THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Events
Bharat Jayram Venkat
February 17, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Continents Apart: Disability, Thermal Inequality, and the Narrowing of Worlds
Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat
University of California, Los Angeles
ABSTRACT: For some people, climate change has quite literally made their world smaller. This talk focuses on the ways in which rising temperatures have reshaped how certain people—frequently disabled and/or experiencing chronic illness—relate to their bodies, their homes, and their worlds. Drawing on research with people who experience thermoregulatory symptoms, I argue that the narrowing of the world is both a consequence of how heat disproportionately impacts disabled people and a strategy utilized by disabled people to survive in what are increasingly hostile climates.
BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Institute for Society & Genetics. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). His current book project—titled Swelter: The Fate of Our Bodies in a Warming World—is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the plight of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. This book reflects on the existential and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our bodies as they experience this crisis. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States, and Picador in the United Kingdom. Dr. Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab. His work has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and most recently, by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Venkat’s talk.
Krystal A. Smalls
February 24, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Ways of Relating in Dire Times: Lessons from Black Living
Dr. Krystal A. Smalls
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
ABSTRACT: In this moment of mounting US fascism, many of us are strategizing ways of keeping one another alive. We are also cultivating ways of keeping one another free, fed, educated, and healthy because we understand that while staying alive and living fully are tightly bound to one another, they are not the same thing. Taking up relationality as a mode of deep living, this talk explores some of the affective, aesthetic, and intersubjective dimensions of Black languaging and also suggests that there are racialized and racializing “ways of relating” that transcend verbal language to create diasporic legibility, familiarity, intimacy, and animosity through and around difference. It also suggests that there are human and humanizing ways of relating that shape our broader efforts to stay alive and live deeply. Through ethnographic examples and Black theory, we will glean the raciosemiotics of an expressive esotericism and aesthetic that help constitute Black Diasporic relationality, space, and place - and that often provide protection and pleasure in dire conditions. As many continue to turn to global Black resistance movements as guides for collective survival and liberation, this talk asks what we might learn when we also closely study the mundane practices of worldmaking and lifemaking that have sustained Black peoples throughout the longue duree of antiblack racism.
BIOGRAPHY: Krystal A. Smalls is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora by Oxford University Press (2024).
Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
March 3, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
University of Louisville
Aalyia Sadruddin
March 31, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin
Wellesley College
Jennifer C. Hsieh
April 7, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Jennifer C. Hsieh
University of Michigan
Usha Reena Rungoo
April 14, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Usha Reena Rungoo
Harvard University
Undergraduate Thesis Symposium
May 12, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Undergraduate Thesis Symposium
Please join us for this year’s Anthropology Undergraduate Symposium, which will showcase the work of graduating fourth years who have completed a BA Thesis for Departmental Honors.
The symposium will be followed immediately by a department picnic in the Classics Quad outside Haskell Hall.