Digital Arts and Culture 2009 was the 8th in an international series of conferences begun in 1998. DAC is recognized as an interdisciplinary event of high intellectual caliber. This iteration of DAC dwelled on the specificities of embodiment and cultural, social and physical location with respect to digital technologies and networked communications. DAC09 was structured around themes, each theme being composed of panels. DAC09 was held in the Arts Plaza of the University of California Irvine and was co-sponsored by UCHRI. More

The Workshop on Networking Knowledge is a conjoint initiative by UCHRI, the MacArthur Research Hub on Digital Media and Learning, and the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. The Workshop hosts ongoing meetings to address common themes in the impact of digital technology, new media, and networking practices on knowledge formation, circulation, transformation, and their implications across various domains. Workshops serve as a site for discussions of significant current and emerging work across these areas of interest. David Theo Goldberg, Mimi Ito, and Bill Maurer invite to the series of workshops at UCHRI which took place for the first time in  January 2009 and will continue during the 2009-10 academic year. Photo by Jennifer Wilkens. More

For almost four decades, Angela Y. Davis's scholarship and activism has defined the meaning and practice of being a public intellectual and has radically transformed many sites of knowledge production, including the positioning of the U.S. academy as a site of intervention and social transformation. Few professors have had such a broad impact in their fields of expertise or on the world in their lifetimes. This gathering of her former students, in conversation with scholars nationally, maps the impact of her vision on issues such as democratic theory, philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies/popular culture, social policy, race, class, and feminisms. Professor Davis has also trained students as activist scholars for almost four decades in both university systems in California. We thus convene this conference to examine the poetics and politics of Professor Davis's pedagogy in California over the past forty years (1969-2009) and to consider how her role as an activist-scholar-teacher bridges the academy/community divide and dismantles the false dichotomy of theory/praxis. The event was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantee Maylei Blackwell, Chicana and Chicano Studies, UCLA. More

The symposium was an intensive, low-residency course including participation in a dry-immersion roving symposium scheduled for October 22-25, 2009 in Joshua Tree/29 Palms and the Coachella Valley. The symposium included tours of the 29 Palms Marine Base, Joshua Tree National Park, and the lower desert dune and oasis systems. Mapping the Desert, Deserting the Map formed part of a larger project entitled Mapping the Californian Desert organized and jointly coordinated by UCIRA, UC Riverside's Sweeney Gallery and the UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center. Mapping the Californian Desert will include temporary installations, talks, performances, film screenings and desert excursions/'dry immersions' scheduled throughout the 2009-2010 academic year. The course was also designed to provide an academic/course-related link to one of UCIRA's new areas of interest - Social Ecologies: California-centric embedded arts research, as well as UCHRI's new California Studies Initiative. More

In conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 2009, the German Department at the University of California, Irvine, hosted an interdisciplinary conference that explores the relationship between cultural images (broadly conceived) and the maintenance or breakdown of political divisions. Walls are not just physical entities; they also rely on and propagate segregationist forms of knowing and depicting "the other." This means that alternative representations are necessary if walls are to be replaced by new social unities. Keynote lectures by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (English and Comparative Literature, UCI) and Christina von Braun (Cultural and Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin). The event was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantee John Smith, German, UC Irvine. More

NOWCASTING was the first conference to apply design theory to emerging issues in the digital humanities. Showcasing digital humanities projects at every level from Google mapping to super computing visualization, the Nowcasting seminar proposed that learning from communication design, interaction design, and industrial design will be vital to 21st century humanistic inquiry. The Nowcasting Seminar was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantee Peter Lunenfeld, Design & Media Arts, UCLA. More

To date, SECT sessions have been conducted at UCHRI’s facilities in Irvine, California. In August 2009, SECT VI traveled to Shanghai to hold an intensive two-week summer institute on "Designing China." Design is more than just a matter of combining aesthetics and functionality. Today, more than ever, the stakes of design are very high, raising at every turn urgent economic, political, social, and philosophical issues. The relation between design and its context is particularly salient in a rapidly transforming space like contemporary China. This seminar proposed to focus on China, not because China leads the world in the field of design, but because China today is where design issues are raised in perhaps their most problematic and provocative form. The seminar was neither a survey of design nor a training course in design fundamentals; it was not even exclusively about China. Rather, China was taken as a case study to explore, in the spirit of "experimental critical theory," the larger issues of design in a globalizing world. More

