THE 2015-16 IHC SERIES: THE HUMANITIES AND THE BRAIN
Seat of consciousness and the unconscious; motor of knowledge, memory, judgment and problem-solving; locus of language and creativity; regulator of movement and emotion; processor of sense perception – the brain reigns sovereign over human cognition and sentience. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2015-16 public events series “The Humanities and the Brain” will explore the workings of the brain from perspectives deriving from the humanities and fine arts, as well as from newer interdisciplinary fields such as neuroesthetics and neuroethics. The program will bring humanists and neuroscientists into dialogue to consider diverse analyses and representations of this most elusive organ. 

The Humanities and the Brain | 2015-16

What is the meaning and significance of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the next form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored through the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2016-17 public events series Community Matters.

A primary focus of Community Matters will be the changing nature of a liberal education. Increasingly, higher education is emphasizing the cultivation of citizenship through field-based learning, collaborative community-based research and the co-creation of knowledge through community-university partnerships. Through such approaches, the goals of a liberal education are becoming refocused to align with the values of deliberative democracy, participatory citizenship and civic engagement through cooperative problem solving. Community Matters aims to stimulate reflection and transformation in this direction, inviting the campus and community to work together to develop humanities- and arts-based programs that cultivate essential skills of collaboration and that mutually engage the university and the local community through co-conceived learning opportunities and co-designed projects.

Community Matters | 2016-17

Crossings+Boundaries

What is the significance and power of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the latest form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored in the 2017 convening of the Western Humanities Alliance.

The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Western Humanities Alliance

A dialogue between Yunte Huang (English) and Constance Penley (Film and Media Studies) about Huang’s new book, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History. Refreshments will be served.

Daughter of the Dragon is a trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood’s most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos—with a touch of defiance—“Orientally yours.” Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong’s tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai, and capturing American television in its infancy. As Huang shows, Wong’s rendezvous with history features a remarkable parade of characters, including a smitten Walter Benjamin and (an equally smitten) Marlene Dietrich. Challenging the parodically racist perceptions of Wong as a “Dragon Lady,” “Madame Butterfly,” or “China Doll,” Huang’s biography becomes a truly resonant work of history that reflects the raging anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, and ageism toward women that defined both Hollywood and America in Wong’s all-too-brief fifty-six years on earth.

Yunte Huang is Distinguished Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and is the author of Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics (2022), Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002), and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997), and the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos. His book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (Norton, 2010), won the Edgar Award and was the finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as being named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2014-15, he has also published articles in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily Beast, and others. His most recent book is Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (2018).

https://ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Humanities Decanted

Yunte Huang: Daughter of the Dragon

In this talk, journalist Mark Arax discusses how California’s capture of land and water is the story of a people’s defiance of nature and the wonders and devastation it has wrought. It’s a tale of magic and madness in the arid West, of genocide and endless extraction, of redirected rivers and ever higher dams and deeper wells, of imported workers left behind in the sun and the fatigued earth made to give more even as it keeps sinking.

Mark Arax has been called a “21st-Century John Steinbeck” for his books that pry open the soul of California. A writer of essays, history, biography, and journalism, he is a two-time winner of the California Book Award and a recipient of Stanford University’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His most recent work, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, a national bestseller, has been hailed by critics as one of the most important books ever written about the West.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Imagining California

Mark Arax | The Dreamt Land: How the Invention of California Became Miracle and Ruin

A dialogue between Liz Carlisle (Environmental Studies) and Peter Alagona (Environmental Studies) about Carlisle’s new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming.

A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that has meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it has meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia. In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people.

Liz Carlisle is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her work focuses on fostering a more just and sustainable food system. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University, and she formerly served as Legislative Correspondent for Agriculture and Natural Resources in the Office of U.S. Senator Jon Tester. Recognized for her academic publishing with the Elsevier Atlas Award, which honors research with social impact, Liz has also written numerous pieces for general audience readers, in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is the author of two books about transition to sustainable farming: Lentil Underground (winner of the 2016 Montana Book Award) and Grain by Grain, coauthored with farmer Bob Quinn.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Liz Carlisle: Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming

A discussion on reparations in California with panelists Daina Ramey Berry (UCSB), Tiffany Caesar (San Francisco State University), and Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley), moderated by Giuliana Perrone (UCSB). Panelists consider the history of reparations in the United States, explain why they are being considered in California, and assess the current status of plans for reparations in San Francisco as well as the state as a whole.

Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly articles. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.

