Fellows Talks

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

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

Owning Le’Veon Bell and Other White Fantasies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019–2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2022. She has also published numerous book chapters and articles including: Accumulation of the Primitive: The Limits of Liberalism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street, The Journal of Settler Colonial Studies; Refusing the University in Toward What Justice?; “American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power,” Harvard Educational Review; and, “Red-ding the Word and the World” In, Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis. She is also a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence. As one of their projects, they published the Standing Rock Syllabus. In addition to her academic and organizing work, she has provided eldercare for her parents for over ten years and remains the primary caregiver for her 94-yr. old father.

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Fellow’s Talk: Yuhan Liang on Value Conflicts in the Confucian Tradition

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2022–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Value Conflicts, Moral Diversity & Zhi 志 in Confucian Tradition, Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, Yuhan Liang. with a response by Michael Lynch. March 22, 2023, 12:15pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Value Conflicts, Moral Diversity & Zhi 志 in Confucian Tradition

Yuhan Liang (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)

with a response by Michael Lynch (Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, October 19, 2022, 3:30pm, RESCHEDULED: Wednesday, March 22, 2022, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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Moral diversity entails different people can legitimately adopt different practices even in similar cases. However, moral consistency requires people to treat similar cases alike (the doctrine of superveniences). I start with the problem–to what extent diverse practices are legitimate? Diverse practices entail that personal factors, like one’s value preferences, play a role in reasoning, whereas moral consistency requires different people to recognize universal values and separate personal preferences. Thus, the paper argues that taking account of personal factors will not comprise moral consistency. In this talk, I examine three views: 1) Circumstantial realtivism. Scholars (like Alan Donagan) use different circumstances to justify different judgments and thus leave no room for personal considerations. 2) Rational relativism. Rational relativists, Joesph Raz and Ruth Chang, argue that only when rational choices cannot decide the judgment in a specific situation, agents can create will-based reasons by making a commitment. Thus, they level some room for personal considerations. 3) I argue for the third position. Particular personal factors should always play a role in practical reasoning. Through reverse engineering the notion zhi 志, we can learn that zhi calls for dual correspondence. Having zhi is not merely require an intellectual response. It also calls for the cultivation of affective dispositions in everyday practices. Thus, personal considerations should always play a role in practical reasoning. But different zhi will not comprise moral consistency because it will not twist the recognization of right judgments.

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: Julia Brush on Cyborgian Potentials

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The Algorithm You May Never Learn: Cyborgian Potentials and Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Ph.D. Candidate, English, Julia Brush, with a response by Evla Orozco Mendoza. October 12, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room. This even will also be livestreamed.

‘The Algorithm You May Never Learn:’ Cyborgian Potentials and Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Julia Brush (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Elva Orozco Mendoza (Political Science & WGSS, UConn)

Wednesday, October 12, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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This talk draws upon the work of queer cartographies, transnational terrains, and refugee poetics to argue that the the digital space, although borderless physically, represents paradoxical spaces of erasure and possibility for marginalized people. Considering contemporary LGBTQ+ Asian American poetry, this talk questions whether the cyborg figure can offer alternative claims for citizenship and subjectivity while centering the exploration of what it means to be human in a digital age in the United States. This inquiry focuses on the work of queer Korean-American poet Margaret Rhee, feminist new media artist, and scholar of ethnic literature, whose poetry employs the perspective of and in the form of cyborg subjects. Acknowledging that “the digital” serves as a globalized site and capitalist-driven enterprise that is both alienating and disenfranchising, this argument nevertheless counters these dystopian visions via the cyborgian potentials envisioned in Rhee’s collection, Love, Robot (The Operating System: 2017). Given that digital and machinated writing can be mimicked to suggest collaborations between AI technology and artists, cyborgian potentials suggest that subjectivities marked through the vectors of race, gender, and sexuality are capable of overwriting the dominant machines of hegemony. I argue that the cyborg figure offers a critical response to the conception of digital subjects as “neutral” or otherwise essentialized and becomes a liberatory figure within recent Asian American poetry.

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.”

