While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, 19 million U.S. adults estimated to have a felony conviction, and the staggering 79 million Americans with a criminal record. But the size of the U.S. carceral state is second in consequence to its reach. Incarcerated people are greeted by more than 48,000 laws, policies and administrative sanctions upon release that limit their participation in the labor and housing markets, in the culture and civic life of the city, and even within their families. They are subject to rules other people are not subject to, and shoulder responsibilities other people are not expected to shoulder. They live in a “supervised society,” a hidden social world we've produced through our laws, policies and everyday practices, and in fact, occupy an alternate form of political membership—what Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller calls “carceral citizenship.”

Join Professor Miller as he examines the afterlife of mass incarceration, attending to how U.S. criminal justice policy has changed the social life of the city and altered the contours of American Democracy one (most often poor black American) family at a time. Drawing on ethnographic data collected across three iconic American cities—Chicago, Detroit, and New York—we will explore what it means to live in a supervised society and how we might find our way out. 

Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA). His research examines life at the intersections of race, poverty, crime control, and social welfare policy. He is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (February 2021), based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2020-21-public-events-series-living-democracy/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Living Democracy series

Living Democracy

Reuben Jonathan Miller: Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

A dialogue between Tae-Yeoun Keum (Political Science) and Andrew Norris (Political Science) about Keum’s new book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. 

Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this tension by treating Plato’s myths as mere regrettable embellishments, irrelevant to his main enterprise. Others, such as Karl Popper, have railed against the deceptive power of myth, concluding that a tradition built on Platonic foundations can be neither rational nor desirable.

Tae-Yeoun Keum challenges the premise underlying both of these positions. She argues that myth is neither irrelevant nor inimical to the ideal of rational progress. She tracks the influence of Plato’s dialogues through the early modern period and on to the twentieth century, showing how pivotal figures in the history of political thought—More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Idealists, Cassirer, and others—have been inspired by Plato’s mythmaking. She finds that Plato’s followers perennially raised the possibility that there is a vital role for myth in rational political thinking.

Tae-Yeoun Keum is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCSB and was previously the Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. She is a political theorist broadly interested in ancient political thought and its reception, 20th century German social thought, and the intersection of political theory and literature. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review and History of Political Thought.

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

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Humanities Decanted

Tae-Yeoun Keum: Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought

Objects talk to us over time and space, transmitting in their colors, shapes, textures, and materials insight into other lives and ways of living. Some we wish to preserve for their sheer beauty, others for the people, times, or places they represent. Of the items that are central to our daily lives, textiles are among the most perishable: if not used until they are rags, they still degrade naturally over time, prey to insects, mold, moisture and light.

Despite the humid climate, beautiful textiles in Japan from the eighth century have been lovingly preserved, some retaining brilliant colors. Where vestments have been treated as treasures passed down through centuries of generations, it came as a surprise that something as “new” as a hundred-and-thirty-year-old garment that was probably only worn once or twice would need extensive conservation work. This, however, turned out to be the case for a Western-style court gown made for Japan’s Meiji empress, Haruko (1850-1914). Using the empress’s gown as an illustration, Bethe will discuss conservation as a process that involves learning and preserving lost techniques, combined with cutting-edge scientific solutions. She will introduce basic principles of conservation, such as ensuring that every process is reversible, preserving the original but adding nothing new, and avoiding incurring future deterioration by matching materials and techniques.

Monica Bethe is Director of the Medieval Japanese Studies Institute in Kyoto, dedicated in part to the conservation of treasures in Japanese Imperial Convents. Experience in weaving and natural dyeing led her to conduct research on historical textiles and their conservation. Her publications include chapters in Miracles and Mischief: Nō and Kyōgen Theater in Japan (2002), Amamonzeki, A Hidden Heritage: Treasures of the Japanese Imperial Convents (2009), Transmitting Robes, Linking Minds: The World of Buddhist Kasaya (2010), Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia (2015), and Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age (2022); translations of books, such as Restoration of Japanese Art in European and American Collections (1995) and Textiles in the Shōsō-in (2000, 2001); and articles, most recently, “Guise and Disguise: Nō Costumes in the Context of Cultural Norms” in Mime Journal (2021).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2021-22-public-events-series-regeneration/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Regeneration series and the East Asia Center

Regeneration

Monica Bethe: Ensuring the Future of Historic Textiles: The Case of a Japanese Empress's Court Gown

