2014-15 Academic Year
Dr. Konstantin Butz
Academy of Media Arts, Cologne.
Tuesday, Sept 9, 2014
"Safety Pins and Swimming Pools: Skateboarding and Punkrock in 1980s California"
Abstract:
In the late 1970s / early 1980s skateboarding turned rebellious. Through its amalgamation with the newly emerging hardcore punk scene in Southern California a new subcultural phenomenon developed: skate punk. What are the cultural and material circumstances that made suburban California the site-specific breeding ground for this peculiar sort and style of middle-class dissidence?
Further Info:
Konstantin Butz is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany. He studied Cultural Studies, American Studies and English at the University of Bremen, Cologne, and Dickinson College Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. dissertation "Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American Skate Punk" was published with the German Publisher transcript in 2012.
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Laura Thursby
Doctoral Candidate, Cultural Studies Program, Trent
Thursday, September 18, 2014
"Ethnic and Extraterrestrial Invaders"
Abstract:
This project seeks to explore narratives of‘illegal aliens’ in the United States by reading discourses on illegal aliens alongside narratives of extraterrestrial aliens. I show that contemporary immigration policy is surprisingly not that far-removed from discourses on aliens in science fiction by arguing that extraterrestrial aliens stand in as metaphors for the anxieties and fears surrounding immigration in America. It is my contention that the extraterrestrial alien emerges in the collective American unconscious as a way to express repressed fears about terrestrial events – in this case, substituting or displacing fears of “ethnic invaders” onto extraterrestrial invaders. I draw from Freud’s work on the uncanny and repression to show how the ET alien comes to uncannily parallel repressed anxieties about immigration, race, and the penetrability of borders and boundaries in the United States. Immigration rhetoric has often worked to problematize the presence of immigrants by framing aliens, both legal and illegal, as hidden, threatening and intrusive –stealing jobs and social services and preying on the everyday citizen. In a paranoid register, immigration has become synonymous with invasion – and this is where the trope of an ominous, menacing and obscure extraterrestrial invader who is able to conquer the borders of vast worlds and intimate bodies comes to uncannily reflect the popular discourse surrounding illegal aliens in America.
This work is based on ethnographic research conducted in Roswell, New Mexico. In 1947, an extraterrestrial spacecraft allegedly crashed just outside of Roswell and today, Roswell has become a place of pilgrimage for UFO and alienenthusiasts. Alongside these alien narratives, Roswell and its neighbouring counties inhabit a space near the United States/ Mexico border –and so Roswell has become a place where discourses on aliens, both extraterrestrial and illegal, collide in very uncanny ways.
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Public Talk and Book Launch by Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo
Cultural Studies Doctoral Program with University of Regina Press
October 02, 2014 : 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Ramin Jahanbegloo will give a public talk and launch his book Time will say Nothing: A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase. All Welcome.
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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,
Professor and Chair, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
November 13, 2014
New Media: Paradoxes and Habits
Professor Chun brings an interdisciplinary background in Systems Design Engineering (B.Sc. Waterloo) and English Literature (MA and PhD, Princeton) to her work in digital media. She is the author of Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011) and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006), as well as the co-editor of Race as Technology, special issue of Camera Obscura 24 (2009), with Lynne Joyrich and New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2006), with Thomas Keenan. Her current work, which she will discuss in her talk, focuses on what she calls “the paradoxical remains of new media.”
Presented by the John Fekete Distinguished Lecture series
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Dr. Margrit Shildrick
Linkoeping University, Sweden
Thursday, February 12, 7:30 pm
'Why should our Bodies end at the Skin?: Technologies, Boundaries and Embodiment
presented by the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program and the Centre for Theory, Culture and Politics.
Margrit Shildrick is Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linköping University, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research covers postmodern feminist and cultural theory, bioethics, critical disability studies and body theory. Her major research centres on the intersection of postmodernism and bioethics, particularly in relation to organ transplantation, and in the use of various forms of prostheses.
Her books include Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, (Bio)ethics and Postmodernism (1997), Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002) and Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Sexuality and Subjectivity (2009).
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Jonathan Crago
Editor-in-chief McGill-Queen's University Press
Academic Publishing in a Digital Environment
Thursday, March 5, 2015, 2:00 p.m.
There will be time(s) available to meet individually
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Blake Fitzpatrick
Professor of Documentary Media
Ryerson University
"Freedom Rocks: the wall as image, art, paint and dust " A Visual Lecture
Thursday, March 19, 2015, 7:30PM
Blake Fitzpatrick is a photographer, curator and writer and a Professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. His research interests include the photographic representation of the nuclear era, visual responses to contemporary militarism
and the history, memory and mobility of the Berlin Wall. His curatorial projects examine war and conflict representation in documentary photography and his writing and visual work have been published and exhibited in Canada and Europe.
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David Holdsworth
Director, MA Program in Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University
“Matheme and Poem: Mediations between Badiou and Deleuze”
Monday, April 6, 2015, 10AM
David will present his work-in-progress progress towards a paper he will deliver at the conference “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom” in Athens later in the month.
The 10:00 a.m. will allow Hanjo Berressem, Chair of American Literature and Culture, Cologne University to join us by Skype.
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Jonathan Bordo
Director, Cultural Studies Doctoral Program at Trent University
“Cezanne in the Mystic North (Thoughts on Imitation Today)”
Thursday, April 16, 2015, 7PM at the Peterborough Art Gallery
This lecture reflects on the insistence and persistence of landscape art today by considering a few contemporary landscape artists, almost all painters though not all men. All of them are from the region. To understand this kunstwollen, Bordo will revisit the landscape art of Paul Cézanne, his cultivation of terroir, to help us understand how and in what way profoundly these are visual works of aesthetic testimony.