Tiffany Caesar is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on the preservation of transnational black women leaders and engagement with public history. She has participated in cultural heritage preservation initiatives in the United States and South Africa focusing on gender issues, cross-cultural youth dialogue, and social justice issues, and she is a cultural heritage ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, South Africa. Among her recent publications is a co-authored piece entitled “Mothering Dead Bodies: Black Maternal Necropolitics” in the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Caesar is the current commemoration chair of the SFSU 1968 Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front Student Strike and journal chair of the 50th Anniversary of the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. With the Iberia African American Historical Society, she led the recent initiatives to create a historic marker for Queen Mother Moore – a founder of the modern-day reparations movement – in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dr. Caesar has also organized several public dialogues on reparations in the Bay Area.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research is concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and United States. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Reparations Taskforce.

Giuliana Perrone is Associate Professor of History at UCSB and the author of Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law.

https://ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2023-24-public-events-series-imagining-california/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Reparations in California

A dialogue between Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Chattopadhyay’s new book, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire. Chattopadhyay recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. Her book takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes of the British empire in India and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing, it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale.

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She is a Founding Editor of PLATFORM and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). Her other works include Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012) and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Swati Chattopadhyay: Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire

Talk: High and Dry: On Deserts and ‘Crisis’
Dick Hebdige (Film & Media Studies & Studio Art, UCSB)
Thursday, December 4, 2014 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The body in the swimming pool as metonym for trouble in paradise is a recurrent motif bordering on cliché in Hollywood/ West Coast sunshine noir. As California contends with its severest drought in the state’s recorded rainfall history and intimations of apocalypse proliferate, the trope becomes especially ominous and loaded. This talk poses questions about human agency and environmental blowback against the backdrop of the desert as a staging ground for rehearsals for the end of the world (or ‘life as we know it’) as various as the Trinity A-bomb test at Almagordo, NM in 1945, a performance by Jean Tinguely and Niki Saint Phalle in Nevada in 1962, the Burning Man festival at Blackrock, and the Virgin Galactic citizen space program currently under way in the Mojave. In the process we shall consider how the American desert figures as conflicted space: as dumping ground and crucible, as military compound, leisure site and sanctuary, as a sustainable energy (wind and solar power) platform, and as the index of an unhabitable future. Against the prospect of imminent global immolation we shall return intermittently to track the passage of the corpse floating face down in the pool from a backyard oasis on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles to a pumped out well south of Porterville in California’s Central Valley.

A cultural critic and theorist, Hebdige has published widely on youth subculture, contemporary music, art and design, and consumer and media culture. His books include: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979); Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Methuen, 1987); and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Routledge, Methuen, 1988). His current interests include the integration of autobiography and mixed media in critical writing and pedagogy.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.

Dick Hebdige: High and Dry: On Deserts and ‘Crisis’

TALK: Life as a Terrorist: The FBI and Me
William T. Vollmann (National Book Award recipient)
Wednesday, November 6, 2013 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Journalist and novelist William T. Vollmann will discuss his experiences with government surveillance.  As detailed in a September 2013 article published in Harper’s Magazine, Vollmann obtained his own FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. In reading the file he learned that he had been a suspect in the Unabomber case and also a suspect in the Amerithrax case, in which terrorists mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people.  Vollmann is the recipient of the National Book Award for his novel Europe Central (2005).  He is the author of twenty books, including both fiction and nonfiction.  His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Value of Care and the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS).

William T. Vollmann: Life as a Terrorist: The FBI and Me

HULL LECTURE ON WOMEN AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: Caring Democracy: The Paradigm Changes
Joan Tronto (Political Science, University of Minnesota)
Thursday, January 9, 2014 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The feminist ethic of care grew out of a challenge to the traditional public/private split with its exclusion of women from the public sphere.  In the past generation, though, neoliberal economic and political policies have reduced the prospects for collective life in a “public” sphere.  This talk will discuss how care, beginning from different ontological, epistemological, ethical and political premises, can serve as an overarching critique of neoliberalism. Joan Tronto is the author of Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice and Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. She is the co-editor, with Cathy Cohen and Kathy Jones, of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader.

Sponsored by the Hull Lecture on Women and Social Justice, the IHC’s  Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment, and the IHC’s Value of Care series.

