Past Events

Each year the Humanities Lab undertakes an investigation of a specific question or topic:

• 2018-19: Art & Politics
• 2017-18: Revolutions
• 2016-17: Energy
• 2015-16: Crisis Narratives
• Spring 2015: Geographies

 

2018-19: Art & Politics

Teju Cole Presents Blind Spot
Wednesday October 3, 2018, 7 pm
Doyle Forman Theater

 

Known and Strange Things: Art and Activism in the 21st Century
Wednesday October 4, 2018, 7 pm
Katzen Art Center

When Nature Becomes Ideology: Lifta’s Silence and the Suburban Landscape of Jerusalem
Friday, November 16, 2018, 1 pm
228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

2017-18: Revolutions 

Frankenstein and Romantic Science
Wednesday February 7, 2018, 1 pm
Richard Sha, Deparment of Literature, American University

Metastable Demons: The Otherworldly Operators of the 20th Century
Wednesday March 7, 2018, 1 pm
Jimena Canales, History of Science, University of Illinois & Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Digital Complexity: On the Circulation of Special Effects
Wednesday April 4, 2018, 1 pm
Oliver Gaycken, Deparment of English, University of Maryland 

2016-17: Energy
Fall 2017

Fuel: History of a Strange Concept
Monday September 26, 2016, 1 pm
Karen Pinkus, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University

Cruising the Petro-state: Car Culture and Nigerian Cinema
Wednesday November 2, 2016, 1 pm
Lindsey Green-Simms, Department of Literature, American University

“After Oil: Transitioning to a New World of Energy”
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Imre Szeman, University of Alberta

Spring 2017

Profane Energies/Sacred Narratives: On Religion and Environmentalism
Wednesday February 15, 2017, 1 pm
Evan Berry, Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University

The Energy of Objects: Loving and Loathing Our Material Things
March 1, 2017, 1 pm
Arielle Bernstein, American University

Learning from Butterflies: Understanding and Predicting Butterfly Responses to a Warming Climate
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Leslie Ries, Department of Biology, Georgetown University

Energy Policy Today: The Environment, the Economy, and Contemporary Politics
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Claire Brunel, American University

2015-16: Crisis Narratives
Fall 2015

Bill Gentle | Reporting from Crisis Zones

We launched our series of events on the concept of crisis with the work of Bill Gentile, journalist, filmmaker and professor at American University’s School of Communication.

Gentile is the founder and director of American University’s Backpack Journalism Project. He is a pioneer of “backpack video journalism” and today he is one of the craft’s most noted practitioners. He is the author of the highly acclaimed “Essential Video Journalism Field Manual.” He engineered the School of Journalism’s 2015 partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and is the driving force behind that initiative

Celine-Marie Pascale | Vernacular Epistemologies of Risk: The Crisis in Fukushima
 

Celine-Marie Pascale, professor of Sociology and expert in the fields of epistemology and language, examined the production of U.S. media discourses regarding the public health risks posed by the massive nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Based on analysis of over 2100 media accounts, she illustrates how media discourses created vernacular epistemologies that constituted not only particular kinds of knowledge but also particular kinds of global citizens.

The earthquake and tsunami events, commonly known in Japan as “3/11,” caused dramatic transformations to the natural, built, and social environments. But as professor Pascale discusses in this project, there were also epistemic changes arising from this disaster that are less obvious but perhaps no less profound in their consequences. The discourses of risk in media provided a very particular vernacular epistemology for risk assessment, both now and in the future. Through dominant reporting practices, media did not just shape perceptions of the Fukushima disaster, they provided heuristics—a vernacular epistemology— through which the importance and risk of nuclear radiation is to be understood.

 

George Galster | Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City
 

For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly high murder rate. In Driving Detroit, author George Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half century. Galster invites the reader to travel with him along the streets and into the soul of this place to grasp fully what drives the Motor City.

With a scholar’s rigor and a local’s perspective, Galster uncovers why metropolitan Detroit’s cultural, commercial, and built landscape has been so radically transformed. He shows how geography, local government structure, and social forces created a housing development system that produced sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Galster argues that this system, in tandem with the region’s automotive economic base, has chronically frustrated the population’s quest for basic physical, social, and psychological resources. These frustrations, in turn, generated numerous adaptations—distrust, scapegoating, identity politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional fragmentation—that collectively leave Detroit in an uncompetitive and unsustainable position.

Claudia Rankine | Citizen: An American Lyric
 

Claudia Rankine visited American University in November 2015 for a series of events connected to her award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).

Citizen: An American Lyric is a cutting meditation on race and the crisis of citizenship in contemporary America. The Humanities Lab partnered with the Creative Writing Program Visiting Writers Series and the Department of Literature to discuss the book at several events.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry and two plays and is the editor of multiple anthologies. Citizen was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the PEN Open Book Award.

