2008-2009
The aim of the Graduate Research Workshops in the Humanities and Social Sciences is to bring together faculty and graduate students from the University of Chicago and the wider Chicago area to create scholarly dialogue, to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, and to foster exchange of ideas. The emphasis of these workshops is the presentation of graduate student dissertation work in progress. Each workshop reflects the research interests of a particular group of faculty members and graduate students.
The following workshops are actively situated within the Anthropology Department:
AFRICAN STUDIES
The African Studies Workshop in an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty whose work concerns the material and socio cultural lives of people of the African Continent and its discursively constituted diasporas, presently and historically. Student participants tend mostly to come from the anthropology department, but the workshop also has active members in the fields of history, literature, political science, religious studies, and history of culture and encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration and exchange. In addition to regular presentations by students, faculty, and invited guests, the workshop hosts biannual Red Lion Seminars jointly with Northwestern University's Program of African Studies
Faculty Sponsors: Emily Osborn, François G. Richard
Student Coordinator: Elizabeth Brummel (ebrummel@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/african/
Time: Alternate Tuesdays, 5:00 pm, Wilder House.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF EUROPE
This workshop explores current research in the anthropology of Europe and treats ongoing ethnographic fieldwork -- local, regional, national, and transnational -- in all areas of Europe. While the workshop focuses on anthropological approaches, it also draws on insights from history, sociology, and cultural studies, inviting participants from these and other disciplines. Presentations range from lectures by visiting Europeanist anthropologists, to discussions of work in progress by Chicago faculty, to papers by students on their field research.
Faculty Sponsors: Kesha Fikes, Victor Friedman, Susan Gal
Student Coordinators: Owen Kohl (owenkohl@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/antheur/
Time: Thursdays, 4:30 p.m., Haskell 101.
EMPIRES AND COLONIES
Empires and Colonies responds to the need for a shared academic forum for graduate students and faculty whose work is in conversation with imperial and colonial studies. Temporally it will span the fifteenth century to the present. It provides an opportunity for members to raise and consider methodological and theoretical questions regarding both imperialism and colonialism. Among the questions considered are the following: What are the interrelationships between colonies and empires? How do we understand the relationship between the growth of colonialism and the rise of modernity? How do we account for and understand the creation of imperial and colonial subjectivities, and how do we account for their change over time?
Faculty Sponsors: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Emily Osborn
Student Coordinators: Stacie Kent (sakent@uchicago.edu)
Richard Weyhing (rweyhing@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/empire/
Time: Alternate Wednesdays, 5:00 p.m., Cobb 112.
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
The goal of this workshop is to provide an informed, interdisciplinary dialogue on the various dimensions of how people engage with their environments. The environment -- broadly considered as a dynamic product constantly (re)produced through the interaction of people and the material world they both comprise and occupy -- is a source of human sustenance as well as an object of politics, social movements, discourses, and cultural representations. Our goal for this year is to explore the relationships among human rights, perceptions of the environment, cultural representations of nature, and the materiality of environmental histories as they are configured in specific social, political, and cultural contexts.
Faculty Sponsors: Alan Kolata, Mark Lycett, Kathleen Morrison
Student Coordinators: Medeleine McLeester (maddie@uchicago.edu)
Brian Wilson (bcwilson@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/global/
Time: Alternate Wednesdays, 4:30 p.m., Pick 105.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Due to domestic and world events, human rights have become a vital focus for academic research across disciplines. Responding to a growing need to examine and discuss human rights, the human rights program has organized a workshop for the presentation of research and discussion on relevant contemporary human rights issues. The Human Rights Workshop crosscuts all academic disciplines and helps the campus community to engage in the examination of issues of moral and political significance. In 2007-08, the workshop will be organized along thematic lines in cooperation with faculty sponsors: Autumn: the history of human rights (Michael Geyer, History); Winter: human rights and the environment (Mark Lycett and Kathleen Morrison, Anthropology); and Spring: human rights and political struggle in comparative perspective (John Comaroff, Anthropology).
