2005-2006 Workshops
Medieval Culture and Postmodern Legacies
This group focused on the subject of the legacy of the Middle Ages as it has been defined and redefined in the late twentieth and early twenty first century. The project also supported an academic group of faculty and students who are otherwise unaffiliated and largely unsupported (Medieval Studies), and yet have provoked great involvement across many departments.
Southeast Asian Inter-Textualities
This workshop involved twelve participants and met for discussion groups numerous times throughout the early part of the year. The group events culminated in a series of lecture/discussion that brought together an external faculty member, a UCR faculty member and a Graduate student from either UCR or elsewhere. This approach allowed graduate and faculty research to stand side by side and be given equal weight. The meetings resulted in a series of events with ten to twenty-four people attending. The group objective was met, to stimulate a range of discussions that have helped to sharpen the focus on the methodological complexities of studying the historical dynamics of inter-textuality in Southeast Asian cultures.
Of Human Bondage and Modern Subjectivity
The “Of Human Bondage” workshop had eight core faculty and sponsored only three public lectures. However, the group met nine times in smaller discussion group in which each member of the group offered up his or her own work for discussion, a format that proved very successful. This workshop examined the question of the slave from multiple disciplinary and inter-disciplinary sites including: its historical manifestation both in the US and across the globe; its theoretical articulation in modern philosophies of freedom; its allegorical force across discourses of dependence; and its sustained trace in the performance of ethnicity and race in contemporary market economies.
Democratizing Global Governance
The Challenges of Global Democracy workshop once again was an active and successful group. This workshop discussed the role of contemporary transnational social movements in shaping the trajectory, or rather the (potential) trajectories, of truly democratic global governance. This Mellon Workshop combined its funds with those of our campus’s Program on Global Studies (PoGS), while also drawing on UCR’s resources of the Institute for Research on World-Systems (IROWS).
This workshop has been a robust, dynamic, and innovative group, run primarily by two graduate students, Jeremy Kaye and Michael LeBlanc, both also involved as organizers in last year’s Global Interface workshop. The purpose of this workshop was to bring together scholars across a variety of disciplines who are doing work at the intersection of media studies and gender studies, with a special emphasis on issues of masculinity. The workshop ran seven events over the year many of which were panels involving both faculty and graduate students.
Transforming Hegemonies -- Inter-group project
Mellon Director T. Scanlon coordinating all groups.
The purpose of the inter-group initiative, Transforming Hegemonies, was to support periodic cross-fertilization and cross-dialogue among the groups mainly through three lecture and public panel presentations on the shared theme of “Transforming Hegemonies.” The thematic title for this 'super-group' implies that the linking idea of hegemonies not only actively shapes and transforms our world, but also contemporary critical scholarship can transform the hegemonies.