Featured News & Events
Shaoling Ma: What Do Media Do?
Shaoling Ma’s talk “What Do Media Do? The ‘Case’ of Late Qing China, 1861–1906,” drew on her recent book, The Stone and the Wireless, Mediating China 1861-1906.
[Read More]Allen Riddell: Every Victorian Novel
Allen Riddell’s talk, “Every Victorian Novel: Dispatches from Data-Intensive Book History,” reviewed three recent contributions to the history of fiction publishing in the British Isles and Ireland during the 19th century.
[Read More]Radical Futures Symposium
The Radical Futures symposium, which took place on March 20-21, 2021, brought together researchers from Germany and the US to discuss both the future of media and form(at)s of imagination/imaginaries in the 21st century.
[Read More]Projects
Upcoming Events
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Mar
19
The Role of Latin American Indigenous Images & Narrations in Healing Colonial Wounds 11:00am
The Role of Latin American Indigenous Images & Narrations in Healing Colonial Wounds
Tuesday, March 19th, 2024
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
The Dodd Center for Human Rights
ES: “El Papel de las Imágenes y Narrativas Indígenas Latinoamericanas en la Sanación de las Heridas Coloniales”
Language: Please note that this discussion will be held in Spanish with simultaneous translation provided to English. Those who would like to listen along in English are encouraged to bring a smartphone and headphones.
Please Register Below
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Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian sociologist of Aymara and Sephardic descent. Her work focuses on the socio-political history of Bolivia, collective memory, and imagery as a social document. She served as a professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés for 35 years until her retirement in 2014. She currently teaches at various universities in Bolivia and abroad. In 2019, she was awarded honorary doctorates from UMSA and the University of San Luis (Argentina). In 1983, she co-founded the Andean Oral History Workshop with Tomás Huanca Laura, alongside students and faculty of the Public University of La Paz. During the challenging times of Bolivian ‘progressivism,’ she organized the Ch’ixi Collective with UMSA faculty and students, with its headquarters (Tambo Ch’ixi in Tembladerani) housing the Free Lecture, where she has directed the Sociology of Image Seminar since 2015.
Rivera Cusicanqui has authored several notable books, including Oprimidos pero no Vencidos: Luchas del Campesinado Aymara y Qhichwa, 1900-1980 [EN: “Oppressed but not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Qhechwa in Bolivia, 1900-1980”] (1984, 2003); Los Artesanos Libertarios y la Ética del Trabajo (co-authored with Zulema Lehm, 1988); Las Fronteras de la Coca (2003); Violencias (re)Encubiertas en Bolivia (2010); Mito y Desarrollo. El Giro Colonial del Gobierno del MAS (2015); Un Mundo Ch’ixi es Posible. Ensayos = un Presente en Crisis (2015, 2020); and Sociología de la Imagen (2018, 2023).
She has been a visiting professor at universities spanning Latin America including UNAM, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara (Mexico); FLACSO and Universidad Andina (Ecuador); and São Paulo and Santa Catarina (Brazil). In Europe, she has been invited to teach at universities and art spaces in Tenerife, Lisbon, Paris, and Barcelona. Rivera Cusicanqui has received several awards for her work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bolivia Strategic Research Program (PIEB, La Paz, 2014); the Culture 21 Award from the United Cities and Local Governments organization (CGLU, Barcelona/Mexico 2016); and the Ester Boserup Award (Copenhagen, 2023).
In the audiovisual field, she has written and directed documentaries and docu-fictions such as Khunuskiw: Recuerdos del Porvenir, Wut Walanti: Lo irreparable, and the series Las Fronteras de la Coca along with the fictional film Sueño en el Cuarto Rojo. She self-identifies as an Anarchist and Birchola.
Francisco Huichaqueo Pérez is an artist from the Indigenous Mapuche community in Chile whose work explores the social landscape, history, culture, and worldview of his people. His films use a variety of approaches to engage with, activate, and preserve Indigenous traditions and foster understanding. Kuifi ül (Ancient Sound) enacts the healing and awakening power of the trutruka, a traditional wind instrument. Trankal Küra presents a dance of resistance on stolen land, while reveries are re-created in Super 8 film and video in Los sueños de la Machi Silvia Kallfüman. Künü documents the commissioning and construction of a Mapuche ceremonial center, memorial, and place for parliament in Loncoche. It demonstrates the diplomatic prowess of the Mapuche leaders, who won consensus amongst disparate Indigenous communities, a forestry company, and the Chilean architects who helped them design the place.
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This event is part of a series held by the Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights. Other events during the residency include:
- Friday, March 22: “Anarchist Struggles in La Paz: Militant Repression of the Local Workers Federation and Women’s Workers Federation.” Photographic exhibition curated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.
- Tuesday, March 26: “Collective Struggles in Defense of the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Populations Attacked by the Bolivian State, 2011-2023.” Public lecture by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.
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The Gladstein Visiting Professor is a distinguished scholar with international standing in the study of human rights, who participates in a 10-day visit to the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute at UConn. During that time, they deliver a major public lecture, teach a seminar in their specialty, and consult with the faculty and graduate students of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute’s research programs.
This event is co-sponsored by the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative, El Instituto, the Departments of Anthropology and Digital Media & Design, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Native American Cultural Programs, as well as the Research Programs on Arts & Human Rights and Global Health & Human Rights at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute.