For a long time, information was scarce. Messages and letters were transmitted at the speed of human or equine legs. The materials upon which information was inscribed were either too heavy or too perishable to circulate. But by the end of the eighteenth century, as machines took over, not only the means of transmitting information but what counted as information had changed. Knowledge and experience now yielded to the objectivity of information, grounded, for example, in the laws of probability. Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as “too much information.” Today, everything is a potential source of information: the living beings carrying genetic information, the starlight carrying information about the distant origin of the universe, the earth and skies stocked with sensors, the complete libraries existing online. If we have a question for an expert on the other side of the world, we receive an answer so promptly in real time that we do not even notice its delay. In his talk, Kittler will consider the history of our relationship to information and how the abundance of information available today is both too little and too much.

Wolf D. Kittler is Professor in the Germanic & Slavic Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include Western literature from Greek antiquity to the present, philosophy, art history, history of science, media technology, and critical theory.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2022-23-public-events-series-too-much-information/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Too Much Information series

Too Much Information

Wolf D. Kittler: Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

Make a Poem Cry is an anthology from one of California’s high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays, stories, and more mined from the depths of familial, racial, and economic violence. They are imaginings for how to address trouble and crime without punishment, dehumanization, and violence in return. Here’s restorative/transformative justice in action. Here’s redemption in the flesh. Here are voices and viewpoints needed for a just and equitable world for all. In this TMI series event, Hartman and Rodríguez will discuss how the project makes visible the experience of incarceration–about which there is too little information–as well as read selected works from the anthology.

Kenneth E. Hartman was convicted of murder at nineteen and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. After he had served thirty-eight years, former California governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. commuted his sentence, and Hartman was paroled in 2017. He’s presently a freelance writer who is also working as a development coordinator and prison programs specialist for a Los Angeles-area nonprofit. His 2009 memoir, Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars, won the 2010 Eric Hoffer Award. Hartman edited Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough, a collection of prisoner writings about life sentences without the possibility of parole, which won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Harper’s.

Luis J. Rodríguez was the poet laureate of Los Angeles from 2014 to 2016. Across forty years, he taught creative writing as well as conducted poetry readings, lectures, and healing circles in prisons, juvenile lockups, and jails throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, South America, and Europe. He is the founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and cofounder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. Rodríguez is the author of sixteen books of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction, including the best-selling memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2022-23-public-events-series-too-much-information/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Too Much Information series and the Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment

Kenneth E. Hartman and Luis J. Rodríguez: Make A Poem Cry

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy.

Over the past year, CRT has been a source of discussion everywhere – in the media, in school board meetings, in classrooms – and has generated many questions. During this session, Taifha Alexander, UCLA Law CRT Forward Project Director, discusses CRT, its founding, and contributions, and the recent assault on the theory.

Taifha Natalee Alexander currently serves as the CRT Forward Project Director at UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program. She graduated, with honors, from both Georgetown Law and UCLA School of Law. Taifha has over twelve years of experience in higher education. Her legal studies and research are focused at the intersection of law, critical race studies, higher education, social justice, and equity. While a law student at Georgetown, Taifha’s article, “We Can’t Breathe: How Top Law Schools Can Resuscitate an Inclusive Climate for Minority and Low-Income Students,” was published in the Georgetown Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives. Since earning her J.D., Taifha has served in roles at University of South Carolina Aiken, UCLA, and Wofford College, to manifest the recommendations she put forth in her article. Taifha’s commitment to equity, justice, and anti-racism was fostered at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, where she earned her Bachelor of Science in Legal Studies.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/2022-23-public-events-series-too-much-information/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Too Much Information series and the Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Taifha Alexander: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Luis J. Rodríguez is an award-winning author and activist whose memoir about life in a gang, Always Running, is as popular as ever in 2023, its 30th anniversary. The UCSB Library Special Research Collections recently acquired Rodríguez’s personal papers, giving scholars and students an opportunity to see the personal and social context behind Always Running and Rodríguez’s other prose, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as his involvement in gubernatorial races, revolutionary organizations, and the prisoners’ rights movement. In this talk, Jo Metcalf discusses her use of the archive as she and co-editor Ben Olguín (UCSB) create an anthology of the life and works of Rodríguez. Engaging with this collection of letters, manuscripts, contracts, newspapers, and photos exposes both the excitement and frustration that archives often hold. Ben Olguín introduces the talk.

