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IHC Open House

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

You are invited to the IHC’s Open House on Thursday, October 5, from 4-6 pm. Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Meet new Humanities faculty, IHC fellows, and staff members. Learn about Crossings + Boundaries, our 2017-2018 public events series. Find out about our community-engagement programs and our numerous funding resources for faculty and graduate students. Explore our new lending library. Enjoy good food, drink, and conversation.

RECEPTION: IHC Platform Gallery Exhibition Opening Reception

6th floor of HSSB

Originating from the French word plateforme, meaning ‘ground plan’ or ‘flat shape’, the Platform Gallery is a public exhibition space at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB, that features the work of emerging artists displayed as two-dimensional printed media. The complete Platform exhibition archive is available online. The 2017–18 Platform exhibition engages with the IHC’s public events series theme, Crossings + Boundaries, which considers diverse experiences and phenomena of boundary crossing—institutional, political, cultural, artistic, gendered, psychological, ...

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

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

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars, followed by a reception.   Beth DePalma Digeser (History, UCSB) studies the intersection of religion and philosophy with Roman politics, as well as the procession of “conversion” in Late Antiquity. Her latest book, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Cornell 2012), explores the interactions of Platonist ...

Talk: Interstellar Crossings: The Image of Exoplanets and the Imagination of Other Worlds

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

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds animated the scientific discourse and press coverage. Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this discovery was not just about discovering more planets, but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk, Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave the boundary of our world to extend human presence beyond the solar system.

Crossings+Boundaries TALK: Opening the Gates of Heaven: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

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

Religion and philosophy have always been present in human space exploration, in the form of religious rituals practiced during space missions, placement of sacred objects in space, and astronauts’ descriptions of transcendental changes in perspective when looking back on Earth. Space exploration also poses ethical, religious, and philosophical challenges. How, for example, do we protect other celestial bodies from contamination by human space exploration? How do we protect the Earth from contamination by extraterrestrial samples ...

Crossings+Boundaries TALK: Dreamland: America’s Opiate Epidemic and How We Got Here

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

Click here to read an article about Quinones' talk. Quinones will discuss the origins of our nationwide opioid epidemic: pharmaceutical marketing, changes in our heroin market, and new attitudes toward pain among American healthcare consumers. He will also discuss cultural shifts that made this epidemic possible. Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. His book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic won a National Book Critics Circle award ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talks: Sayak Valencia and Lorena Wolffer

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

Talk: From Queer to Cuir: Geopolitical Ostranenie from the Global South Sayak Valencia’s talk will explore the politics of survival and the alliances of the trans/border/messtizx/sissy/lesbian/dressed/slut-fag/cripple. The word “cuir” represents a defamiliarization—or ostranenie—of “queer,” which challenges automatic reading and registers, through its unfamiliarity, a geopolitical inflection southward and from the peripheries. Countering colonial epistemology and Anglo-American historiography, cuir invokes a space of decolonialized enunciation, at once playful and critical. Sayak Valencia (Cultural Studies, El Colegio de la ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

Corwin Pavilion 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, CA, United States

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Murder and Mattering in Harambe’s House

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

Date change to Tuesday, March 6th at 4:00PM. This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.” Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science ...

Wijnberg Poetry Reading

Crossings + Boundaries Reading: Of Great Importance

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

The poems in Of Great Importance discuss taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state. The collection has been called “a painfully consistent and uncomfortably accurate analysis of power, economic and social structures and mechanisms which are at the root of the degenerate world in ...

Humanities in Prison

Symposium: Humanities in Prison

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

Why study the humanities in prison? Why teach them?  What is the value of prison humanities programs for communities both inside and outside of prisons?  What humanistic texts and skills do we teach? This day-long symposium, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara, will explore the building of intellectual communities across systemic divides through the humanities. The symposium will include the voices of educators and formerly incarcerated individuals and ...

Crossings + Boundaries Talk: Borderwall as Architecture

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

Ronald Rael’s talk will reexamine what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and ...

Crossings + Boundaries TALKS: Sinan Antoon and Sara Pursley

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

Talk: The Times of Revolution in Jawad Salim’s Monument to Freedom The Iraqi artist Jawad Salim’s famous Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, is usually read as a linear historical narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it produced. Pursley’s talk explores heterogeneous conceptions of time in the work, including depictions of cyclical forms of temporality that reference Khaldunian historical time, Shi`i messianic time, and the time of mourning. She ...