Spring 2016

Elliott Colla | Revolution in Verse: Protest Culture in Egypt
 

Professor Elliott Colla (Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University) discussed the literary heritage of “The Arab Spring” as a way of evaluating how poetry informs activism and political protest.

When Egyptians took to the streets five years ago, they armed themselves with poems. During the initial 18-day period of revolution, the soundtrack was that of rhyming couplets and song, through which revolutionaries managed to articulate a wide range of demands, complaints and dreams. What is it about poetry that makes it so useful to protest movements? What can the study of slogans teach us about poetry and literature?

A celebrated scholar of Arabic literature, translator, and novelist, Professor Colla is currently a William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University. This engaging talk on political slogans in Egypt was part of his new book in progress, The People Wanted: Words, Movements, and Egyptian Revolution.

Rachel Louise Snyder | Eradicating Domestic Violence

In this lecture Rachel Louise Snyder presented her groundbreaking investigation into domestic violence, and offered her insights about how new methods of evaluation and new collaborative practices can make a difference in curbing domestic homicide. Featured in The New Yorker and other major publications, her research is also informing discussions of policy, and changing law enforcement and social programs that respond to domestic violence today.

Paul Wapner | The Global Environmental Crisis

For decades, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about the environmental “crisis.” They warn that the earth’s ecosystems are in acute danger and that injustices abound as people exploit each other through the medium of nature. How useful is the concept of “crisis” to describe environmental degradation? It is certainly the case that climate change, freshwater scarcity, loss of biological diversity, and other factors are undermining the planet’s life-support systems, and that untold numbers of people and creatures are affected. But does labeling these phenomena as a “crisis” help or hinder humanity’s ability to respond? In this talk, Professor Paul Wapner examined the relationship between crisis and response.

Jay Melder | Responding to Homelessness in DC
 

Jay Melder, Chief of Staff at the DC Department of Human Services, discussed the challenge of homelessness for the future of DC. Our city has experienced incredible change and growth in the last decades, but still struggles with poverty, gentrification, the displacement of long-time residents, and urban homelessness. Melder explained how city agencies, organizations, and officials take on the challenges of chronic homelessness in a city that has been radically transformed in recent years by new urban developments and changing demographics.
 

Spring 2015

Where is the Internet?

Laura DeNardis
 

How do technologies once imagined as disembodied or dispersed become local? Laura DeNardis is one of the world’s foremost Internet governance scholars and a professor in the School of Communication at American University. In this talk she discusses current debates about internet infrastructure and neutrality, and traces how the internet has evolved from a dispersed and ethereal technology to a global everyday utility and a local, and fiercely debated, political resource.

Geocaching: An Interdisciplinary Community Project
David Pike
 

How do we transform the landscape around us through stories, images, memories, and experiences? David Pike is a professor of literature at American University, and the author of major books in urban studies, modernism, cinema, and comparative literature. For this project he is introducing the AU community to geocaching, a collaborative project that connects physical and virtual space. Using mobile apps and maps, students from participating classes will “seed” the American University campus and other locations in the DC area with geocaches, and invite the community to find and respond to these hidden treasure troves. In addition to physical artifacts, historical materials, and clues for more interaction, geocaches will include stories, poems, and artwork, and elements that are real, imaginary, past, or lost. After the introductory lecture and workshop, follow-up events will extend this project throughout the semester— with the participation of graduate and undergraduate students and faculty from multiple departments and programs including literature, public history, world languages and cultures, art history, creative writing, arts management, college writing, film and visual media, philosophy and religion, graphic design, and computer science.

Fables of De-Patriation: Undocumented Others in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre
Ricardo Ortiz
 

How can we understand the experiences of people whose lives have become radically displaced or deterritorialized? Ricardo Ortiz is associate professor of US Latino Literature and Culture at Georgetown University. His work focuses on hemispheric, transnational “Américas” Studies, cultural studies, and race, gender and queer theory. For this talk, he discusses the representation of migration and violence in the film Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009), which follows illegal immigrants and escaping gang members on the dangerous train journey from Honduras, through Mexico, to the United States. Combining fictional and documentary elements, and filming in real locations with real people, the film becomes an emotional testament of migration and displacement. A film screening will be scheduled for early March.

The Humanities Truck
Dan Kerr, Nina Shapiro-Perl, Juliana Martinez

How do we mobilize the humanities, and connect with the community in ways that are innovative, uncharted, and truly on the move? Functioning as a mobile workshop, recording studio, and exhibit space, the Humanities Truck will document experiences, start conversations, and share the stories of diverse, underserved communities in the Washington, DC, region. For this lunchtime roundtable discussion, the interdisciplinary team of faculty behind this exciting project will present their first projects and aims. As an experimental mobile platform for collecting, preserving, and expanding dialogue around the humanities, the Humanities Truck will work with specific micro-communities throughout the region, in order to recognize and enhance the existing cultural creativity in communities that are typically devalued, and foster imaginative new ways of addressing community challenges in the midst of rapid urban change.

2015-16: Energy

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