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The Humanities Center
Bringing Humanists Together for Collaborative Research
 
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Walter F. Edwards, DPhil
 
 
 
 
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2005-2006 Brown Bag Colloquium Series

The Humanities Center has scheduled a record 53 talks to be held on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
All lectures will be held in 2339 FAB from 12:30-1:30 unless otherwise announced.

Download schedule as a .pdf file

Click Brown Bag title for abstract.

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TALK ABSTRACTS:

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Sergio Rivera Ayala, "Race and Power in XVII Century Colonial Mexico"
1692 was a devastating year for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Floods and heavy rains destroyed most of the wheat crops which were an important food source for the Spanish population in Mexico. This natural disaster caused an agricultural crisis and consequently severe food shortages. In response to the scarcity of food, the colonial authorities diverted corn stocks, an important food source for the popular classes, especially the Indian population, to the rest of colonial society. This choice of policy, instead of solving the crisis, aggravated it even more, generating an increase in grain prices and a shortage of food. Some government officials were implicated in the elevated prices and shortages. As a result, the popular classes revolted in Mexico City, center of the Spanish colonial empire. Plebeians took control of the Vice regal palace and burned it, clamoring “death to the gachupines” (derogatory expression for Spaniards). Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a prominent Creole, (American-born Spaniard) wrote a report on the riots. He was well known for his passion for indigenous history and culture. The author appropriated and incorporated elements of the native in his writing and these became part of the emerging Creole identity and a foundational part of Creole ethos. Because the Spanish-born “gachupines” from all walks of life believed themselves superior to Creoles, their American-born counterparts, in reaction, showed pride in things native to Mexico. Sigüenza y Góngora not only spoke Nahuatl, the main indigenous language of Central Mexico, but his personal library contained a great number of indigenous codices. It was one of the best libraries of the Americas. However the position he took in his report about the 1692 riots is very problematic. He blamed the Indians for the entire emergency and absolved the colonial authorities, praising them instead for all the efforts they made to control the crisis. Creoles like Sigüenza y Góngora perceived this revolt, which had more characteristics of a spontaneous event resulting from the accumulated anger and unjust situation endured by the lower classes, as an example of the behavior of the “treacherous Indians”. What made Sigüenza y Góngora take a position in defense of the colonial powers and condemn the indigenous population? How can we read his position in the text in relation with the antagonism between Creole and gachupines? What kind of challenge did the voice of the indigenous population present in the Creole’s mind? The purpose of this talk is to explore Creole identity and its relationship with the power of the colonial state as well as other ethnicities.

John Corvino, "How to Be a Humean Moral Realist"
Moral realists hold that there are moral truths that are (to some extent) independent of our beliefs about them: our moral beliefs should answer to these truths, and not the other way around. Anti-realists, by contrast, see moral truths as a (largely malleable) human construct wherein we project our feelings out onto the world. Although moral realism is attractive for its attempt to provide objective moral standards, realists often have a hard time explaining both the source and the normative authority of such standards.

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose moral theory is based on human sentiment, is often claimed as an ally of the anti-realists. In this paper I defend a somewhat controversial realist (or at least quasi-realist) reading of Hume. I argue that Hume's sentimentalism is a promising route for providing objective standards while avoiding some of the familiar pitfalls of realism.

Renata Wasserman, “The Color of History: Black Brazilian Writers Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto”
Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto are major Brazilian writers, of African ancestry, who lived and worked at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, through the period of the abolition of slavery and its aftermath. Though they are both counted as realists, their approach to the social, political, and economic circumstances around them—including the fate and position of Brazilians of African ancestry—marks the range of possibilities within the scope of realism and fuels a lasting controversy about the responsibility of the writer toward his environment and about the implications of different styles of approaching this environment. As I trace the careers and reception of Assis and Barreto, brief references to African (North) American literature will illustrate, by contrast, the different possible relations between text and context, text and reception.

David Moxley and Olivia Washington, “Narratives of Recovery: How Older African American Women Emerge from Homelessness”
The experience of homelessness is situated in a very complex social location, which justifies multiple approaches to representation. The Telling My Story Project experiments with developing and using these multiple representations in partnership with formerly homeless older minority women who act as guides to the investigators, and as mentors helping them construct richer insights into the tragedy of homelessness and the triumph of emerging out of it. While homelessness is arduous for anyone, it is particularly difficult for older minority women, for a variety of reasons. But the representations the women produce indicate that they are not victims but authors of their own experience in which strengths, resilience, being and becoming interact to make them active, purposeful, and deliberate in their efforts to emerge out of homelessness and leave it behind.

The presenters will examine several narratives of homelessness they obtained through in-depth and intensive interviews of eight older African American women who emerged from homelessness successfully but who still face numerous issues and threats that can induce setbacks. The emergence process was not easy and, in some cases took a considerable toll on mental and physical health. The presenters will examine the themes of recovery and emergence imbedded within each story and they will offer frameworks that capture the process two women negotiated. These frameworks illuminate the deficiencies in contemporary communities, and the weaknesses in the safety net of social welfare. In addition, the narratives reveal a stark reality: even though the women achieve some success they face numerous challenges to recovery, to staying out of homelessness, and to gaining the resources they need to achieve independent living and some semblance of stability.

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Joe Calarco, "The Modern Poet as Mage and Musician: From W. B. Yeats to Dylan Thomas and Beyond"
It is hardly surprising that the first volume of R.F. Foster’s recent monumental W. B. Yeats: A Life is subtitled The Apprentice Mage. Almost from the beginning, Yeats’ poetic enterprise is a departure from naturalism and an effort to transform the natural world and man himself in the image of a magical, transcendent order. In one of his poems, The Song of Wandering Aengus, the wanderer and his finally-achieved beloved will “pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon,/ The golden apples of the sun.” It is only a step from this vision to the later Byzantium of Yeat’s imagination, where he aspires to the artifice of a golden bird upon a golden bough, singing “to lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

When Yeats performed his poems, it was in a sonorous, elevated style unpopular with his harsher critics. It was not until the American tours of Dylan Thomas that such a style was to be immortalized. For both poets, there are impermeable chains binding the sound and sense of a poem. To speak of them being “read” or “spoken” seems an insult to the experience of a performance; say instead that they are sung, though not in the conventions of the diatonic system; or say that they are chanted, like the spells Yeats actually cast as a mage of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

It is remarkable that these Yeats poems, so antique in some of their references, resonate so profoundly in a world caught in the war of cultures. Or that the poems of Thomas, so obscure in some of their references and metaphors, dance on the tympanum in a place beyond sense but not beyond passion.

