2022 Spring Colloquium Series

Guest Speaker: Danielle Dinovelli-Lang
Assistant Professor, Carleton University

Register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-claw-of-value-tickets-314957013907

Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm (PDT) on Zoom

Abstract

Danielle Dinovelli-Lang tracks brown bear claws as icons of potential value across the differential political economic regimes that stalk the forests of Southeast Alaska/Tlingit Aaní, where she has conducted long-term field research since 2004. In particular, she analyzes the formation and activities of the Brown Bear Claw Handicraft Working Group (BBCHWG), an initiative to bring stakeholders together to act in an advisory capacity to federal managers charged with revising subsistence regulations for the benefit of rural Alaskans. The BBCHWG was meant to resolve conflict over subsistence brown bear regulations, but it did not. In exploring why, Dinovelli-Lang describes an important but under-recognized aspect of the practical and ideological work that goes into sustaining capitalist value as a singular, overawing force, which only later appears to govern the behaviour of its subjects as an inviolable law.

Bio

Danielle Dinovelli-Lang is cross-appointed to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Her long-term independent and collaborative (with Karen Hébert) research into the vicissitudes of environmental politics in coastal Alaska grapples with the way relations that are and are not determined by the capitalist value form play out in a world that is still worth fighting for.

Guest Speaker: Angie Willey
PhD Candidate, Sociocultural Anthropology, D.E. in Critial Theory, University of California, Davis

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Tuesday, March 29, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm (PDT) on Zoom

Abstract

The erotic has been a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid for making sense of our lives and worlds. This talk begins from the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexual science and their legacies. It moves on to considerations of the visceral obscured by the lens of “sexuality” and of the erotic as a site of ethics and politics. In both Lordean and Foucauldian genealogies, eros operates as a set of possibilities, or capacities – for pleasure, joy, fulfilment, satisfaction – that exceed, indeed provincialize, sexuality. This project points to the generativity of more-than-scientific archives of body-knowledge and lexicons of desire for rethinking (human and more-than-human) nature, need, and relationality.

Bio

Angie Willey is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, working at the interstices of queer feminist theory, critical relationality, and science studies. Her work on non/monogamy, colonial sexual science, and critical materialisms has appeared in Feminist Studies; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Feminist Formations; Journal of Gender Studies; Science, Technology, and Human Values; Archives of Sexual Behavior; and Sexualities and in edited collections on monogamy, on materialism, and on the science of difference. She is author of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (University of Washington Press, 2017) and special issues of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience - on "Science out of Feminist Theory," the Journal of Lesbian Studies -on “Biology/Embodiment/Desire,” and Imaginations: A Journal of Cross Cultural Image Studies on “Critical Relationality: Indigenous and Queer Belonging Beyond Settler Sex and Nature.” 

Guest Speaker: Justin Lee Haruyama
Pronouns: he/him/his or they/them/theirs
PhD Candidate, Sociocultural Anthropology, D.E. in Critial Theory, University of California, Davis

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Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 10:00 - 11:30 am (PST) on Zoom

Abstract

Over the last decade, Mandarin-language Jehovah’s Witness congregations have proliferated across Zambia. These congregations are almost exclusively composed of local Zambians who have learned Mandarin as a second language, but count few to no ethnic Chinese congregants. Though they find little success in converting Chinese people, these Witnesses transgress common Zambian social norms by befriending Chinese migrants, eating Chinese food, and expressing appreciation for Chinese culture. Explaining their actions, Witnesses invoke and elide history in ways that erase national and racialized differences between themselves and Chinese migrants. They instead act upon a temporal horizon in which Biblical truths must be quickly spread before the rapidly approaching dissolution of the current system of things. In doing so, they enact a diffracted modernity that appropriates modernity's totalizing tropes while challenging the secular liberalism of the nation-state, as they anticipate the world entering its final years before Jehovah God vanquishes all human-governed polities.

Bio

Justin Haruyama is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at University of California, Davis. His research examines the controversial presence of Chinese migrants in Africa today, with a focus on social interactions between Chinese expatriate and local Zambian communities as they come to interact in contexts of work and religion in southern Zambia.