victoria Ford Smith and Kate Capshaw, of the Children’s Table Podcast. Her work has been supported by the NEH, the Fulbright Foundation, and by the Yale Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Her latest book, Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of How Two Fugitive Schoolboys Grew Up to Change a Nation, was supported by a UCHI Faculty Fellowship. During her fellowship year, Professor Duane will be working on a book project entitled, “Like a Slave: Slavery’s Appropriation from the American Revolution to QAnon.”

Hassanaly Ladha is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and the Graduate Advisor in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He taught at Harvard University before joining the faculty in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at UConn. His first book, The Architecture of Freedom: Hegel, Subjectivity, and the Postcolonial State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), which was supported by a 2015–2016 Humanities Institute Fellowship, offers a new reading of Hegel’s related theories of Africa and the dialectic, language and the aesthetic, and mastery and slavery, tracing the implications of these concepts for postcolonial studies and political theory.

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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.

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

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

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

Heather Cassano (Assistant Professor, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Cornelia Dayton (History, UConn)

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

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

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

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

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Sandy Grande on Indigenous Elders

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

Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fellow’s Talk: Cornelia Dayton on Lawyering while Black in the 18th Century

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2022–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts. Professor of History Cornelia Dayton, with a response by Yuhan Liang. February 15, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts

Cornelia Dayton (Professor of History, UConn)

with a response by Yuhan Liang (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The talk presents an overview of new research findings on the legal activities of John Peters of Boston (ca. 1745–1801). His multi-faceted entwinement with the law may have been the most extensive for any Black person in the Northeast in the 1700s. Peters was a savvy litigator who employed eminent lawyers and called himself a lawyer at one point. As a Black man who aspired to gentility and who married a celebrated Black woman of letters, the poet Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), Peters drew some Whites’ ire and condescension. My larger aim is to produce a biography of Peters framed for academic, classroom, and general audiences.

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

Yuhan Liang is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research is interdisciplinary and involves Chinese philosophy, virtue epistemology, and moral psychology. At UCHI, she works on the dissertation “Confucian exemplars and Moral Diversity.” This dissertation aims to reconcile moral diversity and consistency via exemplarism approaches. Unlike most Anglo-American philosophies that adopt a top-down approach to studying moral questions in the frame of normative ethics and metaethics, Confucian exemplarism provides a bottom-up pragmatic approach: through reverse engineer exemplars’ everyday practices or instructions, we reconstruct the theoretical commitments based on their moral excellency.

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Fellow’s Talk: Hind Ahmed Zaki on Feminism, Law, and Violence

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UCHI Fellow's Talks 2022–23. Gendered Sovereignty: Feminist Politics, , Law, and Violence in Egypt and Tunisia (2011-2017). Assistant Professor, Political Science & LCL Hind Ahmed Zaki. With a response by Britney Murphy. February 8, 2023, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Gendered Sovereignty: Feminist Politics, Law, and Violence in Egypt and Tunisia (2011–2017)

Hind Ahmed Zaki (Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, UConn)

with a response by Britney Murphy (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The few months following the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia in 2010–2011, more widely known as the first wave of the Arab spring, were an exhilarating time for a diverse set group of feminists. New women-led groups were forming at an astonishing rate, with new feminist initiatives and collectives springing up every day. These initiatives ranged from seeking to influence post-revolutionary constitutions, negotiating women’s safety in public and at home, fighting for increased political participation, and holding state agents accountable for committing acts of gender-based violence. Despite their diversity, these groups shared an engagement with the Law as the main tool for improving the status of women. All saw the uprisings as an opportunity to negotiate laws that had produced the gendered legal categories they had to contest everywhere.

This talk situates feminist activism in the context of the Arab spring within broader political struggles over the limits of state’s authority in the aftermath of uprisings. I theorize outcomes of feminist politics through a new framework that I term gendered sovereignty: the web of attachments, procedurals, and identities that are formed in relation to histories of state sponsored legal feminism that are, in turn, closely tied with longer histories of authoritarian rule. I draw on three years (2013–2017) of multi-cited ethnographic field work, 200 in-depth interviews, archival research, NGO reports, court cases, draft by-laws, transcripts of transitional justice proceedings, to illuminate the ways in which histories of state-sponsored feminist were implicated in the production of local notions and practices of state sovereignty over the long durée, and the ways in which contemporary feminist movements challenged gendered practices of state sovereignty following the uprisings. Applying this framework comparatively to the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, I show how in Tunisia, legal reforms related to combatting gender-based violence played a major role in reinstating state power and authority; while in Egypt sovereignty and prestige were restored through the suspension of juridical and legal state powers, and the use of state-sanctioned gendered violence. Ultimately, I argue that feminist identities created through affective, procedural, and legal attachments to histories of state-sponsored feminism, not only influenced the political outcome for women’s rights, but also reshaped state sovereignty through reproducing, reinforcing, and challenging the prerogative and carceral powers of the authoritarian states. As such, this research project places feminist projects at the heart of broader struggles for democratization, human dignity and rights. It also questions common liberal assumptions about the links between gender justice and the rule of law, especially in transitional political contexts.

Hind Ahmed Zaki an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. She joined UConn in 2019 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2018. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Ahmed Zaki was the Harold Grinspoon postdoctoral fellow at Brandies University (2018/2019), and Middle East Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her scholarly interests span feminist political theory and praxis, transnational feminist movements and politics, gender-based violence, and comparative politics of the state, with a special focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Ahmed Zaki’s research is published in several languages. She has been an elected member at large of the board of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) since 2018.

Britney Murphy is a doctoral candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include modern U.S. history, urban history, environmental justice, food access, and volunteerism. While at UCHI, Britney will complete her dissertation, “Outsiders Within: Volunteers in Service to America and the Boundaries of Citizenship, 1962–1971.”