Josephine Metcalf is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull, UK and an IHC Visiting Scholar. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre and Programme Director for the MA in Incarceration Cultures. Her research focuses on the representation of prisons and street gangs in literature and other pop-culture forms, and the ways these have been received by audiences.

Learn more about the IHC at https://ihc.ucsb.edu/

Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the UCSB Library Special Research Collections

Josephine Metcalf: “It Calls You Back and Draws You In”: The Personal Papers of Luis J. Rodríguez

Celebrate our 2022-23 Faculty Fellows, whose works-in-progress are supported this year by IHC release-time awards. Fellows give a short presentation of their work.

Heidi Amin-Hong, English
“A Contaminated Transpacific: Ecological Afterlives of the Vietnam War”

Charmaine Chua, Global Studies
“Logistics Leviathan: Counterrevolutionary empire and just-in-time distribution in the Indo-Pacific”

Raquel Pacheco, Anthropology
“Re-making the Peasant Countryside: Intimate mestizaje in Neoliberal Mexico”

Elana Resnick, Anthropology (presentation not included)
“Refusing Sustainability: Waste and Race at the Edges of Europe”

Faculty Fellows Research Presentations

New Research in the Humanities: Presentations by the IHC’s 2022-23 Faculty Fellows

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga presents journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors.

Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the road toward an interrelational “State” of being and the formation of a living politic of radical optimism in the face of global despair.

Cherríe Moraga is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at UCSB and also serves as the Co-Director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art, & Social Praxis. She is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright and the co-editor of the avant-garde 1981 feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of several collections of her own writings, including A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness. Three earlier works, Loving in the War Years, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood were published in new editions by Haymarket Books in 2022 and 2023. In 2019, Native Country of the Heart—A Memoir was published to great acclaim by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

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

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series

Imagining California

Cherríe Moraga: Inaugural Talk: Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

In 1994, when M.G. Lord interviewed the California-based creators of the Barbie doll, she had no doubt Barbie would be as provocative in 2023 as she was in 1959. But Lord did not anticipate that this plastic object, once tarred as anti-feminist, would evolve into a touchstone for understanding feminism—as well as the star of a blockbuster attack on patriarchy. This talk explores the Greta Gerwig effect and the 64 years of changes in Barbie’s jobs, ethos, and even body.

M.G. Lord is the co-host of the podcast L.A. Made: The Barbie Tapes, which tells the story of the doll’s creation in the voices of its original creators. She is also the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll and The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. Her 2005 family memoir, Astro Turf, is a cultural history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as well as the basis for L.A. Made: Blood, Sweat and Rockets, a 12-part podcast that she hosts. It tells the story of the early days of rocketry in Southern California, and the unusual figures—a practitioner of “Sex Magick” and an accused Communist—who founded JPL. Lord is Associate Professor of the Practice of English at the University of Southern California.

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

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment

M.G. Lord: Is Barbie Feminist? It's Complicated

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

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

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

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users’ posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early- and mid-20th-century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese-American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Institute, which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms, and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. Chun is also the author of Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021); Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016); Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011); and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections. She has received fellowships from various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was formerly Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/ihc-public-events-series-past/2022-23-public-events-series-too-much-information/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Too Much Information series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

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

For decades, America has imagined California novels as placed in locations like Hollywood or San Francisco. But, as Susan Straight will discuss in her presentation, other geographies are as beautiful, tragic, and full of narratives set in remote canyons, inland citrus groves, ancient ranchos, and hidden deserts. Straight’s characters, who might be seventh generation Californian or people just arrived, live in the places she’s known forever, hidden kingdoms of love and redemption amid the sycamore trees. 

Straight is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught since 1988. Her most recent novel Mecca (2022) was a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and it was the winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction.

Her memoir In the Country of Women (2020) was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, was a Finalist for the Clara Johnson Prize for Women’s Literature, and named a best book of 2019 by NPR, Code Switch, Real Simple, and others.

She is also the author of the novels Aquaboogie (1990), I Been In Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All The Pots (1992), Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights (1994), The Gettin Place (1996), and Highwire Moon (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Commonwealth of California Gold Medal for Fiction. A Million Nightingales (2006) was a Finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Take One Candle Light a Room (2010) was named a best novel of 2010 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus. Her novel Between Heaven and Here (2012) was named a Best Book of 2012 by the Los Angeles Times and The Daily Beast. She has also published numerous essays, articles, and stories in magazines and journals. Her short story “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award, and her short story “El Ojo De Agua” won a 2007 O. Henry Prize.