Ken Jackson, "Is it God or the Sovereign Exception?: Giorgio Agamben and Shakespeare’s King John"
Shakespeare’s infrequently staged (and read) King John opens with the familiar problem of the history plays: a disputed claim to the throne. The play stands out in how quickly and directly it addresses the problem of sovereign legitimacy. The French Ambassador about to challenge John’s kingship in favor of John’s young nephew, Arthur, refers to John’s position as “borrowed majesty” in the fourth line. This insinuation immediately elicits an irritated reaction from Eleanor, John’s strong willed mother: “A strange beginning: ‘borrowed majesty’” (1.1.5). But the scene quickly reveals that even Eleanor has some doubts about King John’s legitimacy. While John believes his “strong possession” and “right” argue for him, his mother secretly cautions that “Your strong possession much more than your right,/ Or else it must go wrong with you and me (1.1.40-41). The implication is clear. John has “strong possession” certainly, and perhaps some right (“more than your right”), but certainly not absolute right. As King Philip of France points out to King John, “Geoffrey was [John’s] elder brother born” and therefore Geoffrey’s young son, Arthur, rightfully claims the throne (2.1.104). Indeed, Shakespeare puzzles throughout the play, if Arthur’s claim is right, how can a king find himself on a sacred throne without divine authority? For the modern audience, of course, the answer is simple. Divinely determined authority is a myth or, to borrow Montaigne’s phrase, a “mystical foundation” for authority. “Strong possession” or violence alone determines sovereignty. But, lo and behold, that steely-eyed, secular, modern perspective has not stopped us one bit from conjuring other equally mystical foundations for authority to distinguish the legitimacy of one violent sovereign from another. Giorgio Agamben insists, for example, that our various modern declarations of the rights of man – our respect for the “sacredness” of bare life (homo sacer) – now grounds a state’s legitimacy and sovereignty. This essay attempt to use Shakespeare’s King John, and its stunning treatment of Arthur in particular, to illuminate the tenacious connections Agamben displays between the “religious” desire for a divinely determined sovereign, and our “secular” desire for a just and legitimate government.

Haiyong Liu, "The Initial Stage and Parameter-resetting in Second Language Acquisition of Chinese"
According to the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996), both first language and universal grammar play a role in second language acquisition, the former as the initial stage and the latter triggering parameter-resetting through learning. My experiments show that language learners, in addition to language transfer from their native language, also have access to universal grammar at the initial stage. For example, although English reflexives allow only local antecedents, as can been that himself can only refer to Tom in 'John says that Tom likes himself', English speakers learning Chinese do show signs of the awareness of the possible long-distance antecedents that are possible in Chinese; i.e. himself in 'John says that Tom likes himself ' refers to either John or Tom. On the other hand, English speakers tend to allow both subjects and objects as antecedents for Chinese reflexives in their learning, a transfer from their native English, as can be seen from the ambiguity of himself in 'John gives Tom a picture of himself', when Chinese allows only subject antecedents. Similar asymmetry can be seen from the acquisition the pro-drop (optional-subject parameter) of Chinese, which is not allowed in English. I conclude that it is harder for a speaker speaking a language with a certain marked (less common) feature to acquire a feature in a foreign language that is unmarked (more common), but not the other way around.

Jeff Rice, "Digital Detroit"
The city of Detroit has become emblematic of digital culture. Even the idea of a “Digital Detroit” has become the topic and title of an annual city-based conference. Calling the city “digital,” though, evokes a significant question: Whereas Industrial Detroit produced an assembly line logic of equal parts in the system, uniformed structure, and concentration of work and knowledge in one space, how does Digital Detroit lead to a new media logic? This talk will explore the notion of Digital Detroit, but it will not do so in terms of instrumental reasoning. By that, I mean the concept of a Digital Detroit does not depend on software, hardware, financial investment, or any other “grand narrative” of recovery Detroit embraces and most of us recognize as familiar. Instead, this talk will explore Digital Detroit in terms of new media logic and rhetorical production. How do Detroit’s empty spaces contribute to - as well as generate - a new media logic of speculation, conjecture, juxtaposition, appropriation, and assemblage? How has assembly line thinking yielded to assemblage thinking?

Nancy Christ & Vance Briceland, "Research Collaborations: How to Find Partners and Funding"
Shrinking budgets have prompted both government and private funders to re-think their grant eligibility policies. To make the best use of available money, many funders now require that grant applicants collaborate with other researchers either within their own institution or with other public or private institutions, in order to be considered for funding.

How do you locate these collaborative grant opportunities, and where can you find others who share your research interests?

This seminar will present strategies and resources for finding research partners and funding, and will provide a current list of funding opportunities for collaborative research.

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Bob Sedler, "Freedom of Speech: United States vs. The Rest of the World"
The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech very expansively, and the constitutional protection afforded to freedom of speech is perhaps the strongest protection afforded to any individual right under the Constitution. It is also fair to say that the constitutional protection afforded to freedom of speech in the United States is seemingly unparalleled anywhere else in the world, and that in the United States, as a constitutional matter, the value of freedom of speech generally prevails over other democratic values, such as equality and privacy. For this reason, the American view of freedom of speech is not always consistent with international human rights norms and the protection of freedom of speech in other democratic countries. These norms and the constitutional law of other democratic countries treat freedom of speech as an important right, but one that must be balanced against other democratic rights.

Professor Sedler explains why it is that the American Constitution provides so much protection to freedom of speech. He maintains that this is because in our constitutional system, constitutional law develops on a case-by-case basis through the process of constitutional litigation. As the Court has decided First Amendment cases over the years, it has promulgated concepts, principles and doctrines and has established precedents. The sum total of these concepts, principles, doctrines and precedents comprise what he calls the “law of the First Amendment,” which provides a great deal of protection to freedom of speech. For this reason, in actual First Amendment litigation, there is a very good likelihood that the First Amendment claim will prevail.

Nowhere is the difference between the constitutional protection of freedom of speech in the United States and the rest of the world more apparent than with respect to laws prohibiting “hate speech.” Most other democratic nations, including Canada, the neighbor to our north, and international human rights documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil Rights, prohibit the expression of “hate speech” and take the position that “hate speech” is not a part of the guarantee of freedom of speech. Thus, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits the “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” In contrast, when the United States Supreme Court was faced with constitutional challenges to laws that prohibited “hate speech” or “incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” the Court applied two principles that had emerged from its First Amendment cases over the years. Under the principle of protection of offensive speech, the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society itself finds the idea offensive or disagreeable. Under the principle of content neutrality, the government may not prohibit any speech because of its content or the message it conveys. Following the Court’s application of these principles, it was clear that “hate speech” laws were unconstitutional.

Much of the strong protection that the Court has afforded to freedom of speech results from the Court’s application of the content neutrality principle. The underlying premise of this principle is that the First Amendment establishes a marketplace of ideas, that all ideas, good and bad, must be able to compete in this marketplace, and that the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. It is this underlying premise that is subject to strong attack by critics of the Court’s current First Amendment jurisprudence, and that it rejected by other democratic countries and by international human rights norms. The critics insist that there are bad ideas, like genocide, and racism, and sexism, and homophobia, that find their way into the marketplace, and maintain that the government should be able to prohibit the expression of bad ideas because of the harm that they cause to society and to “victim groups.” It is this view that is reflected in the constitutional law of other democratic nations and international human rights norms.

