03 Dec Fall 2021 IHC Faculty Award Winners
December 3, 2021
The IHC is pleased to announce the results of its Fall 2021 awards competition. Congratulations to the winners of IHC Faculty Collaborative and Fellowship Awards!
FACULTY COLLABORATIVE AWARD
Award of up $2,000 for collaborative research or instructional projects during the next eighteen months
The Global Imagination of Racial Justice: Coalition, Comparativism, Community
Swati Rana, English
Stephanie Batiste, Black Studies & English
This symposium on the global imagination of racial justice centers racial collaboration and comparativism as method. It invites scholars and artists to explore ways to bridge U.S. national and global conceptions of racial justice through interdisciplinary projects in cultural, literary, and media studies. It is part of a three-year project that explores decolonial, intersectional, and transnational methodologies to create a common social agenda in and through difference. The goal is to advance the broader mission of the humanities to develop a shared, planetary praxis toward antiracist futures.
Silicon Valley Requiem
Andrew Watts, College of Creative Studies
William Davies King, Theater and Dance
Silicon Valley Requiem is a proposed composition based on the requiem mass, but replacing the liturgical environment with the public theater of Tech CEOs. A trio of synthesized voices singing Gregorian chant melodies are paired with three live female performers singing abstracted fragments. The application of contemporary technology on medieval plainchant creates a plethora of complex philosophical questions. What does it mean for non-humans to sing a text fundamental to the human condition, mortality, and the afterlife? If a techno-utopia is being sold to us by icons of Silicon Valley here on earth, are we living a post-human existence?
Ecologies of Childhood: An Interdisciplinary International Research Conference
Sara Pankenier Weld, Germanic and Slavic Studies
This collaborative, interdisciplinary research reconsiders environmental discourse in global children’s literature, media, and culture and examines the collaborative performance of childhood evident in environmental initiatives across disciplines and regions. It will culminate in a large, interdisciplinary, international research conference entitled Ecologies of Childhood: Children’s Literature, Culture & the Environment, convened at UCSB on August 12-17, 2023, and will ultimately lead to publications in a book volume and special journal issue(s).
FACULTY FELLOWSHIPS
One-quarter teaching release to concentrate on research projects in the 2022-23 academic year
Heidi Amin-Hong, English: “A Contaminated Transpacific: Ecological Afterlives of the Vietnam War”
This book project takes up the Vietnam War as a departure point to evaluate the material and psychic legacy of militarized environments across Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the continental United States. Through analyses of minor literary, historical, and visual texts, this book project reassesses the Vietnam War as a critical juncture that shaped present conditions of ecological destruction and settler occupation. Arguing for a re-theorization of war and the environment that accounts for minority knowledges of land and animals, it appraises Asian diasporic and Indigenous Pacific Islander cultural works that engage with environmental predicaments.
Charmaine Chua, Global Studies: “Logistics Leviathan: Counterrevolutionary empire and just-in-time distribution in the Indo-Pacific”
Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic and archival research in China, the U.S. and Southeast Asia, and on board a container ship, “Logistics Leviathan” examines the deepening integration of transport and logistical infrastructures into the mechanisms of transnational capitalist power across the transpacific contact zone. It argues that logistics may be understood as an active experiment by transnational elites to make the oceans safe for the free movement global commerce, producing decolonial movements for economic self-determination as a disruption of the global economy’s healthy circulation. “Logistics Leviathan” investigates oceanic encounters between overlapping regimes of development within global systems of governance.
Raquel Pacheco, Anthropology: “Re-making the Peasant Countryside: Intimate mestizaje in Neoliberal Mexico”
“Re-making the Peasant Countryside” traces how the notion of “gender progress” represents both a new regime of citizenship by which the Nahuas and Teenek of the Huasteca region of Mexico are shaped into self-regulating citizens, and also a medium by which they can make claims to social belonging. It suggests that gender progress facilitates indigenous peoples’ engagement within a post-agrarian economy in which they are expected to fulfill the precarious waged-labor generated by economic deregulation. Ultimately, it argues that indigenous people’s experience of such labor advances “intimate mestizaje,” the continuation of settler colonial patterns of violence, rather than gender progress.
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