In 2021, Straight was named Woman of the Year for the 61st Assembly District by Assemblyman Jose Medina, for her thirty years of writing stories of African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, and immigrant life in southern California, and bringing little-known histories, especially of women, into American books, museums, magazines, and libraries. In 2014, Straight received the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2011, she received the Gina Berriault Award for Fiction from San Francisco State University. Straight received the Lannan Prize for Fiction in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in 1998.

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

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence Program

Susan Straight: Writing Our Californias

Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, Director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, discuss sea level rise and the challenges looming over the California coast. Xia will draw from her new book, California Against the Sea, in which deeply reported stories braid together science, policy, and the state’s social history. The conversation will explore how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

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

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series, the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment, the UCSB Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, the Marine Science Institute, and the Environmental Studies Program

Rosanna Xia: California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

Self Help Graphics & Art is a legacy arts organization that served on the cultural front of the Chicano Movement. Its emphasis on printmaking as an accessible medium infused with activist aims and its ability to cultivate and navigate various solidarities helped to support over fifty years of growth. This presentation by the co-editors of Self Help Graphics at Fifty looks at the multiple aesthetic styles and collaborative innovations that produced intergenerational, transnational, and cross-racial connections during the organization’s first five decades. 

Karen Mary Davalos, Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has written two books on Chicana/o/x museums, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006 (2010), the Silver Prize winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Reference Book in English. Her research and teaching interests in Chicana feminist scholarship, spirituality, and art inform her award-winning book Yolanda M. López (2008). She conducted life history interviews with eighteen artists, a decade of ethnographic research in Southern California, and archival research on fifty years of Chican@/x art in Los Angeles to produce her book Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (2017). With Dr. Constance Cortez (UTRGV), she launched “Rhizomes: Mexican American Art since 1848,” a multi-component digital ecosystem that resolves the misunderstandings and invisibility of visual art by Mexican Americans. Since 2012, she has served on the board of directors of Self Help Graphics & Art.

Tatiana Reinoza is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in the history of printmaking within the field of Latinx art. Her writing has appeared in the Archives of American Art Journal, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, as well as edited volumes and exhibition catalogues such as ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. She has also curated exhibitions including the 2022 exhibition All My Ancestors: The Spiritual in Afro-Latinx Art, which took place at the Brandywine’s Printed Image Gallery. In 2023, she published her first book, Reclaiming the Americas:  Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory and, with Davalos, the co-edited volume Self Help Graphics at Fifty. She is currently at work on a new book project titled “Retorno: Art & Kinship in the Making of a Central American Diaspora.”

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

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series, the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment, and the UCSB Library

Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza: Self Help Graphics & Art

A dialogue between Janet Afary (Religious Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Afary’s new book, Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911. 

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the Middle Eastern trickster figure Nasreddin in their periodical Mollā Nasreddin. They used folklore, visual art, and satire to disseminate a consciously radical and social democratic discourse on religion, gender, sexuality, and power in Transcaucasia and Iran. The periodical reached tens of thousands of people in the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation.

This highly-illustrated book explores the milieu in which Mollā Nasreddin was born, the way the periodical recreated the trickster trope, and the influence of European graphic artists, especially Francisco Goya, on the journal. It focuses on the most creative period, 1906-11, when the journal reflected the social and political concerns of three major upheavals: the 1905 Russian Revolution, the 1906–1911 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, and the 1908 Young Turk Movement. Afary received the 2023 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism from the American Historical Association, awarded annually to the author of the most outstanding book published in English on the history of journalism. The book also received the 2023 British-Kuwait Friendship Award, given to the best scholarly work on the Middle East published in the U.K.

Janet Afary is Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, and The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism.

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

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Janet Afary: Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911

What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an organization devoted to elevating the voices of people experiencing economic hardship, creating and implementing policies rooted in their needs, and advancing a state agenda focused on equal opportunity for all. Since 2022, EPIC has been building grassroots support through its statewide listening tour and coalition-building activities, captured in the acclaimed documentary film Poverty and Power. Featuring excerpts from the film and a conversation with EPIC President Devon Gray, Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative Greg Kaufmann, and Director of Organizing and Community Engagement Jasmine Dellafosse, this discussion, moderated by Professor Alice O’Connor, focuses on a movement that aims to change the narrative about poverty—and California’s economic future.