Professor Sedler proposes that this colloquium explore the greater constitutional protection provided to freedom of speech in the United States, in comparison to the rest of the world, in light of humanistic values. Can humanistic values provide guidance as to how strongly we should protect freedom of speech when it takes the form of “hate speech” and of what most of us would consider to be “bad ideas”? Can humanistic values be relied on to support strong constitutional protection to freedom of speech?

Robert P. Holley, "You CAN Always Get What You Want and Usually Pay Much Less than You Expected: The Out-of-print Book Market in the Internet Age"
Are you looking for an out-of-print book in the Humanities? The good news is that your odds of finding it are high. The even better news is that you’ll pay significantly less than you would have before the arrival of Internet booksellers. Bob Holley will report on his research that used a sample of advertisements to buy and to sell out-of-print books from the pre-Internet days (1982 and 1992). A high percentage of the items (75%+) were in the Humanities. Using the meta-search engine, used.addall.com, he discovered 95% availability in all four samples. In inflation adjusted dollars, prices had dropped around 45% from pre-Internet days. He attributes the changes to the efficiencies of large databases and the ability of the Internet to match buyers and sellers. Scholars and libraries now have much better chance of finding older books.

Bob Holley is Professor in the Library & Information Science Program. He not only teaches collection development but also continues to buy library materials for the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures.

Terese M. Volk, "Congdon’s Early Music Education Materials"
Music educators have been creating materials for classroom use since the late 1800s. One of the earliest to develop such materials was Charles Congdon. These materials were so successful that he published, advertised and promoted his materials for sale. This presentation focuses specifically on his song books, music scrolls, and his new chromatic pitch pipe.

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Monte Piliawsky, “An Invisible Voice of the New Left: Life Cycle Political Socialization of a White, Working-Class Radical Woman”
The paper tells the story of 57-year-old Molly Rose Morgan's odyssey--political, ideological, and personal--through virtually every revolutionary movement of the last four decades. Molly evolved through the following political stages: student New Leftist (at Wayne State University in 1968), socialist feminist, Maoist-communist for seven years, and for the past 30 years, a seamstress and militant union organizer with UNITE HERE in Southern textile factories.

Molly is en exemplar of a largely unrecognized group: white, working-class, sixties New Left women who have participated in disproportionately middle-class social movements. Molly's journey demonstrates how the power of class oppression and gender hegemony in American society and paradoxically even in the supposed egalitarian New Left made an indefatigable leftist fall into two traps: feeling intellectually inferior to her middle-class, college-educated peers, and internalizing traditional sexist gender roles.

Loraleigh Keashly, “Aggression at the Service Delivery Interface: The Evolution of Patient-Staff Hostility”
The delivery of healthcare services is characterized by a number of social, situational and psychological factors that are associated with the onset of aggression. Much of what we know about aggression in healthcare and other organizational settings is based on cross-sectional survey data—which tells us little about the underlying dynamics within specific aggressive incidents. Describing the connections and sequencing of behaviors within an incident in detail allows us to articulate the various pathways an incident can take and their resultant outcomes (constructive or destructive). Such knowledge has important implications for the prevention and management of such incidents specifically and for the quality of healthcare delivery more generally.

In the current project, my colleague Joel Neuman and I sought to gather such detailed information by interviewing people in detail about their thoughts and feelings during the course of a specific incident. Specifically, we conducted interviews with U.S. military veterans and VA staff and focused on specific hostile and upsetting incidents within veteran-staff encounters during the delivery of healthcare services. In this presentation, which is based on preliminary data from this ongoing project, I will focus on causal attributions for the incident as perceived by the interviewees and explore how differences in attribution by parties to the event link to subsequent responding and hence the escalation or de-escalation of the incident.

Anca Vlasopolos, “Intercourse with Animals: Feminized Nature and Sadism in Balzac, Melville, Whaling Journals, and 1920’s Footage of Albatross Hunts”
Male writers/explorers//hunters in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century documents view nature as feminized and/or subaltern. Hence, animals in a Balzac story, in Moby Dick, and in journals and early film documentaries become subject to sexualized torture and extermination. In loci of military and commercial-industrial exploitation animals are used in modes that replicate Western-male dominance. What makes the texts and documents in question interesting is the authors’/actors’ unease with their roles as oppressors and their tortuously ambivalent emotions toward a feminized nature.

Bruce Russell, “Against Relativism”
I will talk about three sorts of relativism: about truth, about justification, and about morality. Some claim that there are no truths, but this view is self-defeating. If it is true, then there is at least one truth, and so it is false. Others claim that to say that something is true is just short for saying that it is true for some person, culture, epoch, or the like. I will argue that the “true for S” locution just means “believed true by S,” and so is uninteresting.

When it comes to justification, some claim that we are not justified in believing anything. This claim, like its counterpart denying truth, is self-defeating. If we are justified in believing it, then it is false, for then we would be justified in believing something. A slightly more interesting claim is that evidence is subjective: what is evidence for you need not be evidence for me. An even more interesting claim denies the following: if two people have exactly the same evidence for some proposition, then one of those persons is justified in believing that proposition if, and only if, the other is. I will also argue against the slightly more interesting claim, and the denial of the much more interesting, claim. Justification is relative to evidence, but evidence is not subjective Evidence requires that everyone who possesses it, and only it, take just one of three possible epistemic stances toward the relevant proposition: believe it, suspend judgment, disbelieve it.

Finally, some people think that morality is relative in the sense that “it’s just a matter of opinion” whether some action is right or wrong and whether some types of person are good or bad. However, this seems obviously false. It is wrong to torture innocent children to death just for the fun of it; it is wrong to enslave people; it is wrong to rape someone; and it is wrong to deny someone her liberty if she poses no danger to herself or others, and has not committed any crimes. Also, rapists and hitmen are bad people. That we do not know the moral status of all types of actions and people does not mean that we do not know the moral status of some of them. Moral relativism is false because we do, and so morality is not “just a matter of opinion.”

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Alvin Saperstein, “Science and Religion: the Two-Brain Student”
There has been much popular discussion, in recent years, of a two-brain basis for human intelligence: a left-brain and a right-brain, one responsible for analytical behavior, the other for holistic and language activity. I am in no position to comment on the usefulness or validity of this basis set. But, as a result of many years of teaching physics and astronomy at the introductory college levels, I am convinced of an alternative two-brain basis for student behavior: an "in-school brain", and an "out-of-school life brain", with very little, if any, connection between the two.

Too often we physicists teach science as if the two components of this orthogonal basis set did not exist. We teach to one axis and ignore the strong transition to the other, which occurs soon after the student leaves our classrooms. As a result, our own academic "turf" is increasingly under attack as a growing fraction of our population, many college-educated, urge the substitution of religion for science in our schools and public life. Consequently, ignoring the appropriate sciences, our society pays a heavy price: decaying cities; snail's space transportation systems: air, water and land which are challenges to our health rather than supports for our well-being; and, increasingly, competition, and even battle, over shrinking resources and space. Hence it would be useful to have some clear notions as to where, if any, there are necessary conflicts between religion and science, and where they may coexist.

