James P Byrne (WLP)
The Paddy Beyond the Pale: Thinking about Cultural Theory and Irish American Identity.
November 12 (Wednesday, 6:00-8:00 pm)
Walker Building, 120 Boylston, room 925 (small conference room)
Respondent:  TBA

Dislocated from both the contemporary culture of modern Ireland and from its genesis as an immigrant culture, Irish American culture has labored to endow itself with ethnic privilege by rewriting its past as a tale of racial discrimination, in line with other more successful minority paradigms. The most common and appealing of these racial analogies – between the immigrant Irish and Black experience of America – has led, at times, to a simple re-inscription of the early Irish experience as an experience of American oppression on a level with the African American experience of slavery.  This “simplistic equation” has been rightly cautioned against by major cultural critics, such as David Lloyd, Luke Gibbons and others.  In fact, uncontested claims about the uniformity of the Irish and African American experience have dominated the history of Irish American assimilation, at different times, being used to either undo or secure the Irish right to American whiteness, and, hence, to deny or affirm the Irish immigrant’s right to American citizenship.  This discussion will look to move through the racial discourse which conditioned early representation of the Irish immigrant, while seeking to move beyond the facile racial paradigm which has constricted contemporary discussions of Irish American cultural identity.

[ read statement ]

Yu-jin Chang
L’ETERNEL RETOUR:  The French Reception of Nietzsche’s Thought
October 12 (Wednesday, 6:00-8:00 pm)
Walker Building, 120 Boylston, room 925 (small conference room)
Respondent: Deirdre Conlon (Institute)

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you …' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.'

Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return, which by his own account struck him one August day in 1881 out of the Alpine blue at Sils Maria, “6,000 feet above the sea and humanity,” has continued to exert a powerful fascination over his readers.  Regarded by some as Nietzsche’s most profound idea, the key to his entire philosophy, by others as an intellectual scandal—and already a manifestation of his later dementia—by others still as both, the eternal recurrence was characterized by Nietzsche himself as an abgründigster Gedanke, his “most abyssal (or indeed abysmal) thought”: at once unfathomably deep and entirely groundless. 

Yu-jin Chang considers the particularly rich line of interpretation taken by French intellectuals—including such writers as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and above all Maurice Blanchot—after the war and attempts to make sense of a thought that continues to fascinate and scandalize.

[ read statement ]

Tulasi Srinivas (OPC)
Deus Loci: A Sacred City, Globalization, Memory and Affect in the Sathya Sai Movement?Deus
December 5 (W, 6-8)
Walker Building, 120 Boylston, room 925 (small conference room)

Loci examines the narratives of devotion that weave through sacred space for the transnationally successful Sathya Sai movement. The Sathya Sai movement draws its devotees from 137 countries and cultures of the world. The sacred city of the Sai movement-Puttaparthi-- is deconstructed into its logical and affective components through excerpts from devotee's diary entries; narratives of exile (both real and spiritual) of prodigality (of a return to a sacred center). Srinivas juxtaposes this global mobility of the Sai devotees against the stability of the sacred city and its architecture-built in a retro future aesthetic style-- in order to examine how the architecture of the sacred postmodern city is a constructed deliberate narrative of globalization that affects understandings of public and private space and its complex relationship to the construction of identity. Readings of the space are easily accessible through maps and photographs and Srinivas's suggests that they form the basis of a "grammar of diversity" that enables a dialogue between the many originating cultures of devotees

Sam Binkley (OPC)
Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s.
November 14 (W, 6-8)
Walker Building, 120 Boylston, room 925 (small conference room)

In his new book Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Duke University Press, 2007), Sam Binkley draws on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, to explain how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s. As rapid social change and political upheaval eroded middle-class cultural authority, the looser life provided opportunities for self-reinvention through everyday lifestyle choice. He traces this ethos of self-realization through the "yuppie" 1980s to the 1990s and today, demonstrating that what originated as an emancipatory call to loosen up soon evolved into a culture of highly commercialized consumption and lifestyle branding.