Devon Gray is President of End Poverty in California. He aligns EPIC’s organization’s priorities across issue areas to make a lasting impact for Californians. Prior to joining EPIC, he was a director with Evergreen Strategy Group, where he advised gun violence prevention organizations on policy and strategy. Gray previously served in the Newsom Administration as Special Advisor to the Governor’s Chief of Staff and is an alumnus of national and statewide political campaigns.

Greg Kaufmann is EPIC Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative. He leads EPIC’s storytelling and narrative strategy, creating platforms for people in poverty to share their experiences, ideas, and insights so that we change the story about poverty in California. Prior to joining EPIC, Kaufmann was poverty correspondent at The Nation where his column was syndicated by Bill Moyers and Melissa Harris-Perry called him “one of the most consistent voices on poverty in America.”

Jasmine Dellafosse is Director of Organizing and Community Engagement at EPIC. She leads EPIC’s organizing and community engagement work to help build a movement that creates equal opportunity and ends poverty in California, affirming the dignity of all people. Dellafosse has confronted systemic racism for almost a decade—first as a youth organizer in her hometown of Stockton, CA, where she helped urban development projects such as bringing food desert areas access to fresh produce.

Alice O’Connor is Professor of History and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UCSB.

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

Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Imagining California series, the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy, and the Department of History

Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future

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: The Po-ethics of Mediterranean Melancholia
Laura Sarnelli (IHC Visiting Scholar, University of Naples L’Orientale)
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

The psychoanalytical notion of melancholia has recently received increasing critical attention in the field of cultural and postcolonial studies. As an emotional reaction to the denial of the loss of a loved object, be it personal, collective, historical or cultural, melancholia has emerged as a critical touchstone for subjective as well as political formations. This talk explores the reconfigurations of the contemporary Mediterranean in Italian literature and culture in the light of a theoretical framework that revalues the transformative power of the melancholic process beyond its pathological connotations, as a critical tool for healing and an ethical response to loss. The refusal to let go of lost objects or past griefs takes on the form of political commitment and resistance against normative mourning; namely, against those strategies of amnesia which are meant to preserve the hegemonic social and political order without accounting for the issue of ethical responsibility. Reclaiming the body of the past by taking care of it means to revalue a crucial understanding of the present (the myth of Antigone proves central to this investigation). Focusing on the legacy of Italian colonial history, the talk will examine some poetical and aesthetical representations of contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean as an expression of critical melancholia.

Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian Studies and the IHC’s Value of Care series.

Laura Sarnelli: The Po-ethics of Mediterranean Melancholia

TALK: Urban Ecology and the Imagination of the Future
Ursula Heise (English, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA)
Thursday, April 23, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In the early twenty-first century, the majority of the global human population lives in cities. Future population growth will occur mostly in cities. This shift challenges conventional forms of environmental imagination with their focus on wild and rural habitats. The lecture will explore how urbanization functions as a specific dimension of the Anthropocene, and how narrative fiction – especially science fiction – and poetry might help us re-envision the boundary that has traditionally separated urban from natural spaces. The Anthropocene challenges us to reimagine nature in cities and cities as “novel ecosystems,” and novelists and poets such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Harryette Mullen have recently used strategies of high-modernist urban literature to grasp the functioning of cities as multispecies habitats.

Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature, environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan, literature and science, globalization theory, and media theory. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010). She is editor of the book series, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is currently finishing a book called Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.

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

Ursula Heise:  Urban Ecology and the Imagination of the Future

ARTIST TALK: Music of the Anthropocene
John Luther Adams (composer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Become Ocean)
Thursday, June 4 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Today a growing number of geologists believe we have left the Holocene and entered a new period—the Anthropocene—in which the dominant geologic force is humanity itself.  What does this mean for music? What does it mean for a composer, or for any creative artist working in any medium today?  Can music be engaged with current events and at the same time detached from them? Can music resonate with world around us, and yet still create a world of its own?

Called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), John Luther Adams is a composer whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world. Adams composes for orchestra, chamber ensembles, percussion and electronic media. A recipient of the Heinz Award for his contributions to raising environmental awareness, Adams has also been honored with the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University “for melding the physical and musical worlds into a unique artistic vision that transcends stylistic boundaries.”

Sponsored by the IHC’s Idee Levitan Endowment and the IHC series The Anthropocene: Views from the Humanities.

