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2012-2013 Center for the Humanities Themes:

Temporality: Stasis, Repetition, Transformation (Fall 2012)

At a moment of economic, social, and political crisis this center theme asks after time: its organization and its social and political effects.  Concepts dependent on a theory of temporality—stasis, change, life stages, eras, periodization, progression and regression, order, linearity, diachrony and synchrony, repetition, reiteration, duration, and rhythm—are the building blocks of our contemporary social and cultural theory; time underpins our epistemological frameworks.  And, as scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences have demonstrated, time and temporality are intricately connected to space, to affect, to the body, to subjectivity, and to politics.  This theme brings together scholars in performance studies, feminist studies, media and film studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, literary criticism, history, philosophy, art history, sociology, and cultural studies, and their overlapping yet distinct approaches to the critical study of time.  Within the broader field, we will focus on stasis, repetition, and transformation, examining the logics of stasis and repetition in relation to recent conceptions of subject formations and transformations.

Emplacing the Local (Spring 2013)

In an era of globalization, where new media connects us in an instant around the world with communities linked only in cyber-space, it would seem that our lives are lived less and less through emplacing ourselves within the spaces we regularly inhabit, and engaging in place-making; that is, seeing ourselves as engaged in the spaces within which we interact and form communities with those around us.  In contrast to such pessimistic predictions, a number of scholars have articulated the ongoing importance of place as part of socially constructed spatialities of postmodernity and neoliberal capitalism at a subjective and community level.  Additionally, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have been drawn away from the easy identification of subjects who are embedded in the time-space compression and increasing kinesis of the contemporary world to the importance of the local and of ongoing, situated practices of creating significance and history.  Foregrounding the matter of place makes way for critical appraisal of questions of local importance, asking how research can and should be engaged, as praxis, with local politics, histories, environments, and arts.