Joan Tronto: Caring Democracy: The Paradigm Changes (Hull Lecture on Women and Social Justice)

Juan Cobo Betancourt | The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada

TALK: Combat Trauma and Moral Injury
Jonathan Shay (author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming)
Tuesday, February 12, 2013 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Injury of mind and spirit from war is often broader and more destructive than Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as officially defined. The strict definition can be understood as the persistence, after battle, of the valid adaptations in brain and mind that kept you alive when other humans were trying to kill you. In civilian life, these adaptations are not needed and become impairments. In the ‘90s, Shay coined the term “moral injury” for a painfully common source of the “something more,” not captured by PTSD, but supremely captured by Homer in his portrait of Achilles in the Iliad. Compared to pure PTSD, moral injury destroys the capacity for trust, increases suicidality, domestic violence, and criminality, and wrecks the capacity for a flourishing human life. Shay will explain moral injury, describe how the term is now used for two related but different damages of war, and give his view on the prevention of psychological and moral injury in military service. Shay, a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, has spent over twenty years working with veterans and military leaders. He is a passionate advocate of improved mental health treatment for soldiers and of more effective efforts to prevent PTSD and moral injury in military service.

Jonathan Shay: Combat Trauma and Moral Injury

SYMPOSIUM: The Legacy of Abu Ghraib
Lisa Hajjar (Sociology, UCSB)
Joshua Phillips (author of None of Us Were Like This Before)
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Nearly a decade after the exposure of prisoner abuse perpetrated by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the IHC will host a symposium to consider the long-term impact of the violations upon human rights policy and upon the United States’ war on terror. Featured speakers will be Professor Lisa Hajjar, author of Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights, and award-winning print and broadcast journalist Joshua Phillips, author of None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture.


Lisa Hajjar and Joshua Phillips: The Legacy Of Abu Ghraib

TALK: Maps as a Public Good: Crowdsourcing in Fire Emergencies
Michael F. Goodchild (Geography, UCSB)
Thursday, November 10, 2011 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Developments in web technology have made it easy for the average citizen to provide information about events on the Earth’s surface. This information is especially valuable in time-critical situations, such as wildfires. After examples of the power of crowd-sourced geographic information, the presentation focuses on the role of the community in gathering and maintaining current information during fire emergencies in Santa Barbara. Volunteers have played key roles both in creating information, and in synthesizing it in the form of online maps and situation reports. The key issue of data quality will be discussed.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Public Goods series.

Michael Goodchild: Maps as a Public Good: Crowdsourcing in Fire Emergencies

TALK: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Friday, November 18, 2011 / 2:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of “slow violence” to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.
Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Rob Nixon: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

PANEL: The Future of Publishing in the Humanities
Wednesday, April 21, 2010 / 3:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What does the future of publishing in the humanities look like? This panel will discuss the current challenges that academic publishing in the humanities face and new solutions in response to them. E- scholarship, open access journals and new models for publishing monographs will be the focus of the discussion.  Participants include Lynne Withey (Director, UC Press); Laura Cerruti (Director of Digital  Content Development, UC Press); and Brad Eden (Associate University  Librarian for Technical Services & Scholarly Communication, UCSB).

Sponsored by the IHC’s Future of the University Series.

Laura Cerruti(PANEL): The Future of Publishing in the Humanities

Lynne Withey(PANEL): The Future of Publishing in the Humanities

This talk offers an on-the-ground perspective from a record-breaking fire season on a California hotshot crew, tracing the sociological, historical, and economic forces that fuel today’s megafires. For wildland firefighters, navigating the escalating impacts of climate change is a matter of life and death. These fires are not natural disasters, but the result of political choices. Understanding where they come from—and how firefighters survive on their edges—is essential to imagining a more just and equitable climate future in California. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Jordan Thomas is the author of When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, which was recently nominated for a National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Drift, among others. He is a cultural anthropology doctoral candidate at UCSB and former wildland firefighter.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/on-fire-inaugural-talk-when-it-all-burns-the-creation-of-californias-wildfire-crisis/

Sponsored by the IHC’s On Fire series

Jordan Thomas | When It All Burns: The Creation of California’s Wildfire Crisis

Join us for a dialogue between Elana Resnick (Anthropology) and Charles Hale (Dean of Social Sciences) about Resnick’s new book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism’s excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the country’s waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working alongside Romani women street sweepers and years embedded in waste organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups, Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste management and European geopolitics.

Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. Her research examines waste, racialization, labor, nuclear energy, and friendship through multi-modal methods. She has published in journals including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Public Culture. She is the recipient of the 2025 Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award from the Council for European Studies.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/humanities-decanted-elana-resnick/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Elana Resnick | Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ecstasy: Linking the Humanities and the Brain
Ann Taves (Religious Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 15, 2015 / 4:00 PM 
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Ecstasy, an experience that is widely discussed in the humanities and sought after in the general culture, illuminates many of the difficulties involved in linking research in the humanities with research in the social, psychological and neurosciences.  In order to link these approaches, which employ different methods to study human experience at different levels, we need to identify features that are often associated with, but do not uniquely specify, ecstasy at the cultural level (studied by humanists) and specify these features in precise enough terms that they can be studied sociologically, psychologically, and neurologically.  The lecture will draw on humanistic approaches to examine the range of experiences that people have characterized as ecstatic and the meanings that people have found in and drawn from them and on the psychological and brain sciences to help understand the underlying mechanisms involved.

Ann Taves is a former President of the American Academy of Religion. She holds the chair of Catholic Studies at the university. Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered, stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.

Empirically, she pursues research primarily within the contexts of American religious history, the history of Christianity in the modern era, and the history of the scientific study of religion, psychology, and related phenomena (e.g., psychical phenomena, magic, superstition).  Theoretically, her work builds on classical theorists, such as Durkheim and Weber, as well as evolutionary and developmental approaches to the study of human behavior.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Ann Taves: Ecstasy: Linking the Humanities and the Brain

TALK: Conditions of the Brain: Meaning, Metaphor, and Mechanism in Illness and Healing
Rebecca Seligman (Anthropology, Northwestern University)
Thursday, October 22, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Increasing evidence suggests the importance of meaning in conditioning bodily experiences and outcomes. This talk will explore the relationship between meaning and the body, with particular focus on the neurobiological and cultural mechanisms that mediate this relationship. Seligman explores the role of meaning and metaphor in illness and healing specifically, using the case of religious healing to illustrate how states of health and illness may be conditioned by interacting qualities and processes of mind, body, and brain.

Rebecca Seligman is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy research at Northwestern University. Her work explores the intersections of mental and physical health in social and cultural context, with an emphasis on the mechanisms through which cultural, social, and political-economic forces become embodied. Seligman also incorporates and critically evaluates relevant neurobiological research in these areas as a means to better understand how cultural beliefs and practices operate within bodies. Her book, Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion, investigates the connections among mental health, embodied experience, and religious participation in northeastern Brazil

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Rebecca Seligman: Conditions of the Brain: Meaning, Metaphor, and Mechanism in Illness and Healing

TALK: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain
Kenneth S. Kosik (The Neuroscience Research Institute, UCSB)
Thursday, November 12, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Human interactions are finely calibrated and many of these interactions are prosocial, that is a social behavior that benefits other individuals or a larger group. The repertoire of prosocial behaviors is vast: How much eye contact we make, how much affection we show, how much concern we feel for the plights of others, what we reveal to others and what we don’t.  In a sense, the motivation for language itself is a prosocial activity. Among humans the degree to which we utilize these social tools is highly variable. At the extremes of the social behavior spectrum are clusters of neurological conditions caused by highly specific mutations. At one end of the spectrum are the autistics and savants; at the other end is a condition called Williams syndrome in which affected individuals are hyper-social and despite cognitive impairment have remarkably preserved language ability. Some neurodegenerative disorders such as fronto-temporal dementia selectively affect prosocial behavior. Knowledge of a genetic mutation in some of these cases tells us the root cause. Because genes have changed very little among primates, this genetic hook allows us to track genes related to social behavior through evolution and perhaps gather insights regarding the emergence of our particularly prosocial lifestyle relative to other primates.

Kenneth S. Kosik completed a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Case Western Reserve University in 1972 and an M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1976. He served as a resident in neurology at Tufts New England Medical Center and was Chief Resident there in 1980. Beginning in 1980 he held a series of academic appointments at the Harvard Medical School and achieved the rank of full professor there in 1996. He also held appointments at McLean Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2004, Kosik became the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research and Co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He founded and serves as Medical Director of the non-profit center, Cottage Center for Brain Fitness (CCBF).

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Kenneth Kosik: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain

TALK: The Neuroscience of Aesthetics and Art
Anjan Chatterjee (Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania)
Thursday, November 19, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What can neuroscience possibly tell us about aesthetics and art? In this talk, Anjan Chatterjee will offer a framework from which a neuroscientist might deconstruct aesthetic experiences. Chatterjee will discuss findings from neurology and cognitive neuroscience that reveal neural structures and networks engaged when we respond to beauty and react to art. Finally, informed by our understanding of the neural underpinnings of art, he will speculate about its evolution. Previous debates about whether art-making and appreciation represent an instinct or an epiphenomenon of other evolved capacities are probably not well-framed. His talk offers a third way to think about why we are now – and perhaps have always been – surrounded by these mysterious objects that we call art.

