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    Bodies Politic Talk: A-Maizing Nahua Healers: Colonial Attacks on Indigenous Healers in Early Modern Central Mexico

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

    Dr. Edward Anthony Polanco will discuss how Nahua healers used maize to heal the human body in central Mexican communities in the 16th century. Titiçih (Nahua healing specialists) provided maize to patients topically and orally and relied on it for answers about illnesses. Dr. Polanco will also explore how Spanish Catholic authorities viewed these healers and their practices as a threat to settler colonial society and attempted to extirpate them. Audience Q&A and a reception ...

    Humanities Decanted: Jeffrey Hoelle

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

    Join us for a dialogue between Jeffrey Hoelle (Anthropology) and David Pellow (Environmental Studies) about Hoelle's new book, Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control. In this book, Hoelle traces the imprint of cultivation across the naturally growing covers of the land and body—plants and hair. The book builds from research in the agricultural fields and cattle pastures at the edge of the Amazon rainforest to domestic landscapes and hair salons and shops in ...

    Bodies Politic Talk: A Dark Cast: Disability, Blackface, and Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

    Drawing from her national best-selling book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, Rhae Lynn Barnes will explore the complex intersections of disability, presidential power, and racial masquerade. She will examine how minstrelsy and the dark cast of blackface performance functioned both as cultural entertainment and a political prosthetic during the Roosevelt era, masking the physical vulnerability of white children with polio while reinforcing racial hierarchies. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Dr. ...

    • Humanities Decanted: Eric Prieto

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

    Join us for a dialogue with Eric Prieto (French and Italian) about his new book, Urban Informality and Narrative Form.  Urban Informality and Narrative Form brings together literary analysis and spatial planning theory in an interdisciplinary study of urban informality. The book explores the forces that have led to the prevalence of urban informality and critically considers common misconceptions about this phenomenon. It highlights the great diversity of subjective experiences hidden behind the euphemistic “informal ...

    Bodies Politic Talk: American Sexual Exceptionalism: Sex, Labor, and U.S. Foreign Policy

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

    Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the U.S. government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored U.S. laws, calling for states to criminalize commercial sex and restrict migration, ...

    • Humanities Decanted: Elizabeth Digeser

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

    Join us for a dialogue between Elizabeth Digeser (History) and Christine Thomas (Religious Studies) about Digeser's new book, Constantine, the Once and Future King: Constructing Apocalyptic Autocracy in Late Antique Gaul. Though the rule of Constantine I from 306 to 337 CE represented a sea change in the ancient world, the emperor's path to consolidating power and securing his legacy was hardly a straightforward one. In this book, Digeser uses material culture and textual evidence ...

    Heroic Roses painting by Paul Klee

    Bodies Politic Talk: Art, Culture, Ethics, and Disabilty

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

    Disability is a concept, social identity, community, and shared human experience represented in history, literature, visual art, music, dance, architecture, design, and popular culture. Images show and shape the way we think about disability and people with disabilities and how we understand variation in human bodies. New ways of seeing and representing disability have appeared in U.S. public culture because of the civil and human rights movement, its laws, attitudes, and social changes. This talk ...

    • Humanities Decanted: Hangping Xu

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

    Join us for a dialogue between Hangping Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies) and Catherine Nesci (French and Italian) about Xu's new book, Crip China: Ablenationalism and Disability Aesthetics. In Crip China, Hangping Xu offers a compelling account of Chinese modernism and modernity through the lens of disability, or what he calls “a cripistemology of modern China.” Central to the book is a critique of “ablenationalism” as a recurring ideology in modern China: a ...

    • Bodies Politic Talk: Inviting Death In: How I Helped My Dad Die, and The Fight to Control How Life Ends

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

    Esmé E. Deprez is an investigative reporter whose father was an aid-in-dying patient. In her forthcoming book, she explores assisted death through both a clinical and a personal perspective. She considers assisted death as a social phenomenon, a legal and political movement, and an area of medical practice that has transformed end-of-life health care. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Deprez is the author of the forthcoming book Inviting Death In: How I Helped ...