Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium
Spring 2022
Co-organizers: Jackie Armijo & Tyler Haupert
Embedded Files
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
15:30-16:30, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
15:30-16:30, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
The dispute between José Peláez and Doña Lucia Dionisio: Re-Thinking the 1812 Constitution’s Impact on Laguna province and the Luzon countryside
This paper explores the legal instrumentalization of the 1812 charter in the province of Laguna, in the Luzon countryside by looking at a dispute between José Pelaéz, ex-Alcalde Mayor (provincial governor) of Laguna in 1814, and Doña Lucia Dionisia of the town of Majayjay, the wife of a native principal. I argue that the internal socio-political dynamics in the provinces were much more complex than those represented in the binary notions of “class struggles” between native elites and cailianes (commoners) or the “colonial struggle” between natives and the colonial state to understand political dynamics during the implementation of the 1812 Constitution.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
15:30-16:30, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
15:30-16:30, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
“Scientific Practices of Truth:” The Culture of Crime Detection in Modern China (1890-1949)
Detective stories featuring a “Chinese Sherlock Holmes,” who solves criminal cases with analytical reasoning and scientific methods, had flooded the Chinese market since the late 19th century. The obsession with the literary detective coincided with the modernization of the police force and judicial system that also emphasized the application of science. This book project delves into this cultural obsession and examines how these scientific methods, such as dissection-based autopsy or crime scene photography, were imagined, conceptualized, represented, and practiced in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on textual and visual materials from detective stories, illustrated journals, news reports, textbooks for police training, and archives of real cases, this book explores the meaning of the “scientific detection” through both actual and fictional criminal investigations. This book argues that popular narratives of romanticized fantasies of science and sensational melodramas reinvented an ostensibly empirical science of detection. The imperial concepts of morality and justice, such as the cosmic retribution, also participated in building the “scientific method” of criminal investigation, which entangled with the forming of moral judgments and social norms. In this way, this book questions the boundary between science and non-science in policing in modern China. As the first interdisciplinary study of the “culture of detection,” this book project reveals that new technologies of policing in modern China were constructed through a dynamic interaction between popular literature, law, and science that goes beyond the Foucauldian model of the “scientifico-legal complex” to produce power and knowledge in criminal investigation.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
10:00-11:00, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
10:00-11:00, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
(Please note this session's earlier meeting time!)
(Please note this session's earlier meeting time!)
“Written in Green Ink: Homero Aridjis, Octavio Paz and an Educational Poetics of Environmentalism"
This article examines the cultural, poetic and aesthetic dimensions of public pedagogy in Mexican poetry of the environment. I read the poetic and political work of Homero Aridjis, along with selections of Octavio Paz’s poetry illustrated by children, as examples of a pedagogical tradition of environmental reform within the Global Hispanophone (Campoy-Cubillo and Sampedro 2019). In his 1970 memoir, El poeta niño [The Child Poet], Aridjis depicts an enclosed world of childhood rooted in phenomenological experience. In poetry, the sights and sounds of his childhood in rural Mexico become the resounding heart of his environmental activism, particularly through journalism and a more recent children’s book, Maria the Monarch (2014). In Paz’s poetry, meanwhile, a resonant sense of wonder forms an internally compact world of presentness, in which trees are personified, time is immobilized and the world celebrated in its innate perfection. It was the cultural power of poetry that emboldened Aridjis, with Paz and many others, to found the Grupo de los 100 in 1985, campaigning and advocating in Mexico and internationally for environmental change. Considering Aridjis’ poetry, activism, and children’s book alongside educational uses of Paz’s poetry, namely El árbol habla [The Tree Speaks], published by the Mexican government’s Alas y Raíces [Wings and Roots] initiative in 2015, I explore how these poets embody the role of ‘cultural workers’ (Freire 2005) in the fight for a humanistic, sustainable and equitable society.
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
15:30-16:30, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
15:30-16:30, Online (Zoom ID: 971 3925 5020)
A Prudential Justification of Political Realism
Studies into realist political theory have been developed following two main lines of inquiry. First, theorists have devoted much effort and time to clarifying the methodological specificity of realist theorising. Second, theorists have produced sustained defences of the consistency of realism as an approach to political reasoning. And yet the question of how to justify the realist approach has not received the same attention. The systematic inquiries into the meta-theoretical basis of realism are still few, and, I argue, they seem unable to offer compelling reasons to a non-realist audience for adopting political realism.
In this paper, I offer a justification of realism building upon the complexity of realist thought and taking advantage of all the argumentative strategies that realists have moved against moralist thinking. To do so, I proceed as follows. I first characterise political realism as anti-moralism. I then outline in detail three possible arguments for the realist approach by availing myself of recent inquiries into the meta-theoretical basis of realism: the meta-ethical, the ethical, and the prudential arguments. I explain that the prudential argument offers the most solid basis for political realism because it relies on the least controversial premises. Still, I delve into the meta-ethical and ethical arguments for two reasons: the prudential argument takes advantage of the theses defended by the rival arguments; and elaborating the other arguments gives me the chance to show the comparative strengths of the prudential argument.
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
Moderated by Jackie Armijo
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