Robin Boyle, "Plenty of Emptiness: Cities and Vacant Land"
This talk examines the phenomenon of the empty city, using examples from the US and from Europe (where the moniker 'shrinking city' is more commonly used). It begins by identifying the dimension of the issue and the impact that urban decline and emerging emptiness has on different urban audiences: residents, business, potential visitors and, critically, policy-makers. The paper then offers a critique of the expansive literature that presents solutions to emptiness, in particular examining the concept of 'block-filling'. Case studies from a large Midwestern city, Detroit, are employed to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to overcoming contemporary urban decline. The paper concludes with a discussion of traditional and alternative policy solutions for the empty city.

Danny Postel, "Reading Habermas (and Lolita) in Tehran: Iran's Intellectual Encounter with Modernity"
A profound intellectual upheaval is taking place in Iran today. At its core is an engagement with the work of European thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Leszek Kolakowski. Why is it that figures and motifs associated with the liberal tradition speak to Iranian intellectuals and dissidents in a way that ones associated with radicalism do not? What can we in the West learn from what one Iranian philosopher calls the “renaissance of liberalism” happening in Iran today? How do the ideas of European political philosophers appear when refracted back to us through the prism of its contemporary Iranian interpreters? Danny Postel, Senior Editor of the online journal openDemocracy.net, will offer some provocative thoughts on these and related questions.

Danny Postel is a contributing editor to the London-based magazine openDemocracy.net, a contributing editor to Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a member of the editorial board of The Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation. He has been a professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago, a staff writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and an editor at Britannica.com, the online publication of Encyclopædia Britannica. His work has appeared in Philosophy & Social Criticism, Left History, Radical Society, New Politics, The Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation, The American Prospect, In These Times, The Progressive, and Exquisite Corpse, among other publications. He is the editor of the book The Shadow of Kosovo, to be published later this year.

Bill Harris, “Reading from a Work in Progress”
"Birth of a Notion, Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told: A Narrative Account With Entertaining Passages Of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation thereof (from the Ha Ha Dark Side) as written by Bill Harris" is a work in progress. It is to be a long (long) blank verse poem. Its subject is the parallel paths taken by the U.S. and popular culture, particularly blackened faced minstrelsy, as they strove to find their form in the mid to late 19th Century.

In 1841 P.T. Barnum, with profits from his exhibition of Joice Heth, advertised as a 161 year old slave woman who had been George Washington’s nanny, opened the American Museum on lower Broadway in New York City. Its five floors were crammed with freaks, fakes and various phenomena that over its twenty four years of existence drew multitudes of curiosity seekers. I propose that the Museum set the standard for the giving-the-people-what-they-want branch of popular culture then and now.

I will read the section of the poem that signifies on Barnum’s museum, its influence on the image of American, and Americans, black and white. I will also discuss the process of the writing of the poem and its form’s connection to the Museum.

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Frances Ranney, “Making Good on Our Promise(s): Women’s Studies across Feminisms and Disciplines”
Women’s Studies programs have grown out of a range of feminist perspectives. Liberal feminist beliefs have influenced many programs to focus on women’s voices on the assumption that those voices, once heard, would be accorded value that would in turn facilitate inclusion and rights in established institutions. Another assumption grounding Women’s Studies programs, growing out of cultural or relational feminism, was that women’s unique values could usefully inform and potentially transform the many fields in which their voices would speak. In keeping with such assumptions, Wayne State’s Women’s Studies co-majors and minors pair a disciplinary major with a focus on issues of gender or sexuality so that they may both participate in and potentially alter fields of endeavor traditionally unavailable to them.

The purpose of my talk is to question whether Women’s Studies programs generally have made good on the promises implied by our assumptions. Through a brief case study, I will consider how postmodern feminism can supplement liberal and cultural assumptions to provide a fuller picture of the struggles of one woman to find a voice—and her ultimate success in doing so—during the Progressive Era. I will then suggest the significance of postmodern feminist insights for the development of our own program.

Christopher J. Peters, “Constitutional Rights and Disagreement”
Constitutionalism is usually understood as the practice of entrenching certain norms, including norms of individual rights, so that current political majorities cannot easily reject or change them. But people of good faith inevitably disagree about the rights they and others have. Some constitutional theorists, most recently Jeremy Waldron, have argued that the inevitability of disagreement about rights makes problematic the idea of constitutional rights, particularly judicially enforced constitutional rights. Waldron contends that the only fair way to resolve political disagreements, including disagreements about rights, is through a democratic process of full and fair participation by contemporary citizens, not by an elite cadre of unelected judges interpreting centuries-old text.

I’ll argue, contra Waldron, that the fact of persistent disagreement supports rather than undermines the case for constitutional rights. The key, I’ll contend, is to understand constitutional law as a process of acceptable dispute resolution rather than a set of entrenched norms. A political community might reasonably choose to resolve its disputes about democratic participation by means other than democratic participation. More broadly, a community might choose to resolve its disputes about political justice – about the community’s authority to impose its moral views upon dissenters – through procedures that are relatively impartial with respect to those moral views. A constitution, interpreted by an independent judiciary, can resolve questions about rights through procedures that are meaningfully external to everyday democracy and its moral and political controversies; those resolutions then might be generally acceptable in a way the products of ordinary politics could not be.

Brad R. Roth, “State Sovereignty and International Legality”
For those who impute to the international legal order an inherent purpose to establish a universal justice that transcends the boundaries of territorial communities, the legal prerogatives associated with state sovereignty represent impediments to the global advance of legality. Sovereignty thus appears as the unconquered domain: a realm of lawlessness that must recede for international law to advance. This view, however, tends to neglect persistent and profound, albeit bounded, disagreement within the international community as to the requirements of justice. An alternative conception of international order predicates peace and cooperation on continued respect for each political unit s capacity to make and enforce the ineluctably contentious decisions needed to structure social life.

Janine Marie Lanza, “Sharing the Wealth: Families and Inheritance in Early Modern Paris”
In early modern French society, common and royal law were meant to shape inheritance practice in order to respond to the social needs of families and communities. For example, in certain regions of France primogeniture governed the logic of distributing wealth after a father’s death and eldest sons assumed ownership of family property leaving their siblings with very little to claim from the natal family. Elsewhere all children, male and female, shared in their family’s wealth at the death of their parents. Families and individuals also used mechanisms like loans, annuities, and life-use clauses in various contracts to channel wealth to favored heirs even when such actions betrayed the intent of legal customs. One of the most common ways families skirted the intentions of the law was to specify widows’ rights to use family property after their husbands’ deaths, even when such clauses prevented rightful heirs from claiming their property. This paper will explore ways in which families used contracts to manipulate the transfer of property in ways that did not conform to law in order to assert the primacy of their own interests above those of the kingdom’s legal system.

Sarika Chandra, "The Body and the Global Documentation of Identity"
There has been a recent upsurge in television and film narratives that focus on the documentation of people’s identity. Historically, an identity card--usually issued by an agency of a particular nation-state--serves as proof of one's identity and simultaneously grants rights and protection under the legal system of the state. Films such as Minority Report, Code 46, and Dirty Pretty Things, imagine the body as its own identity card. These narratives often serve as a warning of the ways in which our lives are rapidly changing. Fingerprints and eye-scans instantly provide information about a person’s DNA, bank accounts, criminal activities, and so forth. Though Minority Report and Code 46 are set in the future, bodily methods of documentation are either already in operation or well on their way towards implementation. I will discuss how contemporary narratives explore the implications of the body-as-identity-document in relationship to the nation-state and the question of rights in a global context.