Footage from the documentary Strange and Sacred Noise
courtesy of Leonard Kamerling and the Alaska Center for Docuemtary Film,  
Univeristy of Alaska Museum of the North

John Luther Adams: Music of the Anthropocene

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

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

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 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

TALK: Why Historical Trauma Studies?
Peter Leese (Institute of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen)
Thursday, May 19, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
One of the earliest definitions of historical trauma studies is Mark Micale and Paul Lerner’s edited collection Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (2001). Leese is one of the original contributors to Traumatic Pasts and co-editor of two forthcoming collections of essays on the social and cultural history of trauma studies and subsequent developments in the field. His talk will discuss the evolution of historical trauma studies, focusing on the questions: “What are we looking for when we investigate trauma in the past? In which directions might the research agenda now move forward? What is historical trauma studies?”
Peter Leese is Associate Professor of British History at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside, his most recent research project is ‘Migrant Memory: Life-Stories, Investigations, Pictures.’ He is the author of Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War, and Britain Since 1945: Aspects of Identity. Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War and Traumatic Memories of the Second World War and After, edited by Peter Leese and Jason Crouthamel, will both be published by Palgrave Macmillan in autumn 2016.
Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Humanities and the Brain

Peter Leese: Why Historical Trauma Studies?

READING: Tides by Pedro Xavier Solís
Tuesday, May 31, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Suzanne Jill Levine (Spanish & Portuguese, UCSB, translator of Tides)
Jorge Luis Castillo (Spanish & Portuguese, UCSB)
Professors Suzanne Jill Levine and Jorge Luis Castillo will present a bilingual reading of Tides, Levine’s translation of Pedro Xavier Solís’s chapbook of poetry that addresses bipolarity. Pedro Xavier Solís, grandson of Pablo Antonio Cuadra, one of Nicaragua’s most famous poets, lives in Managua. A poet, essayist, and fiction  writer, he serves on the boards of directors of the Nicaraguan Academy of Language and of the Granada International Poetry Festival.
Tides is very much a work in dialogue – with the “you” to whom its poems are addressed, with the many writers the poems reference and quote and thus, with literature itself. Solís Cuadra’s approach is readerly and his style light, in spite of the occasionally dark turns that the poems make. This bilingual edition of Tides is the first collection by the Nicaraguan writer to be published in English. The original Spanish title literally translates as “Syndromes: Low Tide and Autistic Seashell.”
Suzanne Jill Levine’s recent work includes the poetry chapbook Reckoning  (Finishing Line Press) and a five-volume Penguin Classics edition of  Jorge Luis Borges. The director of Translation Studies at UCSB, and  recipient of many honors, she received in 2012 her third PEN prize for  translating José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale (Northwestern University  Press).
Jorge Luis Castillo is a distinguished scholar of Latin American  literature and poetry and a Cuban novelist and short-story writer who  grew up in Puerto Rico.  His first book of fiction won the international PEN Prize.
Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Humanities and the Brain 

Reading: Tides by Pedro Xavier Solís / Suzanne Jill Levine & Jorge Luis Castillo

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”

TALK: My Other’s Keeper: Radical Ethics and Visions of Community

Donna Orange (Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU)
Tuesday, March 7, 2017 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Thinking about community, badly needed, is in short supply in current public discourse.  We will step back here to consider what meanings community might bring now, how it can be used to include and exclude others, depending on intersubjective context. We will ask how presumption of common humanity relates to conceptions of community, and above all, what then, a radical ethics, as found in the theorists who emerged from other “dark times,” may require of us now.

Donna Orange is educated in both philosophy and clinical psychology. She also teaches at ISIPSé (Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self and Relational Psychoanalysis), Milano and Roma. In New York, she teaches and supervises at IPSS, the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She runs study groups in philosophy, in the history of psychoanalysis, and in contemporary relational psychoanalysis. She is author of Emotional Understanding: Studies in Psychoanalytic Psychology; Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies, and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011). With George Atwood and Robert Stolorow she has written Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice and Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. With Roger Frie, she co-edited Beyond Postmodernism: Extending the Reach of Clinical Theory. Her philosophical studies include pragmatism, ethics, phenomenology, and many topics in the history of philosophy. In psychoanalysis, she wonders about the ways in which traumatic experience and fixed ideas, including especially her own, interact to inhibit dialogue and hospitality.

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

Donna Orange: My Other’s Keeper: Radical Ethics and Visions of Community

Keynote Address: "The Democratic Frame of Mind," Christopher Bollas

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

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.

Popular tracks by IHC UCSB