Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium
Fall 2021
Co-organizers: Jackie Armijo & Tyler Haupert
Embedded Files
Thursday, September 23, 2021
Thursday, September 23, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Strumpet Fortune" or "Precious winners all": Gambling with Political Possibility in Shakespeare's Plays
Strumpet Fortune" or "Precious winners all": Gambling with Political Possibility in Shakespeare's Plays
Throughout his long career as a playwright, Shakespeare often turns to scenes of gambling to heighten the stakes of his plays. This talk will emphasize his use of the word “odds” in such scenes. Ostensibly, odds are determined to level players’ differences and promote fairness in a game. But an exploration of the gendered and sexual implication of this term in Shakespeare reveals players’ other motives. I demonstrate that the facade of a friendly wager often requires the player’s concomitant denigration and control of the women around him—often to disastrous results. When the gambler calls Fortune a “whore” and stakes the reputations and lives of women in bets, he not only attempts to obscure his desire to promote odds between men, but he also risks social ruin. These issues culminate in the late play The Winter’s Tale where the society depicted in the play is both lost and restored through a gamble that evens all the odds.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds, Georges de La Tour, c. 1620-40.
Thursday, October 14, 2021
Thursday, October 14, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Who Is Allowed to be Jealous, When and WHy?
Who Is Allowed to be Jealous, When and WHy?
Discourses on Jealousy in Early and Medieval Chinese Writings
Discourses on Jealousy in Early and Medieval Chinese Writings
This talk will examine depictions of jealous men and women across various Chinese texts from the early and medieval period (3rd c. BCE–9th c. AD) and consider the question of how jealousy is depicted in men and women and what this tells us about gendered access to emotions and expressions thereof. In other words, who is allowed to be jealous, when, and why? The question of how gender intersects with class and modes of writing will also be addressed.
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Friday, October 22, 2021
Friday, October 22, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Martial Arts, Apocalypse, Counterrevolutionaries: Heretical Religions and Rural Governance in Modern China, 1919-1961
Martial Arts, Apocalypse, Counterrevolutionaries: Heretical Religions and Rural Governance in Modern China, 1919-1961
The White Lotus Sect, well-known among Chinese readers of martial arts fictions and popular literature, was believed to be a major source of social unrest in Late Imperial China. This talk is about the fate of heretical religions (huidaomen), the modern equivalent of White Lotus in 20th Century China, during the turbulent years from 1919 to 1961. Relying on untouched legal documents, this talk examines heretical religions and rural governance without the presence of large-scale rebellions, which illustrates their role in an everyday setting and avoids the danger of labeling them indiscriminately as rebels.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Thursday, October 28, 2021
Thursday, October 28, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Problematizing Metadata as Data: Ontology Literacy and Insight from the Wikiverse
Problematizing Metadata as Data: Ontology Literacy and Insight from the Wikiverse
Algorithms are trendy as sites of data ethics and knowledge injustice. This talk will argue that the data structures these algorithms operate on also deserve scrutiny. In many important cases, these data structures today are ‘[computer] ontologies’, i.e. formalized representations of human knowledge. Introducing a model of epistemic agency, we show that naive notions and implementations of such ‘ontologies’ decontextualize knowledge and thus are detrimental to knowledge self-awareness and self-actualization, as can be seen on the collaborative knowledge base Wikidata. We propose ‘ontology literacy’ as a pedagogical framework for a situated understanding of ‘ontologies’ by both creators and users.
