American Cultures and Global Contexts Center

2007-08 Events

Fall Quarter 2007
ROUNDTABLE: “Global Warming Discourse, Politics, and Culture”
Friday, Dec. 7, 2007, 10:00-12:00 PM; South Hall 2617

On Friday, December 7th, from 10 am to 12pm, we will host an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion with Professors Josh Schimel (Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology) and Eric R.A.N. Smith (Political Science). The topic of the roundtable will be “Global Warming Discourse, Politics, and Culture.” We will discuss the IPCC Climate Assessment and related issues, such as changing public perceptions of global warming and the often conflicting rhetorics of climate change science, politics, and popular culture.

For more information on the IPCC Climate Assessment, please see the 2007 reports created by the IPCC’s three working groups:

Working Group I “The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change”: IPCC WG1 AR4 Report
Working Group II “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”: IPCC WGII web site.
Working Group III “Mitigation of Climate Change”: IPCCWG III Home

LECTURE: “Environmental Memory and Planetary Survival,” by Professor Lawrence Buell (Harvard University)
Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007, 4:00-6:00 PM, McCune Room 6020

Considered one of the founders of environmental criticism, Professor Lawrence Buell of Harvard University will share his most recent work, which treats the intersections of global and environmental studies. Professor Buell is this year’s Jay Hubbell Award winner, awarded by the MLA American Literature Group for lifetime achievement in American literature.

This lecture is part of a year-long series of events sponsored by the ACGCC and intended to promote UCSB’s initiative to build upon its already strong programs in Environmental Studies by focusing on how the Humanities contribute to environmental values and activism. Sponsored by the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, HFA, the Carsey-Wolf Center, the Bren School, Environmental Studies, English, Classics, History of Art and Architecture, the Literature & Environment Colloquium.

Interested graduate students and faculty are welcome to join us for a reception in honor of Professor Buell: Friday Nov. 16, 3:00-5:00 PM, South Hall 2635.

PANEL: The Hypersexuality of Race, featuring Celine Parrenas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young
Thursday, October 11, 2007; 4:00PM; HSSB McCune Room 6020

A reading and panel discussion featuring Celine Parrenas-Shimizu, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, Constance Penley, Professor of Film and Media Studies, and Mireille Miller-Young, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies.

Professors Penley and Miller-Young will comment upon Professor Parrenas-Shimizu’s recently published book, THE HYPERSEXUALITY OF RACE: PERFORMING ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN ON SCREEN AND SCENE (Duke UP). The book analyzes the production of sexuality for Asian women in western modern moving image visual cultures such as early cinema, stag films, contemporary pornography, Hollywood blockbusters, musicals and independent sexually explicit media by Asian American women.

This event underlines the remarkable fact that UCSB boasts three of the nation’s strongest cultural critics working on pornography and film/media studies.

Co-sponsored by the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

TALK & WELCOME PARTY: “Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture,” by Professor Patrick Sharp (Liberal Studies, Cal State Los Angeles)
Thursday, April 26, 2007, 2:00-3:30PM, South Hall 2617

Patrick Sharp is currently Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Liberal Studies at Cal State, Los Angeles. Professor Sharp will offer a reading from his book, SAVAGE PERILS: RACIAL FRONTIERS AND NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE IN AMERICAN CULTURE, which explores the influence of Darwinism, frontier nostalgia, and literary modernism on nuclear weaponry. Taking into account such factors as anthropological race theory and Asian immigration, Professor Sharp charts the origins of a worldview that continues to shape our culture and politics.

After Professor Sharp’s reading, join us for wine, cheese, and conversation at our ACGCC fall welcome party.

CONFERENCE: Intimate Labors
An Interdisciplinary Conference on Domestic, Care, Sex Work
October 4-6, Centennial House, UCSB

Keynote Speakers (in McCune Room, 6020 HSSB):

“From Patient Advocate to Social Advocate: The Work of Nursing,” Rose Ann DeMoro, California Nurses Association. October 4th, 7 p.m.

“Caring Everywhere,” Viviana A. Zelizer. October 5th, 10 a.m.

Intimate labor is work that entails bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, such as sexual intercourse and washing genitalia, or intimate observation and knowledge of personal information, such as childcare or housekeeping. It exists along a continuum of service and caring labor, from high end nursing and low end housekeeping, and includes sex, domestic, and personal care work. Against a scholarship that considers nurses, nannies, home aides, cleaners, prostitutes, masseuses, therapists, and hostesses apart from each other, this conference seeks to explore intimate labor as a useful category of analysis to understand gender, racial, class, and other power relations as well as look at current economic transformations.

Presented by the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice, Women’s Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara. Organized by Professor Eileen Boris, Women’s Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
and Professor Rhacel Parreñas, Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis. Sponsored by the University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund; University of California Humanities and Research Institute; University of California, Santa Barbara: College of Letters and Science, Division of Social Sciences, Hull Chair in Women’s Studies, Women’s Center, Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; College of Humanities, Arts, and Culture Studies at the University of California, Davis.