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WINTER SEMESTER

Arthur Marotti, “The Personal Anthologizing of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England”
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England the manuscript system of literary transmission continued to thrive, despite the growing importance of print as a medium for the publication of poetry. Within manuscript culture, particular individuals, in a practice resembling the habit of “commonplacing” or the keeping of commonplace books of valued information and quotations, sometimes assembled personal anthologies of verse. Participating in a system of literary transmission that allowed compilers and scribes to alter, supplement, and answer the poems they collected, as well as to add their own compositions to the collections, these anthologists, within particular social environments (such as the university, the Inns-of-Court, the royal court, and aristocratic households), left to us a large number of poetical anthologies that represent a wider field of writing than that usually covered by traditional literary history, which has been based mainly on the products of print culture. This paper will consider some of the larger cultural-historical and literary issues involved in this practice and use as examples three different manuscript collections from the period. Finally, it will offer a series of reasons why it is important to study these documents and others to be found in the archives that preserve them.

Margaret E. Winters & Geoffrey Nathan, “The Semantics of ‘Applied’ in Linguistics and Elsewhere”
As a designation of certain academic disciplines, the adjective ‘applied’ (‘applied linguistics, physics’ etc.) often carries negative connotations which are not part of the semantics of the word in other domains, nor in the original sense. Used as a prefix, it is frequently interpreted as implying a lack of intellectual rigor with, often, a definite connotation of inferiority compared to the ‘pure’, theoretical study it is related to. However, what may be labeled ‘applied’ varies both within and across areas of scholarship. Within the language sciences some aspects of linguistics, like the study of second language acquisition, are probably considered ‘applied’ by the majority of linguists, while other endeavors are less clearly categorized (is language planning 'applied linguistics'?) and still others are very occasionally thus designated (historical linguistics as an applied field, for example). The directionality in the development of the field (from ‘pure’ to ‘applied’ or vice versa) may be an issue too; there are what might be called markedness reversals in disciplines which start as completely applied (language teaching itself, for example) which then develop a “purer” side through an increased emphasis on theory and research.

This paper is an exploration, both synchronic and diachronic, of the meaning of ‘applied’ in an academic setting, particularly as it appears in Linguistics. The paper is couched in the framework of Cognitive Semantics. We use both the notion of the radial set and the tool of scalarity in discussing this meaningful unit which, even within the domain of universities, is polysemous semantically or at least pragmatically. With various functions of the prefix come varying connotations within different disciplines and subdisciplines, hence the advantage of looking at a prototype configuration as well as the location of any given use along a continuum of positive and negative value judgments. The differences in directionality and in location on the continuum constitute alternative construals, depending on discipline-specific central points or prototypes.

Non-Sententials Working Group, "Telegraphic Talk: The Syntax of Nonsententials"
Ellen Barton, Linguistics; Eugenia Casielles, Romance Languages; Walter Edwards, Linguistics; Kate Paesani, Romance Languages; Ljiljana Progovac, Linguistics; Patricia Siple, Psychology; Nicola Work, Romance Languages

The humor in the cartoon above turns on the use of several utterances that consist of a single phrase. Traditionally, utterances like these have been called fragments, thought to derive by ellipsis from full sentence sources within the discourse. In our work, we argue that such phrases are actually derived directly, rather than via a sentential source, and thus we call them nonsententials. Our central claim is that the universal human grammar generates not only sentences but also nonsententials – directly derived Noun Phrases, Verb Phrases, Adjective Phrases, Adverb Phrases, Prepositional Phrases, and small clauses (e.g., Me first, Him worry?) – with propositional content. Using the current linguistic theory of Minimalism, we argue that speakers have access to both a sentential and a nonsentential grammar, and that the nonsentential grammar is the basis for the use of independent phrases and small clauses in conversation, in first and second language acquisition, in special registers (e.g., recipes, headlines), and in processes of pidginization and creolization. We are editing a volume (forthcoming from John Benjamins) that brings together researchers from syntax, semantics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, agrammatism/aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies to describe the structure and interpretation of nonsententials in a variety of languages and contexts. In this Brown Bag presentation, we will present cross-linguistic data from a variety of chapters in the volume that support and extend this argument.

Julie A. Washington, “Language and Literacy: When the two don’t intersect for Minority children”
The gap in reading achievement between minority children and their majority peers is well-documented. Difficulty with reading impacts academic achievement in all content areas, and ultimately undercuts employment and other life choices in adulthood. The role of language in this “epidemic” has received renewed interest among educators and language specialists alike as a potentially explanatory variable. The focus of this colloquium will be the “reading problem” in the United States as it relates to African American children and the purported contribution of language differences.

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Michael Scrivener, “Habermas and Literary Theory”
Among the major writers associated with the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas is not ordinarily associated with developments in literary theory. Unlike Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, for whose critical theories of society the realm of aesthetics was essential, Habermas seems to have relegated aesthetics to a less exalted role in his own social theory. The literary and aesthetic are nevertheless important to the thinking of Habermas, who has had a significant impact on literary theory, first with his innovative concept of the public sphere, a conceptual breakthrough that has been enormously productive in the humanities and social sciences. He has also played a productive role in theoretical discussions of the Enlightenment, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, debating the ideas of Foucault and Derrida, and becoming the defender of modernity in the postmodernism debate with Lyotard. More recently Habermas has participated in the conversation on cosmopolitanism, as he has dealt extensively with issues of communitarianism, globalization, and multiculturalism. I will touch upon some of the things that have made Habermas’s writing distinctive in relation to literary theory, especially his ideas on the public sphere.

Marilyn Zimmerman, “People of Detroit: A Living Project”
The People of Detroit: A Living Project is a photographic and interview document of the citizens of Detroit regarding healthcare and their urban environment. This is a collaborative effort of the School of Medicine and the Departments of Family Medicine, Computer Science, Sociology and Art and Art History at Wayne State University to illustrate the many challenges Detroiters face as they access health care, focusing on health care disparities. This project magnifies the human condition across age, race, class and gender. The People of Detroit exhibit and narrative of first person testimonies will be shown. We will describe extending the project through visual sociology and the empowerment of respondents to tell their own stories through photographic narratives. Both faculty and students are invested in this project whose vehicle is core factual first person stories, told through an empathetic context and photographic lens of compassion. The final project will be presented to a variety of stakeholders including politicians, healthcare providers, and insurers with the goal of eliminating health care disparities.

Ronald Aronson, “Living without God”
Is it possible to live without God today while at the same time seeing the world as alive with meaning, being morally centered, and being guided by a world-view that is self-confident as well as coherent? This would have seemed a ridiculous question two generations ago during the high tide of secularism, agnosticism, and atheism. Indeed, the famous Time Magazine cover of April 8, 1966, worried: “Is God Dead?” Not long after, John Lennon’s "Imagine" reached the top of the charts by expressing a utopian vision of a society without religion:

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people living for today. . .

