Humanizing Acts: Researcher's Roundtable examines the gifts of resisting the historical erasure of the COVID-19 pandemic with community and research. This is the podcast component of Humanizing Acts: Resisting the Historical Erasures of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.It features series contributors Dan Bustillo, Amy…

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from eve…

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from eve…

“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from eve…

What is the role of humanities centers and institutes, and what can they do to spark change in graduate education? In this episode, we speak with our mentors, Dr. Barbara Mennel (UF CHPS) and Dr. Kelly Anne Brown (UCHRI), in a wide-ranging conversation about how humanities centers and institutes function as an incubator for intellectual and profess…

Given the crisis of declining student enrollments and tenure-track jobs, what is the role of scholarly organizations in facilitating systemic change? This episode, we speak with Dr. Joy Connolly about her role as president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works on fellowship design, change acceleration, and creating sp…

Under Review Episode 4: Unwellness and the University (UCHRI X UF CHPS) How do we create spaces of care for one another in structures that make us unwell? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mimi Khuc, a writer, scholar, mental health advocate, and adjunct lecturer in disability studies at Georgetown University. We cover her advocacy for adjunct pro…

The digital wave is sweeping the humanities, raising provocative new questions: Should podcasting count as a form of scholarship, and can the dissertation be other than a book-length monograph? In this episode, we visit the National Humanities Center’s virtual podcasting institute, where four PhD students (Lauren Cox, June Ke, Mirna Wasef, and Kevi…

We need to talk about work, and what’s not working, in graduate school. Graduate students are instructors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and researchers, but our stipends are often not enough to make ends meet. First, we look back at the Columbia University graduate student strikes with Sourav Chatterjee, a PhD student at the Middle Eas…

Under Review is a podcast hosted by June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox, two PhD students who ask questions about humanities graduate education. In the first episode, we spoke with Dr. Rachel Arteaga, Assistant Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and co-author of ‘We All Have Levers We Can Pull’: Reforming …

Under Review is a podcast about rethinking humanities graduate education, produced and hosted by two PhD students in the humanities, June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox. In a time when 70 percent of academic positions are off the tenure track, we speak to experts about issues surrounding prestige, labor, contingency, and diverse post-doctoral pathways. …

We explore the power and perils of fire. Standing apart from water, earth, and air, fire is discussed as a centerpiece of human developments, dynamics, and transformations, of narration across most all modes and forms of cultural expression, and as a catalyst for developments in food and shelter, not to mention sometimes unwelcome, if significant s…

The driving question today is no longer whether this or that conflict is a civil war but what political work the notion of “civil war” is being exercised to do. States descend into civil wars when contrasting conceptions of life within them are deemed irreconcilable. Living, for a considerable proportion of the state’s inhabitants, is made unbearab…

Counterfeit is our culture, our history forged, our idols fraudulent. We seek sources of truth as an active concept. But when the line dividing fact from fiction is buried beneath layers of bigotry, senselessness, and corruption, supposition becomes indistinguishable from the real, and we risk mortal wounds as victims to the powers of the false. Ho…

Ruth Wilson Gilmore (City University of New York), AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield), Rafeef Ziadah (University of London), and moderator Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) in conversation about movement as a vital keyword for understanding our fractious present— as collective mobilization, as social movements, as the circulation of ideas, a…

On June 5, 2020, UCHRI gathered Angela Y. Davis (Emerita, UC Santa Cruz), Herman Gray (Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz), Gaye Theresa Johnson (UC Los Angeles), Robin D.G. Kelley (UCLA), and Josh Kun (USC) to think differently together about the structural conditions and explosive events shattering our times.In a wide-ranging conversation emerging out of th…

By UCHRI

By UCHRI

As part of its Fall 2019 inquiry into civil war, UCHRI gathered colleagues from across the UC system and beyond for a lecture and seminar discussion about how racial formation and aesthetic tradition mutually constitute what we think of as the essential form of the civil subject: the autonomous, universal individual that has been a bedrock of Weste…

In this installment of our ongoing series of audiovisual conversations on civil war, Mei Zhan considers our theme as a conceptual device in relationship to her work, past and present. Currently, Zhan is writing an ethnography on the invention of a new kind of classical Chinese medicine on the edges of the healthcare establishment in China. She exam…

By UCHRI

Since its founding, UCHRI has funded Residential Research Groups for faculty and graduate students to engage in collaborative work around a specific topic. In Spring 2019, the topic was Truth, broadly conceived. UCHRI welcomed convener Aaron James in philosophy at UC Irvine, and participants Wayne Spencer Coffey in History of Consciousness at UC Sa…

By UCHRI

By UCHRI

In this installment of our ongoing series audiovisual conversations on civil war, Bishnupriya Ghosh helps us think civility as a handmaiden to power, traversing histories of colonial violence and contemporary populisms.By UCHRI

By UCHRI

By UCHRI

In this podcast, we hear from Cynthia Estremera, PhD candidate in English at Lehigh University, Irene Sanchez, PhD, University of Washington alumni and ethnic studies instructor with the Azusa Unified School District, and returning guest Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, assistant professor of sociology at UC Merced and author of “Birthing both a baby and …

For most of those who have devoted the better part of a decade to earning a PhD in the humanities, a doctoral degree and the experience of earning it holds a deep, inherent value. And yet, higher education struggles to articulate the nature of that value, often resorting to traditional economic notions of earnings and transferrable skills. In this …

Episode 1: What is Diversity? examines social justice issues and inclusivity in higher education, centering on the perspectives of faculty, administrators, and graduate students from underrepresented groups. These groups include women, those who identify as LGBTQ, individuals from working-class backgrounds, and people of color. As the United States…

By UCHRI

Queer People of Color (QPoC) positionalities are a valuable yet underexplored lens through which to rethink the racial and colonial imaginaries and material conditions of subjects and space in Europe. It brings together race, gender, class, colonialism and sexuality, inseparably, in a shared analytic. It addresses multiple erasures: of sexualities …

Interview with Karen Bassi, Literature and Classics, UC Santa Cruz, Convener with UCHRI Director, David Theo Goldberg about the Fall 2015 Residential Research Group.The fact and consequences of human mortality are principal variables in humanities research. And yet this fact, so often relegated to euphemism, has resisted anything like a comprehensi…

Continental Europe is currently facing the most challenging refugee crises since the Second World War. As many fleeing the conflict raging in Syria and elsewhere, set out onto the treacherous Mediterranean seas, images of dead bodies- including children- now appear in widespread circulation. While such images have, on occasions, notably shifted the…