Revisiting Modernization was an interdisciplinary array of activities that features an academic conference, art exhibition, creative writing competition, film screenings, and two keynote addresses to be held at the University of Ghana, Legon. This conference was the first of three conferences to be held over a five-year period on the African continent (Ghana 2009, Senegal 2011, South Africa 2013) that include academic and public events, initiated by the African Studies Multi-Campus Research Group at the University of California. The event was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantee Stephan Miescher, History, UC Santa Barbara. More

In the global context, right action on the part of humans toward each other and the biotic community, what Aldo Leopold called the land ethic, is difficult to represent in political speech, in policy, and even in the imaginative realm of the arts. Like the troubled concept of the global, the concept of justice, as Elaine Scarry has argued, founders in the problem of imagining other people, distant people, strangers. As our species faces anthropogenic climate change, world water shortages and world famine, the twin projects of giving expression to a truly global ecology and to global environmental justice have never been more urgent. This conference aimed to bring together individuals whose life’s work has been the study or practice of writing—literary historians and theorists, journalists and cultural critics, social scientists and environmental policy makers who have made the written word central to their understanding of how social changes are achieved.  The event was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantee Stephanie Lemenager, English, UC Santa Barbara. More

PDF-flyer

UCHRI presented the talk "Alterologies" by Ghassan Hage, Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The talk examined the degree to which we can augment our understanding of racism by considering racist classification as an instance of a more general, and, questionably, universal, way in which the human mind classifies all kind of otherness (human and non-human). The paper further examines some perennial analytical difficulties that mar empirical research on what is defined as racism. More

California universities have long played a major role in imagining and managing their nearby environments, from the development of irrigated agriculture in the Central Valley to the incubation of the environmental movement. This multi-disciplinary conference brought together scholars from across the region to examine the many ways that university researchers, communities, campuses, and systems have helped physically and ideologically reshape the California environment into the complex political and cultural entity it is today. This event was organized by the Environmental Humanities Research Cluster and co-sponsored by UCHRI as part of the 20th Anniversary UC Presidential Humanities Initiative. Grantees of the award were the UC Davis Humanities Institute and UC Merced Faculty Partners. More

This event consisted of three workshops concerning the topics "Organizing a UCSB-based System-wide Network to Support Research on Black California," "Building Archives for Black California Materials," and "Organizing African-American Public Policy Research." The workshops were organized by UCCSI Systemwide Workshops grantee Gaye Theresa Johnson, Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara. More

The schedule for "Voces of the New Califas" included performances by headRush from Oakland, Teatro Izcalli, and Quinazo; poetry with Cesar Cruz and Aileen Reyes; and an art presentation by Mario Torero. This event was organized by UCCSI Community Outreach and Teaching Grants grantee Jorge Mariscal, Literature, UC San Diego. More

This conference concerned de Man's unpublished manuscript Textual Allegories, which is held at UCI's Special Collections and Archives and is currently being brought to online publication as part of a Paul de Man research project funded by the U.K.'s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Speakers included Etienne Balibar, Ellen Burt, Cynthia Chase, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski. This conference was organized by Martin McQuillan, University of Leeds, and Erin Obodiac, UC Irvine/University of Leeds and was co-sponsored by UCHRI. More

This spring semester event was part of a series of symposia of the Berkeley Institute for the Environment. It was an exploration of the visual arts in conjunction with the exhibition Human /Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through September 27, 2009. A panel of scholars and artists explored in conversation the role that the visual arts must play in the transformation of society towards one that can sustain the planet. This event was co-sponsored by UCHRI. More

This spring one student's master's thesis came to life with 25 stories of personal change and civic engagement—sometimes shocking, sometimes sad, always inspiring. This campus-community project used photos, theater, stories and sound to paint a vivid picture of the environmental problems faced by Central Valley communities as told by women leading the movement struggling to solve them. The event was organized by UCCSI Community Outreach and Teaching Grants grantee Julie Sze, American Studies, UC Davis. More

The Interdisciplinary Conference hosted by UCSC's Visual and Performance Studies Faculty Research Group dealt with two aspects concerned with concepts and histories of the Baroque:
1) the art-historical and cultural-historical category of the Baroque in new cross-cultural, trans-medial, and trans-historical configurations, e.g., "baroque-ness"; and
2) the aesthetics, historiography, and general Weltanschauung of the baroque as a conceptual model for contemporary critical thinking, writing, and performance. The event was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantee Catherine Soussloff and the Department of Visual and Perfomance Studies at UC Santa Cruz. More

Presented by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory)

The first annual winners' showcase was a celebration honoring all of the Digital Media and Learning Competition winners, including a public announcement of this yearʼs winners. Winners of the first Digital Media and Learning Competition demonstrated and discussed their projects. More