How times have changed—today the most famous critic of religion in America is Bill Maher, a comedian! We live in a time of religious revival, a time when non-believers have been very much on the defensive. Those who affirm God no longer see themselves swimming against the current. Poll results have been proclaiming this loudly: 64 percent of Americans now describe themselves as religious, and the same number pray daily. An even greater percentage believe in an afterlife, and more Americans accept the Bible’s creation story than do evolution. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state has been growing more porous, discrimination against homosexuals is public policy, and abortion rights have been narrowed. It has become a commonplace, even in the White House, to hear people say, reverentially, that they have been “chosen” for their life path, or that everything is “meant to happen,” both presumably by God.

As religion has been regaining strength, secularism, agnosticism, and atheism have been losing their appeal. Why? What has become of their once-persuasive secular world-view? Why have tens of millions of individuals who do not live by religion been losing confidence in their onetime answers to many of the issues now addressed so forcefully by religion? Beginning by acknowledging the historical experiences that have diminished human confidence in a secular life, I will then explore the question: What does it mean to live without God today?

Juanita Anderson, “African Cinema”
Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene once remarked, “Cinema is a conversation that I hold with my people.” Since 1960, when Sembene became the first indigenous African filmmaker to direct a film on the African continent, African filmmakers have fashioned a cinema and aesthetic that has been a vehicle for addressing some of the most pressing political, economic and social concerns confronting post-colonial African societies. Yet today, audiences of African cinema in the United States far outnumber those on the African continent. This presentation explores the financing and distribution of African Cinema in the context of a global economy and competing global media interests.

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R. Khari Brown, “Racial Differences in the Social Service Provision of Black and White Religious Congregations”
The current study builds from Harris’s (1998) theory of congregations as voluntary associations by suggesting that the social service programs in which congregations decide to invest resources likely has much to do with their racial experiences. Black congregations remain less likely than white congregations to provide emergency (e.g. food, clothing and cash assistance) programs even when both congregations have an equal resource capacity. This likely suggest that black congregational bodies are less willing than are their white counterparts to provide programs that seemingly provide a short-term fix for human needs. To the contrary, black congregations place greater priority on educational programs than do white congregations. This finding may serve as an indicator of the greater willingness of black congregations to invest resources in programs that have more of a long-term impact. Both black and white congregations, however, invest a similar amount of resources into housing-related programs. This may suggest that both groups have similar conceptions of the importance of housing to social-economic betterment.

Victor Figueroa, “A Kingdom of Black Jacobins: Alejo Carpentier and C.L.R. James on the Haitian Revolution”
This paper establishes a dialogue between two of the most important works on the Haitian Revolution produced within the Caribbean: Alejo Carpentier's novel, El reino de este mundo, and C.L.R. James's historical-political interpretation, The Black Jacobins. Although both of these works are considered classical Caribbean approaches to the events in Haiti, their approaches are dramatically different. Specifically, Carpentier's novel foregrounds the religious dimensions of the revolution, and a careful reading of the text shows how all of the important events of the Revolution are in fact linked to, and "explained" in terms of, the cosmogonical powers of Haitian Voodoo. James, on the other hand, while acknowledging the role of voodoo in the Revolution, is more interested in the use that the rebellious slaves make of the "enlightened" ideas and movements of the French Revolution. I suggest that, besides differences of genre and personal inclination, the differences between Carpentier and James are better explained by the fact that neither of them is writing only, or even mainly, about Haiti, but rather using Haiti as an emblem or illustration of other political and cultural struggles.

Stanley Shapiro, “Charles Lindbergh’s Image and Celebrity”
All the biographers of Charles Lindbergh, despite different assessments and conclusions, pursue one overarching theme: the aviator lived in the relentless glare of publicity, unhappy with a public persona alien to his "real" self. He was misunderstood and misrepresented, forever captive to an American audience in need of cultural heroes or scapegoats. What these biographers do not consider is how Lindbergh became a likeness of that media image or how reality compared to the unfolding myth. My talk examines those questions in order to put the credible elements of Lindbergh's story in a more truthful light.

Donyale Griffin, “Hip-Hop's Messages and Images in the 21st Century: Commodity, Conflicts, and Contradictions”
While historically, hip-hop's socio-political significance is undeniable, the genre is often relegated to "booty music", which dilutes the organic messages that have challenged the status quo and served as a part of hip-hop's history since its inception in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Today, rap music leads as the primary defining element of hip-hop culture and drives its marketability. This marketability is seen through music videos, partnerships between corporate entities and hip-hop artists like Nelly and Snoop Dog, and sales of hip-hop music and fashion across cultural and geographic boundaries. This begs the question “Is hip-hop’s commodification a sign of the continued selling and ‘pimping’ of Black culture to the masses?”, or, as hip-hop critic Greg Tate writes, is it “an African American response to the consumerization and disposability of people” (Tate, 1999, p. 386).

Hip-hop culture has been described as the most explosive, engaging, and controversial form of (black) American pop culture to find global circulation and acclaim in the last quarter century (Dyson, 2004) and arguably so. Deemed as a passing fad, the music of hip-hop has permeated not just American culture, but has touched the lives of individuals all over the world. But are the images and messages projected through this genre hegemonic and ultimately self-destructive to the African American community?

During this talk, I will argue that the hip-hop phenomenon in American culture, specifically the music that delivers its message, is worthy of a more critical examination. It is important to explore the key messages and images that are shared and understood by members of the hip-hop culture and the implications these messages and images have on the formation and maintenance of cultural identity.

Hip-Hop music is no longer limited to the ghetto poor, but its major themes and styles continue to be drawn from the conflicts and contradictions of black urban life. Through an analysis of music videos, we will explore these conflicts and contradictions in hip-hop’s key messages and discuss major images, particularly of African American women that are represented in music videos and artists lyrics.

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Jorge Chinea, “Transatlanticism: Re-Historicizing Puerto Rico and Cuba from a Global Perspective”
Too often the history of the Caribbean, as can be the case of other regions, is written from a narrow local perspective. When approached from this angle, the specific historical trajectories of individual island-nations or countries tend to emphasize internal developments considered noteworthy of their evolution, cultures, and place in the world. In this paper, I examine recent scholarship on Cuba and Puerto Rico that challenges the dominant “local-internal” model by exploring several historical events involving both islands that can be equally (and profitably) understood through a broader, transatlantic lens.

Ollie Johnson, “Afro-Brazilian Politics: Challenges and opportunities”
The paper offers an explanation of pro-Black public policies over the last 20 years in Brazil. The first section describes and classifies these policies by issue area, date implemented, government sponsor, and duration. The educational, housing, health, informational, cultural, affirmative action and other policies have been implemented by government agencies at the local, state, and national levels. The second section argues that recent affirmative action policies should be conceptualized as a continuation of earlier pro-Black government initiatives and not a new and completely unprecedented policy program. The third section proposes a political process model of pro-Black policies that places them in the context of democratization. The dynamic interaction between opposition Black political activists and newly elected opposition leaders creates the political space for the formulation and implementation of these policies. This model emphasizes the leading roles of Black activists and politicians over those of White politicians who may have formally approved these policies. The conclusion examines the prospects for more comprehensive pro-Black policies in Brazil and other countries in Latin America.