Contact Information:
Alex Branzell, Events & Communications Coordinator, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut
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Mar
20
UCHI Fellow’s Talk: Martine Granby on a Black American Legacy of Care 12:15pm
UCHI Fellow’s Talk: Martine Granby on a Black American Legacy of Care
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024
12:15 PM - 01:15 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
Spanning decades of familial memories, TEN SECONDS OF SUGAR is a personal essay documentary film chronicling a legacy of caretaking, motherhood, and silence of Black women’s mental health. Reimagining the past as a form of trauma recovery, employing an essayistic approach illustrating the historical relationships between Black American women and the American health system.
SECONDS is a portrait disrupting generational divisions, seeking care, what it means to overcome structural inequalities, and what we pass down. Guided by my narrative voice, captured mainly by an analog tape recorder, the film presents a series of conversations between three generations of women: myself, my mother, and my maternal grandmother. The camera’s presence is a catalyst, paving the way for us to make space to speak openly and without judgment.
Through this talk, I’ll screen excerpts from work-in-progress scenes that render my family’s lineage of caretaking professions, nurses, mental health practitioners, and funeral directors as a form of care reformation and the accompanying research.
Martine Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Connecticut, focusing on documentary filmmaking with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She produces films that weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, and discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities.
Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and Gladstein Chair of Human Rights. He is a scholar of transitional justice and his recent scholarship has focused on hate speech and incitement in international and U.S. law. His books include The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, and Incitement on Trial. He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of Connecticut and he is writing a book about the challenges in reporting, investigating, and prosecuting bias-motivated crimes in the United States.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
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Mar
20
UCHI Talk: Elizabeth Della Zazzera on Early 19th-Century French Poetry Almanacs 3:30pm
UCHI Talk: Elizabeth Della Zazzera on Early 19th-Century French Poetry Almanacs
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024
03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
On the May souvenir page of her 1814 copy of Hommage aux dames, Henriette François Louise Rigano recorded that her husband, Albert Prisse, had traveled to Paris on May 19. On that same page, she wrote that “the French left Maastricht on May 4,” juxtaposing the movements of her family members with the history of the collapse of Napoleon’s European empire. Hommage aux dames was one of a series of very similar almanac titles (Almanach des dames, Almanach dédié aux demoiselles, etc.) produced in France and marketed to women in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This talk will explore how these almanacs, which were primarily poetry anthologies with calendars and sometimes souvenir pages attached, shifted the almanac’s relationship to locality and to time, not only because of their content and format, but also because of how they were used.
Elizabeth Della Zazzera is an assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut’s History department and Director of Communications & Undergraduate Outreach at the UConn Humanities Institute. A historian of modern Europe, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her scholarship focuses on how ideas move on the ground—how their method of transmission and dissemination affects the ideas themselves—with a particular emphasis on the intellectual history of material texts and urban environments in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. Her current book project explores the role of the periodical press, the theatre, and literary sociability in the bataille romantique: the conflict between romantics and classicists. She is also working on a project about French literary almanacs in the early nineteenth century. Her article, “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States” was awarded the 2015 Book History essay prize.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
Contact Information:
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Mar
22
From Wine Moms to QAnon: or, What’s the Problem with Self-Care? The Surprising Connections between White Supremacy and Online Wellness 12:30pm
From Wine Moms to QAnon: or, What’s the Problem with Self-Care? The Surprising Connections between White Supremacy and Online Wellness
Friday, March 22nd, 2024
12:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Homer Babbidge Library
The spread of online racism, homophobia, and misogyny continues to wreak havoc in our homes, our schools, and our streets. Media coverage has illuminated how the toxic masculinity of the Proud Boys and other hate groups function in these spaces. Most of us—students and faculty alike—know to avoid these openly hateful spaces, and often take refuge in seemingly frivolous posts about wellness, beauty and self-care. Yet the spread of white nationalism continues unabated, often with “recruits” emerging in surprising places.
Join us for an interdisciplinary workshop and panel discussion that explores how mommy blogs and beauty influencer posts offer “innocent” vehicles for white supremacist tenets of purity, and rigid bodily surveillance.
The day will begin with a writing workshop (12:30-2:00 pm) in which all researchers working on adjacent topics will be invited to join us in group writing and discussion in response to a pre-circulated article. Join us for lunch and the opportunity to think and write with other scholars thinking through these thorny issues. This workshop is open to faculty and graduate students.
Register to attend the workshop and download the article.
The workshop is followed by two panel discussions, open to all, including undergraduate students; we are eager to learn from their perspectives on contemporary online culture. Like the workshop, the panels will take place in the UCHI conference room and will also be livestreamed over Zoom with automated captioning.
Schedule:
12:30-2:00 Writing Workshop with Lunch
2:00-3:30 Panel 1: Unexpected Crossovers to Conspiracy
“Conspiracism” Eric Berg, Philosophy, UConn
“Romance” Alexis Boylan, Art History, Africana Institute, UConn
“Wine Mom” Beth Marshall, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser U, Vancouver, CA
3:30-3:45 Coffee Break
3:45-5:00: Panel 2: So What’s the Problem with Self-Care?
“Retreat” Leigh Gilmore, English, The Ohio State University
“It Girls” Tracy Llanera, Philosophy, UConn
“Microbiome” Rebekah Sheldon, English, University of Indiana