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Stefan Kaufmann on the Language of Time and Possibility

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UCHI Fellow's talks 2022–23. "Speaking of time and possibility" Associate professor of Linguistics Stefan Kaufmann, with a response by Kareem Khalifa. February 1, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Speaking of Time and Possibility

Stefan Kaufmann (Associate Professor of Linguistics, UConn)

with a response by Kareem Khalifa (Philosophy, UCLA)

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

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All languages provide their speakers with ways to talk about uncertainty, unrealized possibilities, expectations for the future and evaluations of the past. Conditional sentences (if-then sentences in English) are prime examples:

  1. If Biden runs in 2024, Kim will vote for him.
  2. If Biden ran in 2024, Kim would vote for him.
  3. If Biden had run in 2024, Kim would have voted for him.

The interpretation of these sentences depends to a large extent on the temporal expressions (tense, aspect, adverbs) in their constituents. Interestingly, conditional constructions create special environments in which temporal expressions seem to take on meanings which they don’t have elsewhere. But what exactly are those special meanings, and how (if at all) are they related to their ordinary meanings? Such questions have attracted much attention in Linguistics and Philosophy. The patterns we find, not only in English but also across languages, offer fascinating case studies on the relationship between superficial diversity and underlying uniformity in the mapping between meaning and form. In this talk I will outline some of the issues and sketch my own ongoing work.

Stefan Kaufmann is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Prior to joining UConn in 2013, he received his PhD at Stanford in 2001, was a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University, and taught at Northwestern University. His research revolves around the meaning and use of language: how information is encoded in linguistic expressions, the range of variability of this encoding across languages, and what linguistic patterns can reveal about the way speakers view and think about themselves and their physical and social surroundings.

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

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Fellow’s Talk: Elva Orozco Mendoza on Mothers Reclaiming Our Children

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2022–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. All Prisoners are Somebody's Children: Mothers ROC—Resisisting People of Color's Captivity Through Direct Action. Assistant Professor Political Science & WGSS, Elva Orozco Mendoza, with a response by Julia Brush. January 25, 2023, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

All Prisoners Are Somebody’s Children: Mothers ROC—Resisting People of Color’s Captivity Through Direct Action

Elva Orozco Mendoza (Assistant Professor of Political Science and WGSS, UConn)

with a response by Julia Brush (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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Following the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles, California, several grassroots organizations emerged to protest the growing imprisonment of Black and Latino men under false or exaggerated charges. One such organization was Mothers Reclaiming our Children, Mothers ROC, formed by women whose children had been incarcerated as they sought to promote a gang truce to bring peace to their neighborhoods. This chapter draws on historical archives, films, web content, and other literary sources to discuss Mothers ROC’s grassroots mobilization against forced separation due to their children’s imprisonment. I argue that Mothers ROC’s activism helped to change the persistent association of Blackness and criminality produced at the highest levels of government by reclaiming motherhood as a political and ethical orientation. While often stigmatized and blamed for fomenting their children’s lawless behavior, Mothers ROC members worked to reclaim their children in several ways. First, by contesting their physical captivity and denouncing the institutions that deliberately fabricated the systematic imprisonment of Black and Latinx youth. Second, by invoking the mothers’ right to tell their children’s stories instead of allowing the state criminalization efforts to go unchallenged. Third, by working to change structural injustice and call public officials accountable for their actions. Lastly, by healing the harm inflicted onto their children and strengthening community ties. As a result, Mothers ROC’s initiatives contributed to longstanding struggles for Black people’s freedom in the United States.

Elva Orozco Mendoza is an assistant professor of political science and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut. She joined UConn in the fall of 2021 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February of 2015. Prior to joining UConn, she taught at Texas Christian University and Drexel University. Her research interests include extreme gender violence, democratic theory and practice, protest politics and political action in Latin America, comparative political theory, and coloniality/decoloniality thought. At UConn, she teaches courses in comparative political theory, decolonial feminisms, and Latin American and Latinx feminist theory.

Julia Brush is a doctoral candidate in English with a graduate certificate in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, queer theory, and transnational American studies, critical refugee studies, and Asian American Studies. While at UCHI, she will complete her dissertation, “State/Less Aesthetics: Queer Cartographies, Transnational Terrains, and Refugee Poetics.”

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Kareem Khalifa on Segregation Indices

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2022–23 Fellow's Talk: "How Value-Laden are Segregation Indices?" Professor of Philosophy, UCLA, Kareem Khalifa, with a response by Heather Cassano. December 14, 2022, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

How Value Laden are Segregation Indices

Kareem Khalifa (Professor of Philosophy, UCLA)

with a response by Heather Cassano (Digital Media & Design, UConn)

Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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Science’s objectivity is often thought to hinge on its impartiality. Roughly stated, impartiality is the requirement that only epistemic considerations, such as empirical evidence and cogent reasoning, should justify the acceptance of a scientific claim. Yet, the social sciences frequently employ thick concepts, i.e., concepts that both describe and evaluate. Examples include well-being, crime, poverty, and—central to our discussion—segregation. Given their inextricable link with values, it’s tempting to think that scientific claims that deploy thick concepts—so-called mixed claims—cannot be accepted impartially. Using the development of segregation indices and the operational definition of hypersegregation as illustrations, we argue that scientists’ use of thick concepts is compatible with impartial justification of mixed claims. This paper is co-authored with Jared Millson (Rhodes College) and Mark Risjord (Emory University).

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

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Digital Media & Design Department. Cassano’s first documentary film The Limits of My World (2018) followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system to adulthood. The film unpacks what it means to be a nonverbal disabled adult in today’s society. The film won several awards and is now being used as a tool for impact by organizations like Autism Canada and the National Council on Severe Autism.

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