#HumanitiesontheEdge

Emily Dowdle

Oct 11, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Sue J. Kim

In the introduction to her 2009 book, Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourse of Race, Sue J. Kim writes that she “critique[s] the epistemology and politics of what [she] refers to as “otherness postmodernism’” (Kim 1). This “otherness postmodernism” that Kim critiques is that group of critical tendencies based upon the creation and privileging of a dichotomy of sameness and difference, in particular as it applies to race and gender. Drawing upon Slavoj Zizek, Kim

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Milton S. F. Curry

Dillon Rockrohr

Sep 27, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Milton S. F. Curry

Amid a year (that is, another year) tempest-tossed by a seemingly endless cycle of black Americans reported dead at the hands of the state, we begin our seventh year of Humanities on the Edge lectures, this time oriented around the question of post-racial futures. The exigency of the theme is therefore obvious. Introducing Milton S. F. Curry, Associate Dean at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning as well as our first speaker of the y

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Milton S. F. Curry

Emily Dowdle

Sep 20, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Preview: Milton S. F. Curry

In the introductory speech to the 2011 Curating Race Curating Space Symposium at the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Milton S.F. Curry states that the intellectual project of architecture “requires more than inclusion and diversity as appeasement strategies, it requires direct engagement with persons, bodies, and subjectivities that are the objects of our discourse” (1). This is to say that the task of architecture is both to take up the conceptualization and rec

I Really Don't Know Clouds At All: HotE Lecture Review, John Durham Peters

Dillon Rockrohr

Apr 5, 2016

I Really Don't Know Clouds At All: HotE Lecture Review, John Durham Peters

Last Thursday evening, John Durham Peters visited campus to deliver the final Humanities on the Edge lecture of the semester. Entitled “Do Clouds Have Meaning? On the Relation Between Media and Nature,” the lecture raised fundamental questions about what aspects of reality we choose to imbue with meaning, what ways we find to interpret our environment, and what this relation may tell us about ourselves. Peters began his presentation with the comment that his drive here from I

Humanities on the Edge Preview: John Durham Peters

Robert Lipscomb

Mar 29, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Preview: John Durham Peters

Photo Credit: Bill Manning In preparation for the upcoming Humanities on the Edge Lecture by John Durham Peters, the A. Craig Professor in the Department of Communication and Professor of International Studies at the University of Iowa, this post will review a previous lecture entitled, “‘What is Knowledge For’ and What Does Communications Have to do With It?” The lecture was given at the 100th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association in Chicago in 2014. Fr

Emily Dowdle

Mar 15, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Preview: John Durham Peters

In the first chapter of John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media entitled “Understanding Media,” Peters attempts to do just that – understand media. Drawing from various thinkers including Martin Heidegger, Bruno LaTour, Charles Peirce and Marshall McLuhan, Peters engages with the conversation over exactly what media is and what this definition of media means in the landscape of media theory and the writing of the history of media. Med

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Saya Woolfalk

Jason Hertz

Mar 8, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Saya Woolfalk

Fig. 1. Empathics dancing in the "Star Compulsion" formation Saya Woolfalk’s installations, performances, and multimedia work imagine the future in the terms of Afrofuturism, extending a tradition that includes “the music of Sun Ra and George Clinton and science-fiction novels by Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler” (Johnson). Jonathan Walz, Curator of American Art at the Sheldon Museum, said that her art encourages a dynamics of empathy, which is “needed now more than ever.”

The Business of Asking Questions: Saya Woolfalk’s Bodies of Work

Amanda Breitbach

Mar 1, 2016

The Business of Asking Questions: Saya Woolfalk’s Bodies of Work

Artist Saya Woolfalk’s works in paint, soft sculpture, installation, and video playfully and powerfully re-imagine the possibilities of being human. Using color, sculptural costumes, performance, and storytelling, the New York artist simultaneously envisions a future utopia and critiques the shortcomings of contemporary society. Woolfalk will discuss three recent, inter-related bodies of work—No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK—in a Humanities on the Edge lecture at the She

Humanities on the Edge Preview: “Saya Woolfalk: World Builder”

James Lowell Brunton

Feb 23, 2016

Humanities on the Edge Preview: “Saya Woolfalk: World Builder”

Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK Beta Launch, 2014, installation view, (Photo credit: ArtMag 85) On March 3, the Humanities on the Edge lecture series will welcome visual artist Saya Woolfalk to speak about her work. Woolfalk will be the series’ 23rd speaker—and its first visual artist. Woolfalk’s art provides a unique perspective on HotE’s theme for this year, “Posthuman Futures.” In her artist statement, Woolfalk writes: “My work considers the idea that symbolic and ideological syst

On Vertigo (Not the Hitchcock One): A Note on Difficulty and the Illicit Pleasures of Incomprehensio

Nick White

Nov 3, 2015

On Vertigo (Not the Hitchcock One): A Note on Difficulty and the Illicit Pleasures of Incomprehensio

1: Unbecoming Becoming Kim Novak During Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s talk last week at the Sheldon, I began to feel dizzy. Low blood sugar? No. (I’d checked beforehand and was holding steady at 112.) Tired. Yes, but what graduate student so close to November isn’t a little world-weary? That hasn’t stopped this old bobcat of academia before. Panic attack? Maybe. Read on. 2: The Virtue of Difficulty When faced with difficult texts, I tell my students to power through. I thought I kn

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