Faculty Sponsors: Susan Gzesh, Michael Geyer
Student Coordinator: Toussaint Losier (tlosier@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://humanrights.uchicago.edu/workshops.html
Time: Alternate Thursdays, 4:30-6:00 p.m., Pick 105
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARCHAEOLOGY
The primary objective of the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop is to forge a lively and respectful dialogue on aspects of method and theory that cut across diverse disciplinary boundaries. "Object Worlds" will be the centerpiece of a series of explorations to be held in a variety of formats throughout the year. Out goal will be to understand human materiality from a wide array of perspectives. The workshop unites faculty and students from Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as members of other departments and committees such as Art History, Classics, the Ancient Mediterranean World, East Asia, South Asia and Geographical Studies.
Faculty Sponsors: Geoff Emberling, François G. Richard
Student Coordinator: Sarah Kautz (skautz@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/intarch/
Time: Alternate Thursdays, 4:00-6:00 p.m., Haskell Mezzanine 102.
MEDICINE, BODY, AND PARACTICE
This workshop explores practice and experience as a middle ground between the formerly dominant polarities of body as brute materiality on the one hand and as mere symbolic representation on the other. It also seeks to provide a venue for reports on bodily matters from several disciplinary orientations and from a variety of non-Western settings. Our thematic interests for the 2007-08 academic year include disciplining and disciplines of the body; semiotics and the senses; immigration, globalization, and categories of the body and bodies; violence and memory; ecology and environment; reproductive demographics and state policy; scientific and legal approaches to medicine and the body; and most centrally, medicine, medical practice, and health care.
Faculty Sponsors: E. Summerson Carr, Jean Comaroff, Judith Farquhar, Raymond Fogelson
Student Coordinators: Adam Seaman (ats2@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/medprabod/
Time: Alternate Wednesdays, 3:00-4:30 p.m., Judd 313.
MONEY AND MARKETS
The Money and Markets Workshop will emphasize the role of ethnographic fieldwork and historical findings to critically analyze economic assumptions. The workshop provides a forum for both theory and research into empirical, "on the ground" economic behavior around markets, money, and consumption, which allows researchers to observe and deduce the various social and cultural factors that influence and problematize this behavior. This workshop aims to build up an interdisciplinary community of students and faculty to both critique and complement rational economic theories about individual and group economic behavior, through factors such as social, cultural, and historical specificity.
Faculty Sponsors: Karin Knorr Cetina, Ryan Lancaster
Student Coordinators: David Bholat (dbholat@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/money/
Time: Tuesdays, 12:00 Noon - 1:20 p.m.
POLITICS, COMMUNICATION, AND SOCIETY
The Politics, Communication, and Society Workshop ties together diverse strands of research on the political aspects and social roles of communicative practices. With faculty sonsors and student coordinators drawn from several disciplines in the social sciences, the workshop provides participatns with an opportunity to approach the issues of communication from a variety of perspectives and with a variety of focal points. Out conversation over the last few years has been a wide-ranging exploration of topics like the social efficacy of political rhetoric and symbolism, the role of language in the construction of reality, the transformation of concepts through the media, and the relations between sociohistorical processes and systems of signification.
Faculty Sponsors: Andreas Glaeser, Michael Silverstein, Lisa Wedeen
Student Coordinators: Paola Castano (pcastano@uchicago.edu)
Yazan Doughan (yazan@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/pcs/
Time: Alternate Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00 p.m., Wilder House.