The exhibition brought together the work of 35 Native American, First Nations, Inuit, Aboriginal and Maori photographers to explore the concept of visual sovereignty. Created by elder, established and emerging artists the works are mostly contemporary. Images by historical photographers from as early as 1899 were also included. In this collaborative exhibition, the artworks ranged across the genres of portraiture, studio, digital collage, and landscape. In artist panel sessions, Native American, First Nations, Inuit, Aboriginal and Maori photographers spoke about their artwork and experiences within the field of Indigenous photography. The event was organized by Conferences & Seminars grantees Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie and Veronica Passalacqua, Native American Studies, UC Davis. More

"Vox California" was an interdisciplinary workshop that sought both to highlight language as a central component of California studies and to establish California as a crucial site for the investigation of language in social life. As the first conference to focus on the full scope of California's linguistic resources, including but not limited to indigenous and immigrant languages, regional and ethnoracial dialects, subcultural linguistic styles, and linguistically mediated social activities, "Vox California" had a broad interdisciplinary mandate to examine how language semiotically shapes the sociocultural meaning of California and Californians locally, nationally, and globally. The event was organized by UCCSI Systemwide Workshops grantee Mary Bucholtz, Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara. More

This colloquium brought together scholars from two countries (the United States and France) and three disciplines (political science, demography, and urban planning) who study the influence of racial, ethnic, and national-identity diversity on California. Both completed works and works in progress were presented in a small setting that maximized scholarly interaction. The panels also included graduate student research, in the hopes that the colloquium will encourage further collaboration across discipline, across countries, and across generations of scholars. The event was organized by UCCSI Regional Seminars and Research Workgroups grantee Thaddeus Kousser, Political Science, UC San Diego. More

The MacArthur Foundation’s annual conference on digital media and learning was hosted by the UC Humanities Research Institute February 19-20, 2009 at UC Irvine’s Calit2 Building. The MacArthur Foundation, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the UC Humanities Research Institute convened 100 top national scholars, practitioners and technology innovators to discuss their research. Humanities, arts, social sciences, engineering, computer sciences and the hard sciences represent the breadth of disciplines that collaborate in exploring future directions in media and digital technology. UCI Chancellor Michael Drake presented introductory remarks. Photos by Jennifer Wilkens. More

This series of events celebrated artists who make their audiences into more than spectators. Joined by the shared experience of performances that are alternately tender and intimate, intense and cathartic, we do more than watch them perform. In "being there" we become a body of witnesses, a collective, a community. At issue in these artists' performances is not just their presence to us, in other words, but our presence to them, and to each other. The events were curated by UCHRI's Extramural Explorations program grantee Jennifer Doyle, English, UC Riverside. More

The Emerging Epistemologies Project consists of two events at UCLA built around workshops engaging with two junior faculty manuscript writers, Mignon Moore (Sociology) and Lucy Burns (Asian American Studies) in the winter quarter 2009 at UCLA and an event at UCR in spring 2009. The plan for the UCR event is forthcoming. The events are organized by UCHRI's Conferences & Seminars program grantees Emory Elliott, Director, Center for Ideas and Society (CIS), UC Riverside and Kathleen McHugh, English and Cinema and Media Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Women, UC Los Angeles. More

The Workshop on Networking Knowledge is a conjoint initiative by UCHRI, the MacArthur Research Hub on Digital Media and Learning, and the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. The Workshop hosts ongoing meetings to address common themes in the impact of digital technology, new media, and networking practices on knowledge formation, circulation, transformation, and their implications across various domains. Workshops serve as a site for discussions of significant current and emerging work across these areas of interest. David Theo Goldberg, Mimi Ito, and Bill Maurer invite to the series of workshops at UCHRI. Photo by Jennifer Wilkens. More

This conference brought together the participants and visiting faculty of the Residential Research Group "The Emergence of 'the West': Shifting Hegemonies in the Medieval Mediterranean," which was convened in Fall 2007 at UCHRI. The work of the conference contributors revealed the complexity of the interactions between religious, "ethnic," local, regional, genealogical, class, and other identities—oscillating, according to circumstances, between the poles of pragmatism and ideology, and including the deployment of what we would now call "strategic essentialisms." The event was organized by UCHRI's Conferences & Seminars program grantees Brian Catlos, History, UC Santa Cruz, and Sharon Kinoshita, Literature, UC Santa Cruz. More

The conference convened by the UC Irvine Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (CGPACS) with the UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center brought together scholars, technical experts and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations to assess how humanitarianism is imagined and practiced in Africa. The event was organized by UCHRI's Conferences & Seminars program grantees Cecelia Lynch, Political Science, UC Irvine, and Andrew Apter, History, UC Los Angeles. More