A Special Book Signing Event and talk: Durrenda Nash Onolemhemhen, "A Social Worker’s Investigation of Childbirth Injured Women in Northern Nigeria"
A Social Worker's Investigation of Childbirth Injured Women in Northern Nigeria investigates Vesicovaginal fistula (VVF), a childbirth injury commonly found among younger adolescent wives in northern Nigeria. Women with fistulae continuously drip urine. Their offensive odor often leads to life as social outcasts. Millions of women across Africa and the developing world suffer from this condition, but it is preventable and curable. This work examines the problem from the perspective of a social worker. It is not intended as a medical treatise, but instead deals with the condition from an ecological perspective using a systems approach. Its focus is on VVF as it relates to the social environment of the affected women.

The author defines and describes VVF as it manifests itself in Africa, along with the history and epidemiology of the condition and its treatment. It describes the life course of Hausa women who are most affected by VVF in northern Nigeria and how their position in society predisposed them to childbirth injury. Testimonials of the victims about their struggles of survival and their road to a cure are narrated. Short and long term preventive measures are given. The empowerment of northern Nigerian women for the eradication of this condition is a fundamental and underlying theme of this work. [From the book jacket of A Social Worker’s Investigation of Childbirth Injured Women in Northern Nigeria.]

Norah Duncan IV, “Organ Recital with Commentary on African and African-American Music”
Like the great European composers of past and present generations, composers of African and African American descent have also turned to the pipe organ, the acknowledged “King of Instruments” as the vehicle through which they have expressed their distinct cultural heritage. Little is known about their compositions for organ, and rarely are there forums to showcase the genius expressed through them. Inspired by African chants, Gregorian chant, American hymn tunes, the African American Spiritual and “Traditional” Gospel melodies, they give voice to the myriad facets of the musical life of Black people. Hopefully this organ recital with commentary will offer the listener another perspective of their rich and diverse artistic gifts.

Prayer Fela Sowande (1905-1987)
Impromptu Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912)
Prelude and Fugue for Organ Leslie Adams (1932 -)
Variations on “Nettleton” Undine Smith Moore (1904-1989)
Jacob’s Ladder Ralph Simpson (1933 -)
Let us Break Bread Together J. Roland Braithwaite (1927 - )
Spiritual: Round About the Mountain Noel Da Costa (1929-2002)
Gospel Fantasy on “He Knows How Much We Can Bear” Raymond Henry (1935 -)
Toccata on “Veni Emmanuel” Adolphus Hailstork (1941 -)

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Jeff Rebudal, “Traditional and the Post-Contemporary in Dance: Filipino Indigenous Dance Forms in Contemporary Modern Dance”
Seminal choreographers of early American modern dance each respectively had a unique philosophy and approach to creating their own movement expression. Modern dance has evolved dramatically since its inception in the early 1900s, with its strength in individuality and freedom of expression through movement. Choreographers subscribing to this philosophy include Denishawn’s interpretations of East Asian dances; Martha Graham’s Americana and Greek tragedy themed dances; Merce Cunningham’s abstract chance choreography influenced by Chinese I Ching philosophy and Japanese minimalism; and Alvin Ailey’s soulful blend of African American themed ballets. Present day choreographers examining the fusion of ethnic forms with modern dance are Mark Morris and his use of European folk dance themes and ideas; Doug Elkin’s African-American Hip-Hop influenced movement; and Sean Curran’s Celtic choreography. Although each is dissimilar in movement quality, visual design and intention, the common thread that weaves these choreographers is their strong individual artistic voice through dance.

Philippine folk dances have a long-standing history of remaining relatively stable in form, structure and presentation that represent these archipelago islands in the southeast. Dances originating in the most Islamic region of the country reflect the Hindu-Malayan-Arabic influences. In Mindanao, these are the Maranao, Magindanao and Sanggil groups. Adding to this diversity of Philippine dances are the Igorot, Ifugao, Bontoc, Kalinga and Apayao tribes. These indigenous dance forms together with contemporary modern dance are another means to explore a unique and innovative choreographic voice. This lecture-demonstration will present the movement relationships and infusion of traditional Filipino regional dances with contemporary modern dance.

Jeffrey Abt, “Returns of the Repressed: Museums and Religion”
A funny thing happened to the museum on its way from classical antiquity to modernity: It evolved from a cult center to a secular institution. However, the worldwide surge of religious fundamentalism is challenging modernity’s secular ethos as expressed in a host of social structures ranging from governments to school curricula. The museum too, as one of modernity’s more prominent institutional forms, has become a site where secular systems of learning and display are being reshaped to accommodate the tenets of religious faith.

If, as many have argued, the post-Enlightenment museum represents the triumph of modernity, it does so by rendering a distinction between showing religious objects to produce knowledge and showing them for pious devotion. Beginning as early as the Louvre’s formation in the crucible of the French revolution, this meant neutralizing a sacred object’s religious potency by emphasizing its place in art history. More recently, however, as museums strive to broaden their public service by inviting potential constituencies to participate in exhibition planning and collections management, the uses and interpretation of religious objects have received special scrutiny. As results stemming from the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or the creation of the American Bible Society’s Gallery in 1998 show, sacred objects are posing unforeseen challenges to the museum’s function as a secular site for the production and dissemination of knowledge.

This paper surveys the museum’s evolution into a secular institution, its efforts to cultivate various constituencies, and how those efforts are inadvertently bringing to the surface long-suppressed religious content in collections, thus provoking a fundamental challenge to the museum’s secular ethos.

Peter Riley Bahr & Porsche VanBrocklin-Fischer, "Online Survey Research: Expedience at the Cost of Validity?”
Online (internet and email) surveys are increasingly common in social research, due, in part, to the growing accessibility of the internet and, in part, to the cost, difficulty, and time required to execute traditional paper, telephone, and interview surveys. While online surveys hold significant promise as a means of data collection, strong objections have been raised concerning the external and internal validity of findings based on data collected via these methods. Drawing upon a critical review of the literature, this presentation will discuss (a) the strengths and weaknesses of online survey research techniques and (b) matters to consider in preparing and executing a successful and valid online survey.

Kypros Markou, “Nationalism in Music in a Globalized World”
The term “nationalism” in music usually refers to a phase of the romantic movement whereby composers sought inspiration and material in the folk music, folk art and culture of their home country or region. Some of the most prominent composers that come to mind are Dvorak, Smetana, Grieg, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov. It would be a mistake to assume that their “nationalism” had political implications or that it was the result of “a rebellion against foreign music.” As A. J. B. Hutchings points out in the Pelican History of Music, Dvorak (who was Czech) regularly sent his scores to the great German composer Brahms who was his friend and great supporter. Generally “nationalist” composers celebrate and represent the spirit, culture and special characteristics of their people. As a matter of fact there are many composers who are not classified as “nationalists” but who also incorporated or sought inspiration in the folk music and culture of their country. Furthermore, perceptions about a given composer differ from place to place. A striking example is the case of Tchaikovsky who in his homeland was not considered to be writing “Russian” music whereas everywhere else we think of him as one of the most important and characteristically “Russian” composers whose music reflects the Russian character and soul.

