IHC Research Focus Groups

Events

Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

  • Research Focus Group Talk: Domesticating the Future: Egyptian Children’s Publishing, Generation Z, and the Neoliberal Ideology of the New Wave

    Zoom

    The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Dr. Yasmine Motawy. In this talk, Motawy will examine the Egyptian child reader as a historically produced subject shaped by two decades of neoliberal transformation. Drawing on her new book, Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society, which examines a new wave of Egyptian picturebooks published in Egypt since the early 2000s, she will trace the historical development of Egyptian children’s literature ...

    Research Focus Group Roundtable: Race and the Question of Palestine: Lana Tatour in Conversation with Bishnupriya Ghosh and Elisabeth Weber

    1930 Buchanan Buchanan Hall, Isla Vista, CA, United States

    The Catastrophes RFG invites you to a roundtable with Lana Tatour, in conversation with Bishnupriya Ghosh and Elisabeth Weber and moderated by Sherene Seikaly, about Tatour's recent co-edited volume (with Ronit Lentin), Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2025). The book maintains that the colonization of Palestine cannot be understood outside the grammar of race, and it stresses the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler ...

    Research Focus Group Event: Childhood Studies Open House

    McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

    Are you interested in: – children’s media, literature, and culture – historical childhoods – children’s rights – education – child pyschology – sociology of childhood The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group welcomes graduate and undergraduate students from any department with an interest in Childhood Studies to attend our Open House! Free food and drinks provided. Learn about our on-campus Childhood Studies community (courses, affiliated faculty, and graduate students), research and conference opportunities offered by ...

  • Research Focus Group Talk: Childhood and the Role of Adults in the Identity Formation of Children in Ghanaian Children’s Literature

    Zoom

    The perception of childhood seems to vary across cultures and literature is a key conveyor of cultural heritage. heritage. In this talk, Clara Asare-Nyarko will explore childhood and the roles adults play in the identity formation of children in Ghanaian children’s literature. Although the development of children’s literature in Ghana began in the 1950s and a significant volume has been produced for young readers, research on children’s literature in Ghana remains largely a neglected area ...

    Research Focus Group Talk: Accumulation by Dispossession: The Timber Salvage Project on Ghana’s Volta Lake

    4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

    This talk draws on the timber salvage project on Ghana’s Volta Lake to theorize how accumulation by dispossession is reproduced through contemporary environmental governance. It situates salvage within the lake’s longer history of state-led development and displacement following the Akosombo Dam. Framed around sustainability, safety, and economic opportunity, timber extraction reworks a shared lake space into a site of value capture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis, the talk shows how state and corporate ...

  • Research Focus Group Talk: All the Frost Melts: A Trilingual Reading in Dolgan, Russian, and English

    McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

    This trilingual reading of writings by Indigenous writer Kseniia Bolshakova will include portions from her autobiographical novel All the Frost Melts, which was recently translated into English after being published in Dolgan and Russian in 2024. It will feature writer Kseniia Bolshakova reading in Dolgan, linguist Karina Sheifer (UC Santa Barbara) reading in Russian, and translator Ainsley Morse (UC San Diego) reading in English. The reading also will include imagery from life in the Russian ...

  • Research Focus Group Talk: Gilgamesh and the Many Faces of Mesopotamian Heroism

    Zoom

    Please join us on Friday, May 1 at 1:30PM PST for a virtual lecture by Eric Harvey on "Gilgamesh and the Many Faces of Mesopotamian Heroism." Harvey will introduce the Epic of Gilgamesh alongside other Mesopotamian narratives of kings, warriors, and sages, illustrating the strikingly varied vision of heroism produced in the ancient Near East. Eric Harvey holds a PhD from Brandeis University in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, with a specialization in Bible and ...

    Research Focus Group Talk: “Children are an Extraordinary Plastic Material”: Juvenile Homelessness and Delinquency in the Early Soviet Union

    6206C Phelps Hall

    The symbol of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in public memory in Russia and abroad has been the tragedy of the Romanovs’ family in which five children of Nicholas II and Alexandra had been executed by the Bolsheviks, along with their parents. What is less salient in public commemoration is the fact that thousands of ordinary children died in the years after the Revolution from hunger, diseases, and overall neglect as direct causes of the turbulent ...

    Research Focus Group Talk: The Funny Thing About Noise: Film Sound Aesthetics in the Cold War Cinema of Taiwan and South Korea

    McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

    Taiwanese and South Korean film comedies of the 1960s and 70s were swarming with funny noises, from cymbal crashes to dog barks and glissandos of all timbres. Why all the ruckus? Was this simply a relic of the bygone era, an early sound film aesthetic arrived late in a developing nation? Examining the ways in which these sounds emanate from the bodies of comedians to make them larger, unrulier, or simply noisier than life, Shih ...

    Research Focus Group Event: Undergraduate Research and Creative Showcase

    6206C Phelps and Zoom UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

    This undergraduate showcase will feature a research presentation by Fiona Boborci, titled “Translating Childhood: Untranslatability, Linguistic Hospitality, and Reader Perception in The Little Prince.” In her talk, Fiona explores the linguistic, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of translation in children’s literature, examining how different English translations of Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince produce distinct understandings of childhood, imagination, and moral responsibility. Drawing on both French and English traditions, the presentation highlights translation as an active and transformative ...

    Research Focus Group Talk: Re-negotiating the Algorithmic Contract: The Need for a Politics of Potentiality

    3605 South Hall Santa Barbara, CA, United States

    Jose Marichal is a professor of political science at California Lutheran University specializing in studying the role that algorithms and AI play in restructuring social and political institutions. His book entitled You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem was published in 2025 with Bristol University Press (UK). The book explores the unwritten social contract we have with the algorithms that shape what we see, hear and think. His next project (expected 2026) is entitled Machine Liberalism: ...