Craig Freedman (VMA)
Imaging Place
November 7 (W 6-8))
Walker Building, 120 Boylston, room 925 (small conference room)

"Imaging Place," is a place-based, virtual reality art project. It takes the form of a user navigated, interactive computer program that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and three-dimensional technologies to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. The goal of the project is to develop the technologies, the methodology and the content for truly immersive and navigable narrative, based in real places. In June of 2007, Freeman traveled to China to begin work on "Imaging Beijing." He will give an account of that experience for the Works In Progress group.

Eric Gordon
Hub2: Connecting Places to Power in Boston's Neighborhoods
October 11 (Th, 2-4)
Walker Building, 120 Boylston, room 925 (small conference room)
Respondent: Sam Binkley

Hub2 is a partnership between the City of Boston and Emerson college that seeks to help residents take control and ownership of their neighborhoods, enlisting digital environments and networks to strengthen real-world spaces and relationships. The alpha stage of the program employs the virtual world Second Life to enable people to collaboratively imagine, articulate, and assert a vision for the kind of neighborhood they wish to inhabit. It takes the form of a night class that includes city employees, educators, and community activists. This presentation will describe the program and its pilot iteration. In addition, it will discuss the program's theoretical framework that uses the ideas of Jurgen Habermas and Manuel Castells to arrive at a concept called "placeworlds."

Cher Knight
The Alternative Museum/Alternatives to Museums (visit site)
Thursday, April 12, 6:00pm
Room 403
Walker Building, 120 Boylston
Respondent: Mirta Tocci
download excerpt of the text for this discussion.

Elizabeth Whitney
Performance Studies and the Artist-Scholar (visit site)
Thursday, March 22, 6:00-8:00pm
Room 403
Walker Building, 120 Boylston
Respondent: John Bell (Performing Arts)
download excerpt of the text for this discussion.

Roy Kamada
Where the Body Parts Come From: Dis(re)membering History in Dirty Pretty Things (visit site)
Wednesday, February 21, 6:00-8:00pm
Room 403
Walker Building, 120 Boylston
Respondent: Flora Gonzalez
download excerpt of the text for this discussion.

Nigel Gibson
"Demanding Dignity: The Shackdwellers Challenge to Post-Apartheid South Africa" (visit site)
December 7, 6:00-8:00pm
Room 403
Walker Building, 120 Boylston
Respondent: Professor Roger House

Flora Gonzalez / Sam Binkley
"Cuba in the New Millennium" (visit site)
October 25, 2:00-4:00pm
Room West I & II
80 Boylston Street
Professor Flora Gonzalez (WLP) will discuss her new book, Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts. Professor Sam Binkley (OPC) will discuss his recent photographic research in Havana.
Respondent: Vice President Linda Moore (Academic Affairs)(there is no advanced reading for this event)

John Bell
"Playing with Stuff: Dynamics of Performance with Objects, Puppets, and Masks"
November 2, 6:00-8:00pm
Room 403
Walker Building, 120 Boylston
Respondent: Professor Elizabeth Whitney (Institute)
download excerpt of the text for this discussion

Tracey Stark
"Dignity of the Particular: Adorno on Kant's Aesthetics"
April 13, 2006
Room 403, 120 Boylston St.

Emily Kearns:
"Travel, Self, and Other: Exploring Travel as Ritual, Ego Loss, and Reconstruction"
respondent: David Emblidge
March 23, 2006
Room 403, 120 Boylston St.

Erika Williams:
“Why the Music ‘Put [Him] All A-Tune’: Wagner's Lohengrin and the  Politics of Cultural Segregation in Du Bois's ‘Of the Coming of John’" 
respondent: Professor Wendy Walters
Feburary 16, 2006
Room 403, 120 Boylston St.

Sam Binkley
Consuming Aquarius - Loosening up in the Crisis Decade
December 15, 2005
Room 925, 120 Boylston St.

Eric Gordon
Becoming Data - Mapping, Navigation and Loss in the Networked Culture
November 7, 2005
Room 925, 120 Boylston St.

Stuart Ewen
Typecasting: on the Arts and Sciences
October 17, 2005
Emerson Room, 80 Boylston St.

For more information please contact:
Sam Binkley
617-824-8737

To RSVP for an event please contact:
Lindsey Schrott
617-824-8296