This is a chapter in a book in production called Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. The chapter addresses the intercoded limits of human exceptionalism and sociocentrism, tying both to a tacit assumption of g

Jeanette Samyn: On Positive Parasitism

Dec 30th, 2015 45m 20s

In recent decades, many of us have been prompted to rethink our views of parasitism. Long perceived in negative terms, parasitism is now taken by many in the biological sciences to have certain value: parasites and other symbionts, it is argued

Steven Horst: Matter as a Philosophical Posit

Dec 3rd, 2015 48m 42s

We all think we know what matter is, even if we don't know the details of contemporary physics, and we assume that materialism is an ancient and clearly-defined view whose main alternative is dualism. In fact, however, the history of the concep

Barbara Montero: What is Matter?

Dec 3rd, 2015 43m 51s

What is Matter? The seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes had an elegant answer to this question: the essence of matter, or of body, is extension-extension in length, breadth, and depth. And since Descartes also held

Courtney Weiss Smith: Toward a Language of Things

Nov 14th, 2015 46m 20s

When early Royal Society member John Wilkins sat down to create a language that would precisely mirror the reality of things, he found himself privileging poetic aspects of language. Scholars often read Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character,

Jonathan Lamb: The Implacability of Things

Nov 7th, 2015 43m 3s

This lecture tackles the assumption made in books such as Neil MacGregor's The History of the World in 100 Objects that things are in fact objects, either blindly subject to the commands of their human owners or willing on their own account to

Michael Silberstein: Matter, Mind and Meaning

Oct 28th, 2015 57m 44s

Quantum mechanics and relativity have shown us that the nature of matter is vastly different than materialists and mechanists ever imagined. Even so, trying to accommodate conscious minds into the natural order has led to the hard problem of co

Marcela Oteiza: City, Site and Memory: Santiago through the lens of street performance

Oct 20th, 2015 45m 13s

A city is a layered site used and lived by many. It is a space where everything has multiple meanings: a building serves as a destination for some and a metaphor for others. Public spaces become overcrowded with the ghosts of politics, old and

Deboleena Roy: Germline Ruptures: Methyl Isocyanate Gas and Transpositions of Life, Death, and Matter in Bhopal

Oct 8th, 2015 51m 37s

December 2014 marked the 30th anniversary of the gas leak tragedy that occurred at the Union Carbide Corporation's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Due to the initial exposure to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas during the explosion, and due to the

Larry McGrath: The Brain Hard-Wired in History

Oct 7th, 2015 41m 25s

When did we come to think of memory, language, and emotion as "hard-wired" functions of the brain? We will explore the origins of this enduring metaphor by revisiting the explosion of brain research during the 19th century. Developments in path

Surface and Subjectivity: Navigating the Pan American Highway in Panama 04/27/2015

Jul 22nd, 2015 44m 9s

The road that connects Panama City to the country’s eastern province highlights the connections between modernization and colonization: it is the centerpiece of projects of state expansion that enabled migrant peasants to settle the frontier an

Humanities Queer Art Poetics April 24, 2015

Jul 22nd, 2015 1h 44m

According to the event organizers, Queer/Art/Poetics makes a claim for the centrality of aesthetic form and formal practices to the work of queer theorizing. Art in our conference title refers not only to the objects and performances toward whi

Humanities Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento 4/13/2015

Jul 21st, 2015 1h 4m

Sitting at pale reproductions of what Realism once was, audiences forget that the theatrical experience once elicited passionate philosophical debates and provoked riots at opening nights. What sets the theatrical endeavor apart is its capacity

Humanities Gayle Salomon 4/20/2015

Jul 21st, 2015 1h 20m

This lecture is drawn from a book I am completing on about the murder of Larry/Latisha King, a gender-transgressive 15-year-old who was shot and killed in an Oxnard, California junior high school by classmate Brandon McInerney. McInerney was 14

Humanities Min Kyung Lee 04/06/2015

Jul 20th, 2015 51m 40s

The map is often used as a tool to navigate spaces and to locate oneself in those spaces—imagined or real. These spatial practices rely on an assumption that a map is a representation, and that regardless of its medium, as printed charts on pap

Humanities Stéphanie Ponsavady 03/30/2015

Jul 19th, 2015 57m 20s

In a sense, cars and metaphors are all means of transport, instruments used in order to produce a displacement. In France, the rise of the automobile coincided with another movement, the nation’s expansion overseas in the late 19th century. How

Humanities Inventing a Musical Metropolis: Detroit, 1940s-60s Mark Slobin 02/23/2015

Jul 18th, 2015 1h 12m

Inventing a Musical Metropolis: Detroit, 1940s-60s

Humanities The Mobile Margin: (Re)Constructing Barcelona During the Spanish Dictatorship (1939-1975) OLGA SENDRA FERRER 03/02/2015

Jul 18th, 2015 56m 31s

Humanities The Mobile Margin: (Re)Constructing Barcelona During the Spanish Dictatorship (1939-1975) OLGA SENDRA FERRER 03/02/2015

Rush: Adrenaline, Stress, and Modernist Velocity by Enda Duffy 02/09/2015

Jul 17th, 2015 57m 52s

Enda Duffy is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Santa Barbara, where he co-directs COMMA, the Center on Modernism, Materialism, Aesthetics in the English Dept. He earned his undergraduate degree form the National University

The Flight Out of Naturalism and into Live Cinema Jay Scheib 02/16/2015

Jul 17th, 2015 49m 24s

Everywhere, a thirst for the Real, for an ensnaring Reality that transcends the theater in space, time and action testifies to a craving for experiences that near the actual cruelties inherent in our own Real lives and the lives of others. This

Eric Fassin "The Roma Question in France and the Return of Race" 09/22/2014

Jul 12th, 2015 1h 4m

Why should the Roma be persecuted today in France? The political explanation under the presidency of Francois Hollande is no different from that of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy: their culture is supposed to be the source of the problem. In

Hari Krishnan "Celluloid Classicism: Intertwined Histories of the South Indian Dance Revival and Early South Indian Cinema" 09/29/2014

Jul 12th, 2015 59m 21s

This lecture focuses on the complex mobility of dance and cinema in South India to recast the making of modern Bharatanatyam (South Indian classical dance) - the period of the so-called "dance revival" - from the vantage point of early 20th cen

Davesh Soneji "Illicit Sexuality and the Politics of Movement: Dance and the Kalavantulu Community in South India" 10/06/2014

Jul 12th, 2015 43m 1s

This lecture explores the persistent yet invisible performance practices of former courtesans (kalavantulu) in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India. Following nearly a hundred years of "reform" activities the status of these women as legitimate

Gary Shaw "Traveling to the Future: Networks of Acceleration and the End of the Middle Ages" 11/10/2014

Jul 11th, 2015 53m 41s

By 1400, like other Europeans, the English had developed internal networks of communication and travel that had radically transformed their worlds. For some people, the world got smaller but would it be better to say that the world got quicker?

Debra Bergoffen 11/17/2014

Jul 11th, 2015 57m 35s

The story of Oedipus' sons' battle for control of Thebes, the ensuing fratricide, and the refusal of burial rites to the "traitor" Polyneices, captured the imagination of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. In this lecture, Bergoffen employs H