Elva Orozco Mendoza is an assistant professor, jointly appointed in the Department of Political Science and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with affiliations in El Instituto and the Graduate Certificate in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Her research draws on decolonial feminist thought, critical contract theory, comparative political theory, and feminist analyses on maternal activism in Latin America to examine maternal collective action launched in response to extreme violence—forced disappearance, feminicide, targeted killings, and mass incarceration—in the Americas. Her monograph, tentatively titled The Maternal Contract, examines bottom-up agreements between the victims’ mothers to defend their children against state-led and state-enabled violence and criminalization. It argues that mothers’ collectives in the Americas constitute powerful political actors seeking to problematize and counter the normalization of disposable life. By theorizing the maternal contract, this current research contributes to ongoing initiatives to decolonize Western political theory by attending to subaltern actors’ actions and political ideas. Her research addresses major concerns of humanist scholarship, namely how marginalized political actors resist top-down attempts to expel them from the realm of citizenship and humanity.

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Fellow’s Talk: Britney Murphy on VISTA and the Boundaries of Citizenship

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2022-23 fellow's talk. Outsiders Within: Volunteers in Service to America and the Boundaries of Citizenship 1962–1971. PhD Candidate History, Britney Murphy, with a response by Hind Ahmed Zaki. September 28, 2022, 3:30 pm, in the humanities institute conference room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Outsiders Within: Volunteers in Service to America and the Boundaries of Citizenship 1962–1971

Britney Murphy (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Hind Ahmed Zaki (Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday, September 28, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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This talk asks the question, why, despite enjoying broad public and bipartisan support, national community service programs have not become institutionalized in the United States. Britney’s dissertation evaluates the relationship among civic engagement, citizenship, and socioeconomic identities through the lens of one national community service program, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). Volunteers’ activism—in the rural areas of Appalachia, urban slums, migrant labor camps, and among Native American communities—tested the nation’s commitment to addressing socioeconomic inequality and political exclusion. The early history of VISTA (1962–1971) suggests that race, class, and gender hierarchies contributed to conflicting ideas about the causes of national problems and the role of government volunteers in finding solutions.

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.”

Hind Ahmed Zaki is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Her scholarly interests span feminist political theory and practice, 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. Her doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Washington in 2018, was the winner of the 2019 American Political Science Association’s Women and Politics section award for best dissertation on gender and politics and the democracy and autocracy section’s best field work award in the same year. She is an elected member at large of the board of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) since 2018.

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Fellow’s Talk: Shihan Zheng on Opium Addiction in 19th-Century China

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2022–23 Fellow's Talk. Opium Addiction in Nineteenth-Century China. Ph.D. Candidate History, Shihan Zheng, with a response by Stefan Kaufmann. September 21, 2022, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Opium Addiction in Nineteenth-Century China

Shihan Zheng (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Stefan Kaufmann (Linguistics, UConn)

Wednesday, September 21, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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Compared to Euro-American experience with opium, the story of opium smoking in nineteenth-century China appears strikingly peculiar. Western observers at the time believed that opium smoking was a symbol of incompetence, backwardness, and immorality—all the ills of traditional Chinese civilization. Thus, the discussion of opium was always incorporated in a broader criticism of Chinese customs that were viewed as archaic, uncivilized, and barbaric. Historians have highlighted the political and economic influence of opium in late-imperial China, but a thorough study of the dynamic and complicated history of the ideas related to opium addiction has not yet been done. This study seeks to trace the origins and development of discourse on opium addiction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Shihan Zheng hopes to suggest that the creation of languages and ideas of opium addiction was part of the knowledge productions at the turn of the twentieth century, and the efforts to find the “cure” for the drug addiction had direct relevance to China’s experience with “modernity.”

Shihan Zheng is a History doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include conceptual history, medical history, drug and addiction studies, and history of science. At UCHI, he will work on his dissertation project, “The Opium Discourse in China, 1830–1910.” This study will bring out nuances of the story of opium in China that have been neglected in historical literature, highlight the role of opium discourse in the construction of Chinese modernity, and help us better understand contemporary China.

Stefan Kaufmann is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. 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. Kaufmann’s current project focuses on the the language of time and possibility, in relation to notions like uncertainty, causality, and hypothetical reasoning. Kaufmann has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics. He will be working on a book manuscript at UCHI.

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Fellow’s Talk: Fiona Vernal on Race and Identity in Hartford

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Hartford Bound: How African Became and African American and Caribbean City. Associates Professor of History and Africana Studies Fiona Vernal, with a response by Carol Gray. April 27, 2022, 4:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room.