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International Conference on Critical Topography
Investigations of Landscapes
Critical Topography Research Group Trent University and Documentary Media Research Centre Ryerson University
May 20 - 22, 2015
Program & Themes
Wednesday, May 20, Trent University, Peterborough:
Visual and Literary Landscapes
Keynote by Robert Del Tredici, founder of the Atomic Photographers Guild
Thursday, May 21, Ryerson University, Toronto:
Landscape in Motion: Ecology, Climate, Carbon
The Memnopolis through the Commons Forensic Landscape and the Nuclear Paradigm
Artist talk by photographer Mark Ruwedel about his show in the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC)
Friday, May 22, Ryerson University, Toronto:
Plenary
Marc Shell: A Critical Topography of Islands
2013-14 Academic Year
November 7, 2013
Mark Hansen
Professor of Literature and Arts of the Moving Image
Duke University
Inaugural John Fekete Distinguished Lecture
'MEDIA FUTURES: Mediatheoretical Mathematics in Action"
2012-13 Academic Year
Jodi Dean
Professor of Political Science Hobart and William Smith Colleges
"The Communist Horizon"
Thursday, September 20, 2012, 7:30PM
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Marc Shell
Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English and American Literature and Language
Harvard University
"Hamlet’s Globe"
Thursday, January 24, 2013, 7:30 p.m.
2011-12 Academic Year
W. J. T. Mitchell
Professor of English and Art History University of Chicago
"Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture"
Thursday, November 17, 20117:30 p.m.
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Christopher Smith
Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
"The Intoxication of Narcotic Modernity: Addiction, The Body, and The City"
Thursday, November 24, 20117:30 p.m. Scott House 105
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Davide Panagia
Canada Research Chair, Professor of Cultural Studies, Trent University
"10 Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics"
Thursday, February 9, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
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Randy Innes
Post Doctoral Fellow
“The Rhythm of the Image: Time, the Artwork and Visual Culture”
Thursday, March 8, 2012, 7:30 p.m. Scott House 105
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David Pettigrew
Philosophy Department Southern Connecticut State University
"The Geography of Genocide in Eastern Bosnia"
Thursday, March 29, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
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Professional Workshop
Wednesday February 1, 2012
Workshop on academic publishing with Courtney Berger (Duke Univ. Press)
CUST 6200 (all welcome)
6:00 p.m. Scott House 105
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2010-11 Academic Year
George Marcus
University of California, Irvine
"What Did Cultural Studies Do To Anthropological Ethnography? From Baroque Textual Aesthetics Back to The Design of the Scenes of Inquiry"
Thursday, October 14, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Seminar with George Marcus
14 Oct 2010, 10:00-12:00
Readings:
"Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography," in George E. Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, Princeton University Press 1998, 80-104.
"Notes Toward an Ethnographic Memoir of Supervising Graduate Research through Anthropology's Decades of Transformation." in James Faubion and George E. Marcus eds. Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be, Cornell 2009, pp. 1-36.
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Dorothea Olkowski
December 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Dorothea Olkowski, "Gilles Deleuze's "Wrenching Duality": From Kantian Aesthetics to the Paintings of Francis Bacon
Reading: Gilles Deleuze, "The idea of genesis in Kant's Aesthetics" Angelaki, vol 5, no. 3. (Dec 2000).
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David Lubin
Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center
"Amnesty, Amnesia, and Lae: A Reading of Dorfman's Death and the Maiden"
Thursday, January 20, 2011, 7:30 p.m.
Seminar with David Luban
Readings:
David Luban, "Hannah Arendt as Theorist of International Criminal Law" forthcoming in International Criminal Law Review, special issue on Women and International Criminal Law.
David Luban, "State Criminality and the Ambition of International Criminal Law," forthcoming in edited book based on April 2009 conference at Western Ontario University on collective punishment.
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Jason Lafountain
Harvard Art History ABD
will visit CUST 6200 and Professor Bordo's thesis writing group.
November 24, 2010 at 3:00 P.M.
Reading from A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers (Harvard, 2009), pp. 44-50.
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Baudelaire Live!
Thursday 11 Nov 2010, 9pm at the Trend
An open mic for performances from the work of the French poet. In French, in translation, with music. With a performance by Credo 4 and music by DJ Fever. Bohemian dress encouraged.
Sponsored by Trail College, the Graduate Students' Association and PhD Program in Cultural Studies.
2009-10 Academic Year
Agnes Heller
Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Also Professor, ELTE.
“Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Work of Art.”
Friday, November 6, 2009, 12:30 p.m.
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Alison Hearn
Associate Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
"Self, commodity, promotion and politics: reality television, web 2.0 and the 'new' economy."
(Co-sponsored by the Theory, Culture and Politics Centre)
Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7:30 p.m. Scott House 105
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Brian Rotman
Professor, Dept. of Comparative Studies Ohio State University
"Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being"
Thursday, January 28, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
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Tanya Richardson
Assistant Professor, Anthropology Wilfrid Laurier University
“Objectifying Odessa.”
(Co-sponsored by the Theory, Culture and Politics Centre)
Thursday, February 4, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
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Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities, and Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University.
"Immaterial Archives @ New Media Art”
Thursday, March 11, 2010, 7:30 p.m.