Globalization generally refers to the process whereby many experiences, products, ideas etc. become standardized throughout the world. While this process may result in certain efficiencies and increased productivities and perhaps even a certain understanding and bridging of differences between people of various races and nationalities, it would indeed be tragic if composers lost their individuality even when that individuality may stem from the use of “national” or regional culture as a source of inspiration. On the other hand the free exchange of ideas and knowledge among composers from different countries can be a source of continued inventiveness while each composer maintains his/her individuality as an essential element of artistic creation. Indeed, if we look at the history of musical evolution, this form of “globalization” has existed for many centuries.

Sandra Hobbs, “Nationalist Discourse and the Colonial Subject in Noel Audet's 1992 novel L'eau blanche (Whitewater)”
The nationalization of hydro electricity One of the most important events in Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (1960-1976), a movement in which Quebec took control of its economic and social development after centuries of economic control by the English and social control by the Catholic Church. Since that time, Hydro Quebec has been one of the mainstays of the Quebec economy, and indeed its modern industrialized identity. L’Eau blanche, which translates as White Water, recounts the development of the first big hydro-electric project in northern Quebec during the 1960s. The main character, a Quebecois engineer, is portrayed as a pioneer of the new Quebec, but his ability to persuade the Natives to support the Hydro project is as significant as his ability to overcome engineering obstacles. This novel was written in 1992, shortly after the Oka crisis which pitted Quebecois against Natives in an armed standoff over land claims issues. It is therefore significant that this novel go back some 30 years to an important moment in Quebec’s history to re-examine these same issues. In this paper, it will be my contention that the direct conflict between Native and non-Native rights to Quebec’s resources is resolved in the novel through the use of nationalist Quebec discourse that forecloses Native subjectivity. Specifically, I will use Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the colonial subject to analyze the novel’s representation of Native characters. Spivak contends that bourgeois subjects of previously colonized societies such as Quebec actively suppress the rights of subaltern populations in the postcolonial territory in an effort to advance their own nationalist interests. Indeed, in this novel the white characters, who are important figures in are involved in an heroic effort to harness the land’s energy to the Quebec national cause. In order to succeed in this endeavour, however, it is necessary to both acknowledge the Native presence in the north and to suppress the opposition that their land claims represent.

Hans Hummer, “Lay Literacy in Early Medieval Europe”
Professor Hummer will present a case for widespread literacy among the laity in early medieval Europe. Although the period between the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century and the emergence of European states in the twelfth century has been seen as an era of orality and cultural decline (hence the Dark Ages in the public imagination ), in reality early Europe was deeply dependent upon the written word. Controversial is the extent of the penetration of writing beyond the ranks of the clergy into lay society. A close examination of the evidence, in particular monastic charters (i.e. property contracts between monasteries and their lay patrons), reveals the extensive use and preservation of documents among lay people.

Anne Rothe, “Beyond Halbwachs: Collective Memory and/as Counter-Memory”
Memory is becoming one the leading concepts in literary and cultural studies. Originally developed within cognitive and social psychology (and simultaneously but relatively independently from these fields of academic psychology and with a different focus, in psychoanalysis) the concept was developed in order to understand individual minds. However, as early as the 1920s French social psychologist Maurice Halbwachs explored an analogous use of ‘memory’ to describe a collective phenomenon, namely the shared memory of social groups such as families or villagers. Within the last 20 years Halbwach’s ideas were rediscovered and greatly expanded on. This paper will a) review Halbwachs’ groundbreaking ideas on collective memory; b) discuss two recent theories of collective memory by German cultural historian Jan Assmann and French historian Pierre Nora; and c) try to create a systematic model of collective memory based on Halbwachs, Assmann, Nora and a wide variety of other research on the subject while also integrating some of the major criticism of collective memory studies (particularly those by German historian Wulf Kansteiner).

Jacalyn Harden, “Dark Mouth, White Breast: Race, Nature, Motherhood, Technology”
This Brown Bag talk is part of a larger project in which I discuss the quotidian realities as well as the relatively unexplored—but super-charged—theoretical implications of adoptive breastfeeding and how it fits within contemporary debates surrounding race, motherhood, and technological change in the United States. The contemporary adoptive breastfeeding done by white adoptive mothers for their non-white (usually black, "biracial," Central American, Chinese, or Korean) infants and toddlers is part of an ongoing longer history of transracial wet nursing in the U.S. This current moment places individual adoptive mothers who choose to breastfeed their children of color using supplementary devices herbs and "legal drugs" into a history of relationships of power and privilege among white mothers and poor mothers both white and of color. Such relationships have both literally and theoretically been about raced and classed reproductive labor and the inequalities that such arrangements turn upon. Thus I also argue that adoptive breastfeeding of non-white children by their white adoptive mothers combines technology, race, biology, and parenting in ways that are just as telling as the “sexier” and more commonly discussed developments in reproductive technology.

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Peter Riley Bahr, “Postsecondary Remedial Mathematics: What Is It, What Do We Know, and What Do We Need to Know?”
Postsecondary remediation holds a significant and increasingly high profile position in higher education in the United States. This growing attention is not without cause, as the sheer scale of postsecondary remedial need is as daunting as it is disturbing. Mathematics skills are of particular interest within the topic of postsecondary remediation, in part because more students enroll in remedial math than in any other remedial subject. Drawing upon a combination of my own research and a critical review of the literature, this presentation will (a) situate remedial mathematics within the larger postsecondary agenda, (b) discuss the current state of research on postsecondary remedial mathematics with particular attention to remedial outcomes, and (c) recommend directions for future empirical inquiry on the topic.

Joe Rankin, “Families and Crime”
Because the family plays a critical role in the socialization of children, parents presumably play a critical role in determining whether or not their children misbehave. However, after over half a century of research and opinions, findings and interpretations remain contradictory. Despite these divergent views, most researchers have found at least small, significant associations between some dimension of family context and delinquency. In fact, a considerable body of research evidence suggests that delinquency is related to various indicators of problematic family characteristics, either structural (e.g., broken homes) or relational (e.g., parent-child attachment; discipline) in nature.

Various theoretical perspectives which relate various dimensions of the family to crime and delinquency will be discussed, followed by a brief, historical review of the family and delinquency research literature. Finally, my current research on the effect of living arrangements (e.g., live at home vs. a dormitory vs. off-campus housing; students who live with a spouse/partner vs. live alone) and self-reported crime will be discussed.

Sarah Bassett & Brian Madigan, “The numinous image in the ancient Mediterranean world, being a collaborative investigation into the design and function of holy images in the polytheistic and monotheistic cultures of the Near East, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Byzantium, Part II: