UCHRI Podcast

Humanizing Acts: Researcher's Roundtable examines the gifts of resisting the historical erasure of the COVID-19 pandemic with community and research. This is the podcast component of Humanizing Acts: Resisting the Historical Erasures of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. It features series contributors Dan Bustillo, Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz (Cognate Collective), and Mario Alberto Obando, Jr. This podcast has been edited and written by Mario Alberto Obando, Jr. and co-produced by Mario Alberto Obando, Jr. and Daniel Topete. Ana Elizabeth Rosas provided editorial support.

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life? This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mukharesh, Lalu Esra Ozban, Raed El Rafei, Salma Shash, Yasemin Taskin-Alp. Learn more about this project at uchri.org/awards/tracing-everyday-upheavals-in-the-middle-east/ Music: Möbius Surface by escp-music.bandcamp.com/music

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life? This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mukharesh, Lalu Esra Ozban, Raed El Rafei, Salma Shash, Yasemin Taskin-Alp. Learn more about this project at uchri.org/awards/tracing-everyday-upheavals-in-the-middle-east/ Music: Möbius Surface by escp-music.bandcamp.com/music

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life? This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mukharesh, Lalu Esra Ozban, Raed El Rafei, Salma Shash, Yasemin Taskin-Alp. Learn more about this project at uchri.org/awards/tracing-everyday-upheavals-in-the-middle-east/ Music: Möbius Surface by escp-music.bandcamp.com/music

What is the role of humanities centers and institutes, and what can they do to spark change in graduate education? In this episode, we speak with our mentors, Dr. Barbara Mennel (UF CHPS) and Dr. Kelly Anne Brown (UCHRI), in a wide-ranging conversation about how humanities centers and institutes function as an incubator for intellectual and professional networks, hubs for experimental programming, and safe spaces for grad students. We discuss how underfunding the humanities might lead to a host of issues downstream, including space for cutting-edge scholarship. We also speak about distributed models of mentorship and how they can prepare students for multiple career paths. Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com.

Given the crisis of declining student enrollments and tenure-track jobs, what is the role of scholarly organizations in facilitating systemic change? This episode, we speak with Dr. Joy Connolly about her role as president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works on fellowship design, change acceleration, and creating spaces for students, faculty, and administrators to craft a more sustainable future for the humanities. But first: A job ad that asks for too much and gives too little. Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com.

Under Review Episode 4: Unwellness and the University (UCHRI X UF CHPS) How do we create spaces of care for one another in structures that make us unwell? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mimi Khuc, a writer, scholar, mental health advocate, and adjunct lecturer in disability studies at Georgetown University. We cover her advocacy for adjunct professors, mental health issues students face in grad school, the silencing of emotions in professional settings, and changing one's career trajectory during the PhD. Plus, a sound experiment on how it feels to be contingent. Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com.

The digital wave is sweeping the humanities, raising provocative new questions: Should podcasting count as a form of scholarship, and can the dissertation be other than a book-length monograph? In this episode, we visit the National Humanities Center's virtual podcasting institute, where four PhD students (Lauren Cox, June Ke, Mirna Wasef, and Kevin Woram) met and collaborated on a podcast about digital intimacies during the 2020 lockdown. We caught up with them one year later. We also spoke with Andy Mink, Vice President of Education Programs at the National Humanities Center, about NHC's programming for graduate students and the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations. Bonus: a meditative ASMR for graduate students. Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com.

We need to talk about work, and what's not working, in graduate school. Graduate students are instructors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and researchers, but our stipends are often not enough to make ends meet. First, we look back at the Columbia University graduate student strikes with Sourav Chatterjee, a PhD student at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies program at Columbia. Then we chat with Dr. Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Graduate Feminist Director at UC Santa Cruz, about the jobs crisis, academic labor as labor, the UCSC graduate strike, and what can and needs to change around working conditions in the academy.

Under Review is a podcast hosted by June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox, two PhD students who ask questions about humanities graduate education. In the first episode, we spoke with Dr. Rachel Arteaga, Assistant Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and co-author of ‘We All Have Levers We Can Pull': Reforming Graduate Education.” We spoke about what we can learn from community colleges, the “prestige economy” of higher ed, resistance to alt-ac career paths, and what can be done to reform graduate education today. Episode resources here: https://humwork.uchri.org/blog/2022/04/under-review-episode-1/ Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com

Under Review is a podcast about rethinking humanities graduate education, produced and hosted by two PhD students in the humanities, June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox. In a time when 70 percent of academic positions are off the tenure track, we speak to experts about issues surrounding prestige, labor, contingency, and diverse post-doctoral pathways. This podcast is a collaboration of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the University of Florida Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.

We explore the power and perils of fire. Standing apart from water, earth, and air, fire is discussed as a centerpiece of human developments, dynamics, and transformations, of narration across most all modes and forms of cultural expression, and as a catalyst for developments in food and shelter, not to mention sometimes unwelcome, if significant shifts in our contemporary culture. Joined by: Elizabeth Hoover (UC Berkeley), Abrahm Lustgarten (ProPublica), Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia), Brandi Summers (UC Berkeley), and Karen Tei Yamashita (UC Santa Cruz).

The driving question today is no longer whether this or that conflict is a civil war but what political work the notion of “civil war” is being exercised to do. States descend into civil wars when contrasting conceptions of life within them are deemed irreconcilable. Living, for a considerable proportion of the state’s inhabitants, is made unbearable. Those at least nominally controlling the state apparatus insist on obedience and deference to its way of being, on pain of erasure. Civil wars are struggles over competing ways of being in the world, over their underlying conceptions, over control of the state and its apparatuses to materialize and advance these commitments. A critical discussion on cultures of civil warring in our times. On Wednesday, October 28, at 12:00 pm PDT, UCHRI will host a critical conversation on civil war with Elisabeth Anker (George Washington University), Adom Getachew (University of Chicago), Brad Evans (University of Bath), and Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the background: Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm Elisabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 Brad Evans, Deleuze & Fascism: Security, War & Aesthetics; “Histories of Violence” Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination; “The Promise of Freedom: Orlando Patterson’s Modern World” David Theo Goldberg, “On Civil War” Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens James Martel and Brad Evans, “Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today” Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South Nasser Mufti, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism Warsan Shire, “Home” Stephen Smith, The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent Sophocles, Antigone

Counterfeit is our culture, our history forged, our idols fraudulent. We seek sources of truth as an active concept. But when the line dividing fact from fiction is buried beneath layers of bigotry, senselessness, and corruption, supposition becomes indistinguishable from the real, and we risk mortal wounds as victims to the powers of the false. How can we reinvigorate mechanisms of scrutiny and systems of representation? Where are the spaces from which the silenced might emerge? On Friday, August 14, at 12:00 pm PDT, UCHRI hosted Race at Boiling Point: Powers of the False, a conversation with Beth Coleman (University of Toronto), Natalie Diaz (Arizona State University), Isaac Julien (UC Santa Cruz), George Lewis (Columbia University), and moderator Nina Sun Eidsheim (UC Los Angeles).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore (City University of New York), AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield), Rafeef Ziadah (University of London), and moderator Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) in conversation about movement as a vital keyword for understanding our fractious present— as collective mobilization, as social movements, as the circulation of ideas, as the shifting boundaries of the tolerable and the intolerable, as the movement of displaced populations, as constriction and its networkings of resistance. The wide-ranging conversation emerged out of the national and international uprisings in response to the death of George Floyd and others. These leading critical thinkers engage questions about abolition, resisting the dilution of radical imaginaries into palatable language and action, strategies for building and sustaining infrastructures that foster the emergence of new worlds, how we might recognize movement itself as a map of the critical power relations and their subversion that structures life across the globe.

On June 5, 2020, UCHRI gathered Angela Y. Davis (Emerita, UC Santa Cruz), Herman Gray (Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz), Gaye Theresa Johnson (UC Los Angeles), Robin D.G. Kelley (UCLA), and Josh Kun (USC) to think differently together about the structural conditions and explosive events shattering our times. In a wide-ranging conversation emerging out of the national protests in response to yet another spate of anti-Black police violence, these leading critical thinkers engage questions about intersectional and international struggle, the militarization of the border, racial capitalism, the feminist dimension of new social justice movements, the unsustainability of the nation-state, the power of the arts as a rallying force for imagining and sustaining solidarity, and much more.

For our final installment of our talkbit series interrogating civil war, we spoke with Jennifer Terry, professor of gender and sexuality studies at UC Irvine, about her 2017 work, Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America, in order to investigate the symbiotic logic by which war and the advanced world of biomedicine are intertwined. How might war look differently if medicine had never progressed into the reparative world of prosthetics? Together, we talk through this important hypothetical as well as the implications of her work for our civil war project overall.

Since its founding, UCHRI has funded Residential Research Groups for faculty and graduate students to engage in collaborative work around a specific topic. In Spring 2019, the topic was Truth, broadly conceived. UCHRI welcomed convener Aaron James in philosophy at UC Irvine, and participants Wayne Spencer Coffey in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, Robin Derby in History at UCLA, Liron Mor in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, Poulomi Saha in English at UC Berkeley, and Abigail Stepnitz in Jurisprudence and Social Policy also at UC Berkeley. The following is an intimate look into one of their weekly interdisciplinary seminars held here at UCHRI, featuring a conversation that weaves together a myriad of conspiracy theories and considers the implications of the genre in relation to fact-finding, subjective truths, and cultural mythologies.

As part of its Fall 2019 inquiry into civil war, UCHRI gathered colleagues from across the UC system and beyond for a lecture and seminar discussion about how racial formation and aesthetic tradition mutually constitute what we think of as the essential form of the civil subject: the autonomous, universal individual that has been a bedrock of Western political ideology since the Enlightenment. Here, Distinguished Professor of English, David Lloyd (UC Riverside), critically interrogates what he characterizes as "this Hegelian commitment, on Fanon's part, to the transformation of the racial, colonized 'thing' into the human" in the context of a larger question: "What constitutes the civil order of the state and the humans it constitutes?" Assistant Professor of Literature, Ameeth Vijay (UC San Diego), offers a response connecting the talk to Lloyd's latest book, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, by thinking through the concept of development and temporalities of subjectification in 18th- and 19th-century Western philosophy. For more information on UCHRI's initiative on Civil War, see: https://uchri.org/projects/civil-war/.

In this installment of our ongoing series of audiovisual conversations on civil war, Mei Zhan considers our theme as a conceptual device in relationship to her work, past and present. Currently, Zhan is writing an ethnography on the invention of a new kind of classical Chinese medicine on the edges of the healthcare establishment in China. She examines how these experiments in thinking, doing and being aim to "bring medicine back to life" in entrepreneurial China. In this interview, we discuss the divisions among allopathic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and new biomedicine and the implications this has for civil society and, more distinctly, the body.

In this edition of UCHRI’s Talkbits on civil war, Dipesh Chakrabarty reflects on the politics of survival, flourishing, and postcolonial worldmaking in a time of accelerated planetary destruction.

Since its founding, UCHRI has funded Residential Research Groups for faculty and graduate students to engage in collaborative work around a specific topic. In Spring 2019, the topic was Truth, broadly conceived. UCHRI welcomed convener Aaron James in philosophy at UC Irvine, and participants Wayne Spencer Coffey in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, Robin Derby in History at UCLA, Liron Mor in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, Poulomi Saha in English at UC Berkeley, and Abigail Stepnitz in Jurisprudence and Social Policy also at UC Berkeley. The following is an intimate look into one of their weekly interdisciplinary seminars held here at UCHRI, featuring a conversation that spans vampires, transcontinental witchcraft, and leads ultimately to Hilary Clinton and Pizzagate, which they read as a modern witch story.