Anjan Chatterjee is the Frank A. and Gladys H. Elliott Professor and Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital. He is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA in Philosophy from Haverford College and his MD from the University of Pennsylvania; he completed his neurology residency at the University of Chicago. His clinical practice focuses on patients with cognitive disorders. His research addresses questions about spatial cognition and language, attention, neuroethics, and neuroaesthetics. He is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art and co-editor of Neuroethics in Practice: Mind, Medicine, and Society, and The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology.

He was awarded the 2002 Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology. He is a founding member of the Board of Governors of the Neuroethics Society, the President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the President of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Society. He serves on the Boards of Haverford College, the Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and Universal Promise and is on the Advisory Board of Cognitive Dynamics.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain

Anjan Chatterjee: The Neuroscience of Aesthetics and Art

TALK: Listening and the Semiosphere: How Our Individual Brains Build Shared Worlds
Seth Horowitz  (The Listening Program)
Thursday, January 14, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

We build the world from our senses. We see color and form, hear sound and vibration, feel temperature and texture, each sense taking a specific form of energy to create pieces of an ever streaming perceptual puzzle.   Our perceptions create our reality, our own personal psychophysical map of the world. But the map is not the territory.

We use complex neural behaviors like attention to filter and focus this map, turning seeing into looking and hearing into listening. We constantly try to validate our version of reality by comparing it to our memories and others’ perceptions, seeking a consensus. But sensory errors, interpersonal differences in perception, the endemic fuzziness of biological senses, psychological processes and interpersonal communication create gaps in reality, letting us see faces in rocks, hear a phantom cell phone ringing in the noise of a shower, “remember” an childhood event that probably never happened. And while we may think of our innate perceptual limitations as problems, these gaps between what we perceive and what exists in the world outside our head give rise to everything from illusion to art, from sound art to music, transforming the physics of the external world into the meaningful stories that drive the human mind.

Seth Horowitz is a neuroscientist whose work in comparative and human hearing, balance and sleep research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and NASA.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Seth Horowitz: Listening and the Semiosphere: How Our Individual Brains Build Shared Worlds

TALK: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Scientific Study of Meditation and the Cognitive Science of Religion
John D. Dunne (Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Thursday, February 18, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Over the last two decades, some of the most influential scientific studies of meditation have examined practices derived from Buddhism, and the success of these studies — as expressed in impact factors, citation rates, and grant funding — likely rests in part on their capacity to articulate “meditation” in a fashion that remains strictly naturalistic. During the same period, however, the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has routinely deployed the category of the “supernatural” as essential to anything that we can properly call “religion.” From the CSR perspective, one might conclude that the naturalistic rhetoric found in scientific studies simply reflects the ongoing modernist strategy of formulating a “scientific Buddhism” that is not a “religion.” While illuminating, this interpretation nevertheless leaves in place the highly problematic notion of the “supernatural” itself, especially as the marker of “religion.”  

This talk explores the aligned oppositions of natural/supernatural and science/religion within both the science of meditation and the Cognitive Science of Religion. Drawing on the critique offered long ago by Emile Durkheim, it shows how the rhetoric of both contexts remains largely blind to the modernist assumptions inherent in the concept of the “supernatural.”

Sponsored by the IHC’s Idee Levitan Endowment and the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

John Dunne: The Natural & Supernatural in Study of Meditation & Cognitive Science of Religion

CONFERENCE: The Humanities, the Neurosciences and the Brain
Thursday-Friday, May 12-13, 2016
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Panel 2: Sociality, Intersubjectivity, Empathy
Chair: Sara Ballance, Music, UCSB
Corinne Bancroft, English, UCSB, “The Face of Friendship in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction”
Ksenia Fedorova, Cultural Studies, UC Davis, “Identity Transactions and Interpersonal Dynamics in Art and Science”
Cheryl Jaworski, English, UCSB, “The Embodied Mind and ‘the Demon of Domesticity’ in Dickens’s Dombey and Son”

This conference is free and open to the public. 

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the multiple accords, and discords, that characterize humanistic and neuroscientific approaches to the study of the brain.  Gabrielle Starr, author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience, will give the keynote address. Participants will explore creative framings of neuroscientific inquiry through humanistic perspectives, as well as artistic explorations of inner states and mental landscapes.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

CONFERENCE Part 2: Sociality, Intersubjectivity, Empathy

INAUGURAL LECTURE: George Lipsitz & Barbara Tomlinson: Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Why Civic Engagement Matters Now
George Lipsitz (Black Studies, UCSB)
Barbara Tomlinson (Feminist Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 13, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What is a university and why does the work we do here matter? What is the relationship between what goes on in our classrooms, studios and laboratories and what transpires in the wider world around us? The arts, humanities and social sciences promise to cultivate the capacity to imagine and create a better world, to envision and enact a common creative existence. Yet in practice, higher education is structured in dominance and the skills it cultivates are used to hurt as well as to help, to dominate and subordinate as well as to liberate. At this moment in history, when the economy, the environment and the educational system are all perpetually in crisis, when wars without end rage around the world, and millions of people facing displacement, dispossession, and deportation find themselves consigned to unlivable destinies, it has never been more important, and never more difficult, to discern what the proper role of the university should be. We argue for an ethic of co-creation and accompaniment, for recognizing and recuperating the lost potential of civically- engaged scholarship and fusing it with the energy, imagination and artistry emanating from aggrieved communities. We contend that there is worthy work to be done, both at the scene of academic argument and at the scene of social justice struggles where imaginative projects of art-based community making are bringing forth new polities and new politics, new practices and new pedagogies.

George Lipsitz studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. His books include Midnight at The BarrelHouse, Footsteps in The Dark, The Posessive Investment in Whiteness, and Time Passages. Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He received his Ph.D in history at the University of Wisconsin.

Barbara Tomlinson’s work on rhetoric and affect in feminist and antifeminist argument in sociolegal studies, feminist musicology, and feminist science studies has appeared in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Cultural Critique, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, Journal of American Studies, and Literatura e Estudos Culturais/ Literature and Cultural Studies. Other work, particularly on metaphor and composing processes, has appeared in Cultural Sociology, Written Communication, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, the Journal of College Reading and Learning and edited collections. She received her Ph.D from University of California Riverside.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Community Matters

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Why Civic Engagement Matters Now

TALK: Driving Richmond: From Pop-up Public Art Exhibition to University Class—and Transit Museum

Laura Browder (English, University of Richmond)
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In 2013, Laura Browder was commissioned by the city of Richmond to produce a piece for the RVA Street Art Festival, a four-day festival housed in the disused bus barns that were once the home of the Greater Richmond Transit Company. The resulting oral history/photography exhibition, Driving Richmond: Stories and Portraits of GRTC Bus Drivers, told a complex and dialogic story of Jim Crow, civil rights and the racial geography of Richmond through the eyes of the bus drivers.

Less than two years later, Browder was invited by the GRTC to memorialize the history of public transit in Richmond. In conjunction with GRTC bus driver Bruce Korusek and curator Alexandra Byrum, Browder and her University of Richmond students held history harvests at GRTC headquarters which attracted dozens of drivers and mechanics; conducted archival research at the Valentine Museum, and incorporated the portraits and text panels of Driving Richmond into RIDE: Public Transit in Richmond Since 1888, a permanent exhibition housed at the GRTC headquarters. This project provided a template for a series of projects Browder has completed since then, including museum exhibitions and documentary dramas, but also the pop-up archive project that she and her students are creating next spring in conjunction with faculty and students from Virginia Commonwealth University and Syracuse University, as well as a range of community partners.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Laura Browder: Driving Richmond: Pop-up Public Art Exhibition to University Class—& Transit Museum

PANEL: The Engaged Classroom: Learning at the Intersection of Campus and Community

UCSB students:
Zenzile Riddick
Katie Walker
Jonathan Gomez
Jasmine Kelekay

Moderators: Rick Benjamin (Associate Director for Community Engagement, IHC)
Margaret Klawunn (Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, UCSB)
Thursday, November 10, 2016  / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

How best might our academic experiences at UCSB be both guided and deepened by community engagement and practice? As the title suggests, this panel will be informed by an inquiry into opportunities students at UCSB have for engaging in building community in relationship with others. This includes, of course, outreach, but potentially also fostering communities on campus.

Zenzile Riddick is a second-year student majoring in Sociology and Black Studies, and is the Program Director of the Black Student Union. Katie Walker is a fourth-year student majoring in Anthropology and Theater with a community emphasis, and is the Artistic Director of City of Peace, a theater program for 13 – 19 year olds. Jonathan Gomez is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology with emphasis in Black Studies, and is a Co-facilitator of the Transformative Pedagogy Project. Jasmine Kelekay is a Doctoral Student in Sociology with an interest in race and racism, punishment and social control, critical criminology, policing, global African diaspora, Black Europe, among other things.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

PANEL: The Engaged Classroom: Learning at the Intersection of Campus and Community

TALK: Public Universities and the Future of Democracy
Harry Boyte (Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Augsburg College)
Thursday, November 17, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In the midst of enormous external pressures to narrow or eliminate the public purposes of higher education, how can educators become agents of constructive, democratizing change, not objects, spectators, and observers of change? How can students, including first generation college students and students from immigrant, ethnic, and other backgrounds who feel like strangers in institutions where pedagogies and assessments are structured around individualist, hyper-competitive achievement norms, move from survival and protest to leadership in making change? In this talk, Harry Boyte will argue that higher education is a crucial site for democratic change making. To develop its potential requires incorporating skills and lessons of civic agency and “a different kind of politics” from broad-based, cross-partisan community organizations and related movements like the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa into both curricular and co-curricular life. We also need a future oriented time horizon, adapting such skills and lessons to prepare students for careers as citizen professionals, leaders in the democratic transformation of institutions and professions, not cogs in impersonal bureaucracies and corporations driven only by narrow bottom lines. Boyte will sketch new intellectual and practical resources for this work in the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies. Civic Studies conceives of citizens as co-creators of a democratic way of life and it advances an epistemology of civic agency, a lived way of seeing and knowing in the world which blends “head,” “heart,” and “hand,” empirical, cultural and normative disciplines with capacities for effective action. Civic Studies is becoming a prominent presence in Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, Augsburg College in Minneapolis, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. It holds annual Civic Studies Institutes in Boston and the Ukraine, and constitutes a growing network of practitioners and public intellectuals associated with The Good Society: A Journal of Civic Studies.

Harry Boyte is an architect of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship’s public work approach to civic engagement and democracy, and the creator of Public Achievement. Boyte has worked with a variety of foundations, and non-profit, educational, and citizen organizations in the United States and abroad concerned with community development, citizenship education, and civic renewal. Boyte served as a senior advisor to the National Commission on Civic Renewal and presented research findings at a Camp David seminar on the future of democracy. He is the author of nine books on citizenship, democracy, and community organizing, and his writings have appeared in more than 100 publications including the New York Times, Perspectives on Politics, Kettering Review, and the Wall Street Journal. In the 1960s, he worked for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a field secretary with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the Civil Rights Movement. Boyte teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on organizing theory and practice at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and is in demand as a keynote speaker with faculty, students, and professionals.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series, the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Harry Boyte: Public Universities and the Future of Democracy

How does Shakespeare make different kinds of meaning in various local communities? And how can amateur theatre be a form of community engagement for drama and Shakespeare scholars? This talk will consider how community productions of Shakespeare produce indigenous forms of knowledge that should be of interest to academics and amateur theatre-makers alike. It further calls for academics who study Shakespeare to engage with their own community by not only attending local productions of Shakespeare, but also by making theatre alongside amateur actors and directors who are engaging in practice-based, collaborative research that shares knowledge and expertise and de-centers Shakespearean authority. Examples in the talk will be drawn from Brokaw’s own work acting, directing, and dramaturging with the amateur company Merced Shakespearefest in California’s Central Valley.

Katherine Steele Brokaw received her PhD in English from the University of Michigan in 2011. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval Early English Drama (Cornell University Press, 2016). She has also published articles and reviews in Shakespeare Bulletin, Comparative Drama, and Pedagogy, and has an essay in the forthcoming collection Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (Indiana University Press, 2017). She is currently working on articles about dice games in Tudor drama, and about contemporary performances of amateur drama.

Sponsored by the IHC series Community Matters.

Katherine Brokaw: Making Shakespeare: Theatre as Community Engagement

TALK: The Discarded and The Dignified—The Politics of the Fear that “Only One Can Live”

Jessica Benjamin (Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU)
Thursday, February 23, 2017 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In this talk Benjamin brings together her psychoanalytic theory of the Third together with her experience with dialogue in the Middle East and with colleagues involved in post-war reconciliation in Rwanda, South Africa and Chile. She suggests ways in which we can think about deep psychological structures in both collectives and individuals that lead to fear-based hatred of the “Other.” Why is it so hard for some of us to meet the urgent call of victims? Why do some political movements, as we see in the present, engage in denial or even destructive attacks on those who are vulnerable? The historical efforts to redress this find that we may be in a struggle over whose suffering is considered worthy of attention. In such cases we find the imaginary position to be “Only one can live.” This fantasy may underlie the fact that in some instances where people are subjected to great suffering and helplessness this makes them and their injuries appear threatening to those who are (more) safe. The ultimate issue becomes the denial versus recognition of all suffering and human needs with the idea that “all should be able to live.”

Jessica Benjamin is considered to be one of the most important and influential psychoanalysts of the last four decades. She was one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, and was one of the first to introduce feminism and gender studies into psychoanalytic thought. Her early studies included social structure and feminism, but more recently she is known for her effort to explain the classical aspects of psychoanalysis using object relations, relational psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. She has made significant contributions to the concept of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. In 2015 Jessica Benjamin received the Hans-Kilian-Award for her achievements in the fields of psychoanalysis, feminist psychology and the theory of intersubjective recognition.

Sponsored by the Literature and the Mind Program and the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Jessica Benjamin: The Discarded and The Dignified—The Politics of the Fear that “Only One Can Live”

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars.

Beth DePalma Digeser, Laila Shereen Sakr, Jeremy White, Brandon Whited

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the
star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds
animated the scientific discourse and press coverage.
Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and
imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this
discovery was not just about discovering more planets,
but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk,
Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work
with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets
become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to
execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave
the boundary of our world to extend human presence
beyond the solar system.
Before joining the Anthropology department at Yale earlier
this year, Lisa Messeri taught at the University of Virginia
and the University of Pennsylvania. Her published work
includes Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of
Other Worlds (2016), which traces how the place-making
practices of planetary scientists transform the void of
space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known
and explored.

Sponsored by the Idee Levitan IHC Endowment and the IHC’s
Crossings + Boundaries series.
Image Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Lisa Messeri: Interstellar Crossings

“Impermanent Citizens: Precarity and the Recon guration of Communities,” Stephen James (UC Riverside)
“How Advertisements are Made Political and Provoke Emotion,” Matthew Alvarez (UC Merced)

Moderator: Jennifer Lugris (UCSB)

Panel-Critical Reflections on Citizenship and Belonging

Panel - Critical Reflections On Citizenship And Belonging

“Nursing the Spark of Social Engagement,” Michele Bury, Vivian Price, and Ellie Zenhari (CSU Dominguez Hills)
“Black Migrant Women: Seeking Voice, Finding Community,” Geta LeSeur (University of Arizona)
Moderator: Corinne Bancroft (UCSB)

Panel-Imagining and Narrating Communities

Panel - Imagining And Narrating Communities

“Disarming Hate: Gun Violence Prevention E orts and the University,” Melissa Barthelemy (UCSB)
“Co-mingling Bodies and Collective Postmemory: Theater and Performance as Ethical Praxis in Mexico,” Ruth Hellier- Tinoco (UCSB)

Moderator: Naz Keynejad (UCSB)

Panel: Social Memory and Community building

Panel - Social Memory And Community Building

“Making the Humanities Count: The Cultural Study of Quantification,” Heather Steffen (UCSB)

Originally a part of : "PANEL: EDUCATION AS COMMUNITY BUILDING"

Making the Humanities Count: The Cultural Study of Quantification

“Sovereignty Makes the Monument”
Swati Chattopadhyay (UCSB)
“Monuments Are Not Memory”
Dell Upton (UCLA)
Moderator: Jeremy White (UCSB)

The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Weatern Humanities Alliance

Panel: Civic Monuments and Community

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing people to abandon their homes; and famine, because of which at least twenty million people are currently at risk of starvation, most of them in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. In his talk, Filkins will take the audience on a tour of these places and discuss ways to address the complex causes of mass migration.

Filkins has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 2011. From 2000 to 2010, he was a reporter for the New York Times, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series; the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life; and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Dexter Filkins: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

Ronald Rael’s talk reexamines what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and creatively challenge the wall’s existence. He will also discuss his architectural studio’s counterproposals that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Rael proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue.

Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and Associate Professor in Architecture, the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a partner in the award-winning architectural firm Rael San Fratello and CEO of Emerging Objects, a 3D Printing MAKE-tank. He is the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (2017), Earth Architecture (2008), and Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (2018).

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Ronald Rael: Borderwall as Architecture

This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.”

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine.  She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015), both of which won book awards from the American Political Science Association.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Claire Jean Kim: Murder and Mattering in Harambe's House

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

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