18 Mar Winter 2025 Award Winners
March 18, 2025
The IHC is pleased to announce the results of its Winter 2025 awards competition. Congratulations to the winners of IHC Graduate Collaborative and Visual, Performing, and Media Arts Awards!
GRADUATE COLLABORATIVE AWARD
Awards of up $1,500 to support graduate student collaboration beyond the confines of particular departments and disciplines, both within the arts and humanities and between the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences
Twelfth Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium: “Indigenous Futures in Higher Education”
Sylvia Faichney, History of Art and Architecture
Kendall Lovely, History
Margaret McMurtrey, English
Terra Wallin, Religious Studies
The 12th Annual American Indian & Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, Indigenous Futures in Higher Education, seeks to prompt conversations that center Indigenous presence in higher education. Historically, higher education has been rooted in multiple modes of colonial violence. Thanks to decades of work resisting institutional oppression, higher education has the potential to be an increasingly integral part of many Indigenous communities. This symposium asks how we best provide tools that foster public policy, environmental agency, and cultural preservation in service of Indigenous communities and how higher education can be a space for Native and Indigenous students to thrive.
Central Asian Film and History
Anna Schewelew, Comparative Literature/Germanic and Slavic
Abylay Stambayev, History
Heeding the call to de-colonize the post-Soviet screen, this project will put on two interdisciplinary, public-facing series of events: 1) An online series of film screenings and talks with filmmaker/scholars from Central Asia; 2) A series of in-person talks by UCSB professors/grad students approaching Central Asian history through film. It will contribute to the ongoing discussion of two questions: 1) What kind of film canon exists in Central Asia today and how does it reflect the region’s cultural, political and historical entanglements. 2) How can we engage with Central Asian films as both – archival records and deliberate constructions of Central Asian history?
2025 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War
Jahan Zeb Ahmed, Global Studies
Matthew Brown, History
Hayate Murayama, History
Alexandra Noi, History
Anastasiia Stivens, Global Studies
In May 2025, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History will host the 2025 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War. Following an international call for proposals, 21 graduate students will be invited to present original research papers. (UCSB graduate students are eligible to submit proposals.) About twelve faculty members from UCSB and elsewhere will serve as commentators. The conference aims to promote Cold War studies among graduate students all over the world, to help them develop professional skills, and to invigorate Cold War studies by nurturing and showcasing the most promising work by emerging scholars.
The 27th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO)
Cooper Bedin, Linguistics
Montreal Benesch, Linguistics
Ryan Ka Yau Lai, Linguistics
Munira Kairat, GGSE
Nurgul Isik, GGSE
Marat Zheng, Sociology
The LISO conference promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion on naturally occurring human interaction. Papers will be presented by national and international scholars on a variety of topics in the study of language, interaction, and culture. This year, the conference theme is “Research and (Re)action.” This theme invites research that is engaged with the sociopolitical implications of language including: language and activism, language and resistance, language and social justice, and community-engaged approaches to research. We have put this theme forward in the hopes of fostering conversations about the role of language, interaction, and culture in the contemporary global sociopolitical climate.
VISUAL, PERFORMING, AND MEDIA ARTS AWARD
Awards of up $1,000 to support creative work that uses its artistic medium in innovative ways to explore topics of humanistic concern
Kings, Ancestors, Deities, and Diaspora: A Short Documentary of the One-Year Enstoolment Anniversary of the Ahwerewamhene
Marissa Morgan, Linguistics
This project is a short documentary film centered around spiritual practices and diasporic connections related to the traditional king of Ahwerewam in Ghana. This documentary will capture footage surrounding the one-year anniversary of the king’s enstoolment ceremony, including his role in the spiritual lives of his people, and an autoethnographic lens on my family as Black diasporic subjects during a moment of spiritually-saturated “re-turn” to a continent long-imagined as “home.” The project engages the interrelationships between language, space, time, memory, and the body, and particularly how Black subjects in Africa and the diaspora commune with spirits, ancestors, and other deities.
NeuralLoom II
Yiran Xiao, Media Arts and Technology
This project extends into the realm of generative AI By capturing and visualizing the intermediate data produced during the image generation process of Stable Diffusion, a state-of-the-art diffusion model, the project aims to demystify the complexities of modern AI More importantly, it seeks to bridge the gap between the rapid, often opaque outputs of AI-generated art and the cherished human appreciation for the artistic creation process By making the hidden stages of AI creativity visible, “NeuralLoom II” invites viewers to engage with the AI’s creative journey, addressing philosophical concerns about the role of process in art and the potential for AI to render art “tedious and dull” due to its instantaneous outputs.
The Self as Montage in Latent Space
Vivek Karthikeyan, Art
The project is intended as an exploratory comparative study of Eastern philosophical notions of self (anatta, atman, jiva) that emphasize illusoriness and flux of phenomenal consciousness through an engagement with the fragmentary, composite aesthetic of a futuristic post cinema medium that is inspired by the critic Gene Youngblood’s conception of “expanded cinema” and techniques of modern generative AI visual art. The multi-channel audiovisual installation seeks to ask: how does the humanistic study of philosophical ideas such as the composite self advance our understanding and appreciation of the idea of fragmentary assemblage so central to much of modern visual art today?
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