Hartford Bound: How Hartford became an African American and Caribbean City

Fiona Vernal (Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, UConn)

with a response by Carol Gray

Wednesday, April 27, 2022, 4:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209

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This talk explores Fiona Vernal’s current book and digital humanities project, Housing Hartford: Mobility, Race, and Identity in Post-World War II Hartford, which examines the convergence of three great migrations of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and West Indians in the Greater Hartford region. The book project integrates oral history, archival research, and GIS methodologies to reframe the history of how Hartford became an African American and a Caribbean city. This narrative of community formation told through the lens of housing, migration, and mobility, offers counter narratives to hardened scripts of slum clearance, white suburban flight, redlining, urban renewal, and gentrification. By exploring the intersections of space, place, mobility, and identity, Hartford Bound offers new visual and spatial histories of race, ethnic belonging, and community succession.

Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. The project she will present today is part of a suite public humanities projects recently awarded the University of Connecticut’s Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship, a UConn Humanities Institute fellowship, and the Sustainable Global Cities Initiative (SCGI) Faculty Research Grant.

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Fellow’s Talk: Sherie Randolph on Camille Billops

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"I See it as a Feminist Statement": Camille Billops and the Art of Liberation. Associate Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology. Sherie Randolph. With a response by Laura Mauldin. April 20, 2022, 4:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room

“I See it as a Feminist Statement”: Camille Billops and the Art of Liberation

Sherie Randolph (Associate Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology)

with a response by Laura Mauldin

Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 4:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209

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Photo of Camille Billops sitting in a chair, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, under a sculpture of a woman with wings.
Photo of Camille Billops by Coreen Simpson, 1984.

Given the socioeconomic structures and cultural constraints that limited Black women’s options both within and outside of the Black community, Black mothers had little space to determine their own lives, protect their bodily autonomy, and pursue their individual passions. How do we understand “bad” Black mothers who rejected contemporary forms of mothering and placed a greater value on their own creative and political work during the long 1960s? Sherie Randolph’s talk looks specifically at the Black feminist artist Camille Billops (1933–2019) and explores how she understood her contribution to Black arts as more valuable than her role as a Black mother. She learned to view her own happiness as freedom from parenting. In short, Billops’s life choices are in line with current research that suggests that if a woman wants to be content, it is best to remain childless. This talk places Billops’s artwork alongside interviews, her personal papers, and other archival sources to examine how she defied the boundaries of heteronormative motherhood in the postwar United States and went on to become an award-winning artist, filmmaker and archivist. In doing so, Billops enlarged Black feminist understandings of the possibility of Black liberation.

Sherie M. Randolph is an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founder of the Black Feminist Think Tank. Formerly an associate professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Randolph’s book Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical, published by the University of North Carolina Press (October 2015), examines the connections between the Black Power, civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements. The former Associate Director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, she has received several grants and fellowships for her work, most recently being awarded fellowships from the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and Brown University’s Howard Foundation. Randolph is currently writing her second book “Bad” Black Mothers: A History of Transgression.

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Fellow’s Talk: Shardé Davis on #BlackintheIvory

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2021–22 UCHI fellow's talk. #BlackintheIvory: Amplifying the Voices of Blackademic Truthtellers about Anti-Black Racism. Assistant Professor, Communications, Shardé Davis, with a response by Sarah Willen. March 23, 2022, 4:00pm. Live. Online. Registration required.

#BlackintheIvory: Amplifying the Voices of Blackademic Truthtellers about Anti-Black Racism

Shardé M. Davis (Assistant Professor, Communication, UConn)

with a response by Sarah S. Willen (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, March 23, 2021, 4:00pm
Live. Online. Registration required.

A Black professor is walking down the hallway and mistaken for a custodial staff person. A Black student is told that she only received her medical scholarship because of her race. A Black research scientist is physically blocked from the university mail room, and the police are called, even though she has her university ID on her.

In June 2020, Dr. Shardé M. Davis created a Twitter hashtag #BlackintheIvory to document the racism experienced by Blackademics. Thousands used the hashtag on various social media platforms to share their stories, demonstrating that racism in the academy knew no disciplinary bounds. Indeed, Blackademics at all career points and across multiple decades have encountered systemic racism in the academy.

In this talk, Dr. Davis will discuss the concurrent struggles and triumphs of being Black in the Ivory and how Blackademics (faculty and graduate students) are standing in their right as “truth tellers” to talk back and resist the racist systems that have historically oppressed them. Dr. Davis will detail the story of the #BlackintheIvory Twitter hashtag as well as provide an overview of the book as well as its purpose and goals.

