In this series we celebrate and discuss the ways that scholars around campus teach complex gender and women's studies concepts like feminisms, gender, sex, and intersectionality among others.  A 30-45 minute discussion/presentation of pedagogies, challenges and controversies by the scholar(s) is followed by a Q&A with the audience.  

This session's these is "Teaching Intersectionality: Highlighting the Strategies and Stories of International Graduate Instructors"

Renowned poet and professor Nikky Finney has spent her career illuminating the Southern cultural and political heritage of Black people in ways that resonate throughout the country and world. Her ongoing legacy of poignant expression, indomitable truth, and devotion to social justice has enriched the country and world. Learn more about Nikky Finney here. 

As the first Black woman to hold the appointment of Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Crystal Wilkinson serves as an inspiration to young people with an eye toward a career in writing, while also connecting with senior community members. Wilkinson’s research and work primarily focuses on the stories of Black women and communities in the Appalachian and rural Southern canon. Her latest book, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts," released recently and explores physical and spiritual ties between the past and present.

Nietzel Visiting Distinguished Faculty Lecture

Title: "Prophylactic Futurism and the Logic of Security Society”

Presented by Professor Timothy Melley, Geoffrion Family Director of the Miami University Humanities Center at Miami of Ohio University

Timothy Melley is the author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell 2000) and The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Cornell 2012). His work has been covered by The Nation, The L.A. Times, The Village Voice, Le Figaro, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, BBC, and NPR.

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO A MEDICAL CHALLENGE

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the third speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, April 12 at 2 pm ET in the UKAA Auditorium in the William T. Young Library with Dr. Michael M.J. Fischer!

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Dr. Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

This talk presents the outline of my sojourns (both longer and shorter) in Singapore and Southeast Asia over the past decade and the larger research project with which I was engaged. I will start with a prequel, then talk about the two books, and end with thoughts, if I have time, about a third book which was supposed to have been the first, on theater – theater because theater is a spot, a space, or a set of tactics of social and cultural critique, in which different positions, political positions, sexual mores, and other social tensions can be staged and where liberalization of society can be leveraged. Why Singapore? what is Singapore that we should be mindful of it? It is a tiny if very important node in global logistics, oil and finance. Once caught in the vice of the Cold War, and now again in the emerging new Cold War, between arguments about political modes of governance and hard geopolitics that I allude to in the title of the 2nd book, following current geopolitics (and the Obama administration’s announcement of a pivot to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea) and a struggle between East and West, meaning in this case between China and the United States. I’ll begin in the heady optimistic days around 2009 when I was first going to Singapore with three questions that I initially used to describe my larger project: how to create a new world class scientific community which Singapore was attempting to do; how to reform the university system from teaching universities to world competitive research universities; and thirdly how to create a space for an art scene that functions as public space for social and cultural critique, and how that art scene could have an effect in changing the local social imaginary or what I was still calling the social common sense or sensus communis.