The Instagram user Lil Miquela (@lilmiquela) has 1.5 million followers, lucrative advertising deals with giants in the fashion industry, and a management team dedicated to helping her craft her influential personal brand. She’s also a self-identified robot. In this episode, seminar participants discuss the strategic use of Lil Miquela’s biracial identity, progressivism in the fashion industry, and ideas of a digital post-racial future.

In Spring of 2018, a white Utah teenager named Keziah Daum posted photos of herself and her prom date on Facebook and Twitter. She was wearing a red qi pao (or cheongsam), a traditional Chinese dress popularized in China in the 1920s. Twitter users quickly responded that her decision to wear the dress was an example of cultural appropriation. Others argued that it was simply cultural appreciation. In this episode, seminar participants discuss the way that national and international media reported on this incident and examine the assumptions US commentators make how commentators in the United States make decisions about who is allowed to speak on behalf of whom. We also consider the utility of the concept of cultural appropriation itself.

In this installment of our ongoing series audiovisual conversations on civil war, Bishnupriya Ghosh helps us think civility as a handmaiden to power, traversing histories of colonial violence and contemporary populisms.

In this installment of our ongoing series of audiovisual conversations on civil war, Caren Kaplan unpacks the history of aerial technology and warfare in order to underscore the limits of perception, the precariousness of seeing from above, and to trace the intricate web that binds war and everyday life.

The Council of Graduate Schools’ Doctoral Initiative on Minority and Attrition Completion measured the ten-year completion rates for PhDs and found that all students currently stand at 57%, while Latinos complete their degrees at a rate of 51%, and African Americans at 47%. These numbers are limited to STEM fields and do not reflect, for example, notably higher attrition rates in the humanities with a 42% completion rate overall. High attrition rates can be causally linked to problems of graduate student professionalization. The university model equates conference attendance and teaching with professionalization, but this is not enough to efficiently and effectively prepare PhD students for job acquisition and work mobility. What can universities and colleges do to address the challenges of professionalization? And, moreover, how can academic institutions build the infrastructure necessary for addressing the distinct professional needs of diverse groups? This interview with Fatimah Williams, founder of Beyond the Tenure Track, explores how robust professionalization programming can strengthen career pathways and career decision making for diverse students, and looks at some of the best 21st-century models for tackling diversity and professionalization.

In this podcast, we hear from Cynthia Estremera, PhD candidate in English at Lehigh University, Irene Sanchez, PhD, University of Washington alumni and ethnic studies instructor with the Azusa Unified School District, and returning guest Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, assistant professor of sociology at UC Merced and author of “Birthing both a baby and a PhD as a Woman of Color” on the topic. Together, these guests share their experiences in navigating the challenges of motherhood at various stages of their academic careers.

For most of those who have devoted the better part of a decade to earning a PhD in the humanities, a doctoral degree and the experience of earning it holds a deep, inherent value. And yet, higher education struggles to articulate the nature of that value, often resorting to traditional economic notions of earnings and transferrable skills. In this podcast, we explore the concept of value as it is defined within multiple disciplines and contexts.

Episode 1: What is Diversity? examines social justice issues and inclusivity in higher education, centering on the perspectives of faculty, administrators, and graduate students from underrepresented groups. These groups include women, those who identify as LGBTQ, individuals from working-class backgrounds, and people of color. As the United States becomes increasingly diverse, graduation rates for advanced degree holders, management level staff positions, and faculty fail to reflect these changing demographics. Diversity is at the heart of our podcast, however, definitions vary. In this episode we will hear from scholars Whitney N. Pirtle, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC-Merced, Dr. Jenny Kwon Special Projects Coordinator with the Office of the Chancellor at UC-Berkeley, and Henry Lem, PhD Candidate from the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at UC-Irvine, as we attempt to answer the question, “What is diversity?”

On Foundry, UCHRI is hosting a series of audiovisual conversations designed to unpack the thematic of civil war. In our first installment, Toby Miller discusses the social and political hazards of mobile devices—its industry and production—and the violent manipulation embedded in the personal user interface.