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Thursday, November 4, 2021
Thursday, November 4, 2021
16:30-17:30, Room 1150
16:30-17:30, Room 1150
When Immigration Law is Unjust but Legitimate
When Immigration Law is Unjust but Legitimate
It is a fundamental assumption of the current international order that states have at least a qualified right to decide whether to admit a would-be migrant, i.e., when the migrant’s basic human rights are not at stake. When a state operates within this right, there remains a further question of whether its specific migration laws are morally justified. In this talk, I will first examine when a state’s immigration law is unjust but legitimate. Then, I will address the question of whether the citizens of a state and would-be migrants are morally obligated to comply with the state’s unjust but legitimate immigration laws. Based on my analysis, I will conclude the talk by proposing an attractive re-conceptualization of immigration amnesty. Namely, immigration amnesty is a mechanism where a state corrects the injustice of its migration policies rather than an encouragement of lawlessness.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Thursday, November 11, 2021
Thursday, November 11, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Constructing Technological Failure in an Imperial Environment
Constructing Technological Failure in an Imperial Environment
This talk begins with the role the subject of failure has played in the history of science and technology, and then considers how an intersection with environmental history can enrich and expand this discourse. Technological success and failure are historically contingent. By including the more-than-human environment in with the social, political, and economic elements that typically shape these contingencies, we get a more complete picture of why certain technologies are taken up and others left behind. This talk uses case studies from the nineteenth century British Empire—a steam-powered dredging vessel that could not float on the rivers it was meant to dredge, and a continent-spanning railway line that was never built—to examine the roles the more-than-human environment plays in the contingent construction of technological failure.
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Thursday, November 18, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Novels Shaping the Economy: A Quantitative Analysis of How Novels Contribute to the Study of Social and Economic Developments
Novels Shaping the Economy: A Quantitative Analysis of How Novels Contribute to the Study of Social and Economic Developments
This paper investigates the relationship between quantified sentiments of award-winning novels and economic short and long-run sentiments. In an era where the value of literature is increasingly questioned in favor of quantifiable data, we use quantitative methods to demonstrate the importance of literary material for the understanding of the social world. In particular, we show that novels contain much useful insight for the analysis of the economic conditions of society at a particular time. We conduct a sentiment analysis of prize-winning novels of the Pulitzer, National Book Award, PEN Faulkner, PEN Hemingway and Book Critics Circle awards from the years 1948-2018. We assign the novels quantitative sentiment scores, and correlate these data with expressions of economic sentiment such as financial market data and structural macroeconomic indicators. We hypothesize that while novels may not function as predictors of economic developments in the short run due to the time it takes to write and publish them, they do become valuable descriptors of the structural conditions of the economy at a particular time, as well as of medium-run optimism/pessimism regarding the economy. If novels capture valuable information on the economic zeitgeist of an era, we must conclude that literary analysis should be part of any serious attempt to understand social developments in the post-45 United States. To our knowledge, our project is the first to demonstrate using quantitative methods the usefulness of qualitative literary analysis.
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Moderated by Tyler Haupert
Thursday, December 2, 2021
Thursday, December 2, 2021
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
15:30-16:30, Room 1150
Refiguring Chinese Buddhist Narratives in Light of Indian Sources: A Case Study of the Sudāna/Vessantara Jātaka’s Reception in Early Medieval China
Refiguring Chinese Buddhist Narratives in Light of Indian Sources: A Case Study of the Sudāna/Vessantara Jātaka’s Reception in Early Medieval China
The Vessantara Jātaka (also called the Sudāna Jātaka in its Chinese versions) is one of the most renowned and widely circulated jātakas, or birth stories of the Buddha, in the Buddhist world. During the fifth and sixth centuries CE, the story became frequently depicted Buddhist narratives in Chinese murals and reliefs. Several scenes showing prince Sudāna in exile appear to have been selected to crystallise the whole story. This study integrates early Indian sources as well as relevant scholarship to explore the reason why Sudāna’s exile was selected. I argue that the choice to depict Sudāna’s exile was shaped by two historical contexts. The first relates to a specific rhetorical strategy of integrating indigenous Chinese accounts of immortals into the story’s textual tradition in the third century. The second refers to the underlying religious mentality that focused on the quest for transcendence, an idea that grew more popular during the flourishing of Buddhist meditation practice in the early sixth century. This study further provides methodological reflections on the study of Chinese Buddhist art, focusing on how existing research has yet incorporated enough Indian sources and scholarship. Such neglect has in turn led to some false generalizations and identifications.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
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