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY AND THE STATE (STSS)
The study of science, technology, and society has emerged as a significant and provocative new interdisciplinary effort. With innovative approaches to the constitution of techno-scientific knowledge both inside and outside traditional research settings, science and technology studies have fruitfully challenged the anthropologies, sociologies, and histories of knowledge once dominant in the academy. This interdisciplinary workshop aims to explore the complex forms of association and discourse that link the pursuit of techno-scientific knowledge more particularly to the nation-state project and its institutional practices. This year we will more specifically explore the overarching theme of "Science, Security, and Society." How are techno-scientific projects like those the workshop has focused on in the past being transformed by global geopolitical shifts and the global emergence of discourses of security? How is the securitization of knowledge reconstruing our received understandings of scientific practice?
Faculty Sponsors: James Hevia, John D. Kelly, Joseph Masco
Student Coordinator: TBA
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/stss/
Time: Tuesdays, 4:30-6:00 p.m., Haskell 101.
SEMIOTICS: CULTURE IN CONTEXT
This workshop seeks to advance research based on a semiotic framework. Presentations will come from a variety of fields, including but not limited to linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science, literary theory, history, and anthropology. The workshop does not seek to limit its topics of research by area, period, or discipline, thereby providing an eminently suitable forum for wide-ranging discussions and conceptualizations regarding the study of social and cultural phenomena as embedded in meaningful contexts. Building on various seminal studies that have used semiotic approaches, the workshop has the goal of continuing to develop and finesse rigorous analytic frameworks that provide the methods for clearly defining linkages between the object of analysis and its context.
Faculty Sponsors: Susan Gal, Michael Silverstein
Student Coordinators: Adam Sargent (sargenta@uchicago.edu)
Gabe Tusinsiki (tusinski@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/semiotics/
Time: Alternate Thursdays, 4:30-6:00 p.m., Haskell 101.
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SOUTH ASIA (TAPSA)
This workshop is designed to keep faculty and graduate students of social science and humanistic disciplines concerned with south Asia in touch with new directins in the field by providing interdisciplinary models of methodological and substantive approaches. Its more immediate, concrete goal is to keep graduate students in touch with their colleagues' work and faculty informed about the research of graduate students in sister departments. The workshop places special emphasis on interdisciplinary research, especially between the humanities and social sciences. It collaborates with the South Asia seminar: TAPSA dedicated to graduate student presentations, and the South Asia seminar to presentations by resident or visitng scholars and faculty.
Faculty Spronsors: Elena Bashir, John D. Kelly, Gary Tubb
Student Coordinator: Dwaipayan Sen (sen@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://southasia/uchicago.edu/newsevents/htm
Time: Alternate Thursdays, 4:30-6:30 p.m., South Asia Lounge (Foster 103).
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Several other Workshops of major interest to anthropology students include:
ETHNOISE! ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
This workshop contributes to a growing interdisciplinary discourse on music in its cultural context, establishing an interchange between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. This forum capitalizes upon ongoing work of graduate students in the university and invites innovative scholars to Chicago to explore the challenges faced by music ethnographers. We welcome submissions from graduate students in all disciplines and encourage university-wide faculty participation.
Faculty Sponsors: Philip V. Bohlman, Travis A. Jackson, Kaley R. Mason
Student Coordinators: Rachel Adelstein (adelstein@uchicago.edu)
Ieda Bispo (ibispo@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/ethnoise/
Time: Alternate Thursdays, 4:30 p.m., Goodspeed 205
GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
The Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for the development of critical perspectives on gender and sexuality. The workshop's primary purpose is to promote studies of the ways in which gender and sexuality shape human experiences and are embedded in other social practices. The workshop serves as a forum for discussion of both graduate student papers and unpublished work from scholars in the field. Graduate student presentations may focus on any area of gender or sexuality studies. Workshop participants share the responsibility for choosing topics and speakers and for evaluating the effectiveness of the workshop's interdisciplinary process.
