Mobilities
Over the past decade, a new approach to the study of mobilities has emerged involving research on the combined movement of peoples, animals, objects, ideas, and information. This can be viewed through the lens of complex networks, relational dynamics, and the redistribution or reification of power generated by movement. But despite the emphasis on movement, this “mobility turn” must be viewed in the light of the relationships between mobilities and associated immobilities: borders as well as border crossings, isolation as well as connectivity, disability as well as ability. It thus encompasses both the embodied practice of movement and the representations, ideologies, and meanings attached to the mobile and immobile. Should we embrace mobility as the constitutive condition of culture and not its disruption? How does mobility influence and even constitute our everyday life or the lives of past cultures? What exactly does it mean to be “socially mobile”? How might mobility affect our work? Do our “mobile” devices liberate us? What are the relations, if any, between the social mobility afforded by systems of connection such as the internet and the confined actual space in which it takes place?
Lectures
All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted, and are held in the Daniel Family Commons, which is located in the Usdan University Center.
The Tourist, The Collector, and the Curator: On the Life and Afterlives of Ottoman Era Photography
2/2/2015
ALI BEHDAD• Professor of Literature, UCLA
Rush: Adrenaline, Stress, and Modernist Velocity
2/9/2015
ENDA DUFFY • Professor of English, UCSB
The Flight Out of Naturalism and into Live Cinema
2/16/2015
JAY SCHEIB • Professor of Theatre Arts, MIT
Inventing a Musical Metropolis: Detroit, 1940s-60s
2/23/2015
MARK SLOBIN • Wesleyan University
The Mobile Margin: (Re)Constructing Barcelona During the Spanish Dictatorship (1939-1975)
3/02/2015
OLGA SENDRA FERRER • Wesleyan University
Driving Metaphors: The Politics and Poetics of Automobiles in Colonial and Postcolonial France
3/30/2015
STEPHANIE PONSAVADY • Wesleyan University
Blank Spaces and Cartographic Sites
04/06/2015
MIN KYUNG LEE • Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, College of the Holy Cross
The Trouble with “Performance” or the Contemporary Anti-theatrical Prejudice
4/13/2015
CLAUDIA TATINGE NASCIMENTO • Wesleyan University
The Simple Click of Her Heel on the Ground:
Gendered Phenomenologies of Walking
4/20/2015
GAYLE SALAMON • Assoicate Professor of English, Princeton University
ROSA FICEK • Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Wesleyan University