Queer People of Color (QPoC) positionalities are a valuable yet underexplored lens through which to rethink the racial and colonial imaginaries and material conditions of subjects and space in Europe. It brings together race, gender, class, colonialism and sexuality, inseparably, in a shared analytic. It addresses multiple erasures: of sexualities and race from discussions of space; of QPoC in Europe from discussions of European subjects, race and space; and from US-centric QPoC studies. Indeed Europeans are generally presumed to be homogeneously white, while people of color are generally presumed to be uniformly straight. Rarely is space understood as a formation that is co-constituted through sexualities with other relations of power. Our intervention radically rethinks urban environments in their relation to race, subjects and agencies. It also puts Queer People of Color (QPoC) in Europe on the map. We explore QPoC activism in Europe as an emerging formation that interrogates multiple conditions and relations of power as they produce exclusion, erasure and repression. What modes of making places and worlds, what transformative horizons come into view, if we take QPoC in Europe and elsewhere seriously as geographic subjects? How can city-space be reconceptualized from the vantage point of QPoC? What possibilities emerge if we examine strategies of resistance and coalitional politics as “translocal” rather than wedded to the nation-state? Given the centrality of gender and sexual violence in racist and colonial projects, what are the promises of centering gender and sexually non-conforming subjects in the study of racism and colonialism, and what would need to happen in order to home them back into antiracist and anticolonial projects? How does QPoC activism in Europe relate to spaces outside of Europe, beyond the US – in particular the Global South? How does this activism challenge the (re)production of Europe’s outside through ideological and material violence against people of color within or outside its borders? We propose QPoC not as the only, but as one in a range of possible modalities that may well open up new ways of looking translocally at space and race, and of resisting racist and colonial control.

Interview with Karen Bassi, Literature and Classics, UC Santa Cruz, Convener with UCHRI Director, David Theo Goldberg about the Fall 2015 Residential Research Group. The fact and consequences of human mortality are principal variables in humanities research. And yet this fact, so often relegated to euphemism, has resisted anything like a comprehensive and sustained interdisciplinary approach. Although the prospects of fearing, facing, and evading death can be found in scholarship in a wide number of disciplines, the study of mortality per se is not a recognized area of research in the humanities. The aim of the Residency is to identify the theoretical and methodological approaches that can initiate and sustain the study of human mortality as a recognized field within the humanities, as a platform for rigorous collaborative research, and as a basis for undergraduate and graduate curricula. The Residency will bring together scholars from a variety of fields in the UC system to discuss and debate the interdisciplinary history of mortality as a basis for comparative study, across cultures, disciplines, and historical periods. Group Members: Karen Bassi, Literature and Classics, UC Santa Cruz, Convener James Lee, Asian American Studies, UCI Raoul Birnbaum, History of Art & Visual Culture, UCSC Kimberly Lau, Literature, UCSC Daniel O’Neill, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCB Ines Hernandez-Avila, Native American Studies, UCD Susan Morrissey, History, UCI Lisa Raphals, Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages, UCR Juan Campo, Religious Studies, UCSB Deborah Lefkowitz, School of Social Ecology, UCI More Info: http://uchri.org/awardees/the-history-of-mortality-interdisciplinary-approaches/

Continental Europe is currently facing the most challenging refugee crises since the Second World War. As many fleeing the conflict raging in Syria and elsewhere, set out onto the treacherous Mediterranean seas, images of dead bodies- including children- now appear in widespread circulation. While such images have, on occasions, notably shifted the political debates, evidencing in the process the power of social media, they are nevertheless still framed and mediated in order to regulate their effects. Indeed, as the images provide an intimate portrait of the encounter with contemporary violence, speaking directly to the questions of human sacrifice, the status of the victim, notions of militaristic valor, onto the aesthetic mediation of suffering – including political expediency, cultural and theological resonance, and beautification, so they point to the complex relationship between sacrificial violence, which is central to its continuum.