Faculty Sponsors: Stuart Michaels, Debbie Nelson
Student Coordinators: Monica Mercado (mmercado@uchicago.edu)
Anthony Todd (artodd@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://genderstudies.uchicago.edu/events/workshops.shtml
Time: Alternate Tuesdays, 4:30-6:30 pm, Center for Gender Studies Seminar Room
REPRODUCTION OF RACE AND RACIAL IDEOLOGIES
This interdisciplinary workshop addresses the different processes of racialization experienced within groups as well as across groups in sites as diverse as North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Asian Pacific, and Europe. This workshop will examine theoretical and practical considerations of scholarship that highlights the intersection of race and ethnicity with other identities such as gender, class, sexuality, and nationality and interrogates social and identity cleavages within racialized communities. Fundamentally, the workshop is committed to engaged scholarship that rejects the false dichotomy between rigorous intellectual work and community activism.
Faculty Sponsors: Ramon Gutierrez
Student Coordinator: Marcella Medford (mandisa@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://csrpc.uchicago.edu/workshops.shtml/
Time: Alternate Thursdays, 4:15 - 5:30 p.m.,
Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.
COMPARATIVE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
This workshop builds upon and contributes to the reemergence of "cultural psychology" as the comparative study of the way culture and psyche are constitutive of one another. It is specifically concerned with the ways in which the person and her or his mental well-being are defined and developed in diverse environmental and sociocultural contexts. Presentations by graduate students, faculty, and occasional outside speakers from anthropology, psychology, and allied fields will focus on diverse topics in mental health behavior research, including the cultural constitution of disease, the temporal patterning of health-related processes within a life-span perspective, and optimal experience.
Faculty Sponsors: Bertram Cohler, Richard tAUB
Student Coordinators: Ryoko Imai (rimai@uchicago.edu)
Abbe Kopra (abberose@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/clcmh/
Time: Tuesdays, 12:00-1:30 p.m., Judd 313.
MASS CULTURE
The Mass Culture Workshop is a forum for recent and ongoing academic research on the historical, theoretical, and practical dimensions of modern mass (commercial, consumer, or popular) media, including cinema, television, journalism, popular music, photography, advertising, fashion, public amusements, and computer technology. While we do consider interpretive problems presented by individual works and different types of mass media, our focus rests on broader questions regarding the key role mass culture plays in the formation of contemporary public spheres. Because the scope of many forms of mass culture extends beyond the boundaries of any one discipline, the workshop is committed to interdisciplinary work.
Faculty Sponsors: James Lastra, Tom Gunning
Student Coordinators: Ivan Ross (ivanross@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/masscult/
Time: Alternate Fridays, 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 Noon, Cobb 310.
RACE AND RELIGION: THOUGHT, PRACTICE, AND MEANING
The Race and Religion: Thought, Practice and Meaning Workshop seeks to address the ideas, meanings, and practices of the sacred within racially marginalized communities. The workshop seeks to acknowledge both an intellectual conviction to the exploration of religion among racialized peoples and a commitment to engaging with and clarifying the impact of religion in racialized communities.
Faculty Sponsors: Dwight Hopkins, Omar McRoberts
Student Coordinators: Karl Lampley (kwlampley@uchicago.edu)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/rtpm/
Time: Alternate Tuesdays, 4:15-5:30 p.m., Swift 400.
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Other Workshops of Areal Interest:
ART AND POLITICS OF EAST ASIA
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/apea/
CHINA BEFORE PRINT
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/china/
EAST ASIA: POLITICS, ECONOMY, AND SOCIETY
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/eastasia/
EAST ASIA: TRANSREGIONAL HISTORIES
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/eastasia_trh/
VISUAL AND MATERIAL PERSPECTIVES ON EAST ASIA
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/vmpea/
MIDDLE EAST HISTORY AND THEORY (MEHAT)
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/mehat/
ISLAM ART and ARTIFACT
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/islamart/
LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/lah/
MODERN RUSSIAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES
Website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/russian/
INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO MODERN FRANCE
Website: http://fcc.uchicago.edu/workshop/
For a complete list and descriptions of all the graduate workshops, please visit the Council for Advanced Studies (Workshops in Humanities and Social Sciences)
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