Thematic Lectures

This talk puts two problems in dialogue: first, the private misery many academics experience on a given day spent hoping our writing will “flow,” and second, the public challenge of explaining why academic expertise matters now, when so many of higher education’s resources have been blocked. These two problems bridge several perceived divides: individual and social, emotional and rational, psychological and political. Such divides are so familiar we can forget they have histories. But, they do. Indeed, the river city of Cincinnati— with its particular relation to the global flows of water, immigrants, industrial products, and ideas—has played a significant role in those histories. Taking Cincinnati as a case study, and drawing on her recent book Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now, Sarah Mesle explores how personal feelings have material, trackable, and transformable connections to our communities. She further proposes that humanists’ skills— such as our ability to historicize seemingly ephemeral experiences, like bad writing feelings— make us uniquely suited to addressing the broader crises of our period. 

A conversation between artists/designers Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner on printmaking as craft and practice of community engagement and community building. Discussing recent projects that center mutual aid, slow media, and attentive listening, they will explore design’s role in creating minor archives and pose questions to the audience and one another about the transformative (and transformed) role artists and designers can play. 

Surrounded by an octophonic ring of powerful loudspeakers, you are going to sit in the dark for 70 minutes, wear an eye mask, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes. You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and ancient Latin, to the first piece of musique concrete, recordings of Berlin made in 1930, a sonified essay about the gendering of glial cells, and the theory of how push buttons and Tupperware act as media objects. Through these sound pieces, the show examines how our attention is often directed toward very specific modes of understanding, while other ways of knowing are left out. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. 

A conversation on the (a)symmetries of collaborating and publishing Glossary of Insomnia with anthropologist and co-author Alexandra Dantzer, interlocutor-turned-friend and co-author Aleksandar Kecman, and friend-turned-publisher Micah Weber. Discussing the process of the book’s creation over three years and across two continents, they will share their collaborative writing methods and discuss the broader landscape of independent publishing. 

A conversation between artists/scholars Leniqueca Welcome and Audra Wolowiec on the limits of language, the unsaid, and the undone. Drawing inspiration from Welcome’s collages that uncover and play with the “unseen” and Wolowiec’s installations and scores that transform breath, stutter, and pause into spaces of relation, playing with the “unheard,” this discussion will ask:  What does it mean to listen to the unsayable? What are the limits of what can be said or seen? How does the body through sound or writing becomes an instrument of history?

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Blending interviews and personal experience with engaging stories from her own pioneering research, Kate Clancy challenges a host of myths and false assumptions.

Unlike most events in US labor history, the passage of time has not erased memory of the Triangle fire. The story continues to inspire labor, immigrant, and women’s rights movements in New York, around the US, and in different parts of the globe. Triangle memory is nurtured by Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a stalwart band of volunteers who connect individuals and groups to the story through the annual commemoration ceremony and other initiatives. In this talk, Mary Anne Trasciatti explores how memory work that is grounded in a single moment and location can connect people across time and space. 

This talk by Brian Kwoba explores the political life of the journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. Harrison blazed a trail for Black workers and organizers in the Socialist Party of America. He then emerged as the most prominent Black freethinker and free lover of his generation. Most spectacularly, Harrison's Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey and the largest international organization of Africana people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison's revolutionary legacy has been largely erased from popular memory. Until now.

Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Who is perceived as hormonal and why? Whose hormone cycles are idealized and whose hormonal imbalances are criminalized, pathologized, and fetishized—and to what social and political ends? How do these relations of power manifest as visual, material objects and images? And how have artists questioned the very idea of a “hormonally constructed body” (Oudshoorn) and its biopolitical implications for knowledge, embodiment, and being? This lecture by Faye Gleisser centers artists’ radical experimentation with hormonal fluctuations (related to stress, pregnancy, sleep, inflammation, gender identity, metabolism, aging, etc.) and posits that hormones don’t merely modulate our bodies, but instead function as socio-political cultural artifacts. She argues that the ways that such artifacts are manufactured and managed—through state-authorized laws as much by means of fugitive, collective aid and “off label” use—constitutes hormonality, a structural process through which the expression of hormonal management operates as a regulatory technology and a framework for solidarity work and pirate care. Through a close reading of contemporary artist, Mary Maggic’s somatic abolitionist praxis, exemplified in their Open Source Estrogen workshops, Gleisser propose a shared critical vocabulary for apprehending the state-sanctioned surveillance of hormonal knowledge and methods for coming to know collectivized hormonal experimentation long part of DIY guerrilla medicine, trans technologies, and mutual aid care networks.