Dr. Shardé M. Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Faculty Affiliate of various research institutes at the University of Connecticut. Her research examines the way Black women leverage communication in the sistah circle to invoke collective identity, erect and fortify the boundaries around their homeplace, and backfill the necessary resources to return to white/male dominant spaces in American society. These ideas have been published in over 40 peer-refereed articles and invited book chapters, and are best represented in her theory, The Strong Black Woman Collective. Her research was formally recognized with the 2018 American Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Association of University Women and the 2019 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. In addition to her program of research, Dr. Davis created the viral Twitter Hashtag #BlackintheIvory, which extended a timely opportunity for Blackademic TRUTHtellers to share personal instances (and engage in necessary conversations) about anti-Black racism in academia. She is also the inaugural recipient of the 2021-2022 Faculty of Color Working Group Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to edit a new book for #BlackintheIvory that is set to publish in 2023 by the University of North Carolina Press.

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.

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Fellow’s Talk: Micki McElya on Pageantry and Power in the Black Freedom Movement

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2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Liberating Beauty?: Pageantry and Power in teh Black Freedom Movement. Professor of History Micki McElya. March 9, 2022, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

Liberating Beauty?: Pageantry and Power in the Black Freedom Movement

Micki McElya (Professor, History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209

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This talk examines the centrality of beauty pageants—of the celebratory display and competitive assessment of the appearance and deportment of Black girls and women—to the diverse range of Black politics, activist strategies, and visions for freedom and liberation in the United States from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Common to all was an investment in contesting white supremacist beauty standards, claiming the authority to define Black beauty, and harnessing its liberating possibilities. As both subjects and the objects of these investments, Black girls and women confronted an always fraught, often violent terrain of beauty’s opportunities, limitations, pleasures, and awful degradations. As an ideal, a set of practices, and as daily labor, beauty could be many things, but it was fundamentally always about race, gender, and power.

Micki McElya is professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Africana Studies Institute, American Studies Program, and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Her current book project, No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation will be published by Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster) and recently earned a 2022–2023 Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. McElya’s last book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum. She is also the author of Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, which won a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

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Fellow’s Talk: Prakash Kashwan on Rethinking Academic Hierarchies

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UCHI Fellow's Talk: Liberal vs Useful Arts? Rethinking Academic Hierarchies in a (Mal)Connected World. Associate Professor of Political Science, UConn, Prakash Kashwan with a response by Drew Johnson. March 2, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209.

“Liberal” vs “Useful” Arts? Rethinking Academic Hierarchies in a (Mal)Connected World

Prakash Kashwan (Associate Professor, Political Science, UConn)

with a response by Drew Johnson (Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, March 2, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209

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Contemporary calls for the fusion of ‘humanities’ and ‘sciences’ stand atop a long history of a hierarchical world view that separated the intellectual pursuits of liberal arts from the less prestigious fields of mechanical or ‘useful’ arts. While liberal arts were believed to be the domain of ‘free men,’ useful arts were meant for ‘slaves and serfs.’ Prakash Kashwan asks how living legacies of such a hierarchal view of academia might haunt the pursuit of ‘interdisciplinary’ research, which itself has been come under heavy criticism from radical social thinkers and philosophers. Kashwan asks what such a-priori characterization of any intellectual pursuit means for our collective ability to contribute to realizing justice outcomes in a mal-connected world. He engages the audience in centering human agency and ingenuity in diverse intellectual pursuits aimed at smashing the status quo toward a liberating and transformative world making.

Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of the widely reviewed book Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2017), editor of Climate Justice in India (Cambridge University Press, July 2022), co-editor of the journal Environmental Politics, and the co-founder of Climate Justice Network. Dr. Kashwan is also the vice-chair of the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA), and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Earth Systems Governance, Progress in Development Studies, Sage Open, and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. His public-facing writings have appeared in popular venues, such as The Conversation, the Guardian, Al-Jazeera and the Washington Post.

Drew Johnson is a Philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation project, “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse,” examines the nature and function of ethical thought and discourse. Drew has published on skepticism, deep disagreement and intellectual humility, and on self-knowledge (including co-authored work with Dorit Bar-On). During the Summer of 2019, he was the recipient of the Ruth Millikan Graduate Research Fellowship, awarded by the UConn Philosophy Department. Drew is currently a Dissertation Scholar at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

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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.