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Events 2018-2019

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Fall 2018

Oct. 11 - Kafka's Last Trial

BEN BALINT

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy
Thursday, October 11, 2018
4:00-6:00pm
Literature Building, First Floor, Rm. 155 (deCertau)
UC San Diego
Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal was also eventually to lead to an international legal battle over Kafka's legacy: as a writer in German, should his papers come to rest with those of the other great German writers, in the country where his three sisters died as victims of the Holocaust? Or, as Kafka was also a great Jewish writer, should they be considered part of the cultural inheritance of Israel, a state that did not exist at the time he died in 1924?

BEN BALINT taught literature, including Kafka, at the Bard College humanities programme at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. His first book, Running Commentary, was published by Public Affairs in 2010. His second book, Jerusalem: City of the Book, is co-authored with Merav Mack. His reviews and essays regularly appear in the Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Haaretz, the Weekly Standard, and the Claremont Review of Books. His translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in the New Yorker and in Poetry International.

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion; German Studies Program; Jewish Studies Program.

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Oct. 18 - Power of the Sacred

HANS JOAS

Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment
Thursday, October 18, 2018
12:30-1:50pm
Social Sciences Building, First Floor, SSB 101
UC San Diego
Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

HANS JOAS is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he also belongs to the Committee on Social Thought. Joas’ early work has focused primarily on the tradition of American Pragmatism, defending its philosophical interest and explicating its significance for social theory. In the last two decades the historical sociology of religion and of war have become dominant in his research.

Joas' books (in English) include H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought  (1985); Social Action and Human Nature (with Axel Honneth) (1988); Pragmatism and Social Theory (1993); The Creativity of Action (1996)The Genesis of Values (2000)War and Modernity (2003); ; Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence (2008); Social Theory:Twenty Introductory Lectures (with Wolfgang Knöbl) (2009); The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (2013)War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (with Wolfgang Knöbl) (2013); and Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (2014)

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion; Department of Political Science; Department of Sociology; Third World Studies Program.

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Oct. 25 - The Legacy of Jerome Rothenberg

Rethinking Ethnopoetics: The Legacy of Jerome Rothenberg
Thursday, October 25, 2018
9:30am-4:30pm
Literature Building, First Floor, Rm. 155 (deCertau)
UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

AGENDA

9:30-9:45am Babak Rahimi introduction

9:45am -11:30am Panel I
Michael Davidson
Ariel Resnikoff
Diane Rothenberg
Marcel de Lima (Skype)

12:30-1:00pm J Rothenberg keynote speech

1:00-1:15pm coffee break

1:15-3:15pm Panel 2
Bob Cancel
Amelia Glaser
Wai-lim Yip
Pierre Joris

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion; Jewish Studies Program; Third World Studies Program.

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Nov. 7 - The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness

The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness:
Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life

Richard Madsen, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, UCSD

Wednesday, November 7, 2018
10:00am-12:00pm
The Eleanor Roosevelt Room at the Price Center
UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

What is happiness? How do people in China get it? What are the social obstacles to having it? And what does this tell us about contemporary China’s moral order? These are the big questions addressed by the research that produced the essays in a forthcoming book co-edited with Becky Hsu. Here, I provide a synthesis, a holistic but inevitably more speculative response.

There is no straightforward translation of English “happiness” into Chinese, and the variety of Chinese words for happiness, as discussed by Lang Chen, raises deep philosophical and historical issues that are being played out in the complexity of Chinese society today.

Popular understandings of happiness are manifest in ambivalent discourses about family and friendship in private life and social service and political reform in public life. These popular understandings are overlaid by a politically orthodox version promulgated by Xi Jinping’s writings on happiness in the China Dream.

Together this research reveals a morally pluralistic Chinese society characterized by multiple goods and multiple definitions of happiness. This condition is common in all complex modern societies and certainly in the United States. What may be distinctive about China is the level of dissonance and tension between the competing visions of the good life brought about by its “compressed modernity.” For the time being these tensions are contained within the integument of a powerful and intrusive state.

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion; Faculty Group on Religion

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Nov. 26 - The Prosperity Gospel, Humanity, and the Problem of Judgment

Anthropology and Theology: 
The Prosperity Gospel, Humanity, and the Problem of Judgment

Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge 

Monday, November 26, 2018
3:00pm-5:00pm
Social Sciences Bldg., Rm 105
UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

This paper is part of a project that explores the possibility of fostering a conversation between anthropology and theology. It considers a form of Christianity – the Prosperity Gospel – that both disciplines struggle to find acceptable. Looking at recent anthropological research with Prosperity Gospel Christians, primarily in Africa, that tries to overcome this aversion, and at recent theological work that attempts to reach the same goal, I uncover areas of significant overlap and also of divergence between the two disciplines.  The divergence turns on the role of judgment in scholarly work.  Comparing the ways some theologians are trained in making judgments about the phenomena they study with the way anthropologists are trained to suspend them, I argue that in very general terms contemporary anthropologists might endeavor to learn from theologians how they might better ground the kinds of judgments they seem increasingly drawn toward making.  A surprising convergence between the two disciplines reveals itself in the way scholars from both sides tend to recoil from prosperity gospel models of the human being.  This finding leads me to conclude the paper with a comparative examination of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s and the theologian Wolfgang Pannenberg’s accounts of the nature of humanity.  I concluded by arguing that in relation both to judgment and the nature of humanity one can see that a dialogue between anthropology and theology can help both disciplines recognize and reconsider some of their most basic, taken for granted scholarly commitments.  

Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published works on the anthropology of values, ethics, cultural change, anthropological theory, and particularly contributed to developing the anthropology of Christianity. His book, “Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society” was awarded the J. I. Staley prize by the School for Advanced Research in 2011. He has been the editor of The Anthropology of Christianity book series published by the University of California Press.

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion; Faculty Group on Religion

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Winter 2019

Jan. 22 - Puritanism and America

TRACY STRONG

The Land Was Ours Before We Were the Land's: Puritanism and America
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
2:00-4:00pm
Eleanor Roosevelt College Room, Price Center - Level 2, UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map | Price Center map | Level 2 map | visitor parking information.

Tracy B. Strong is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy within Politics & International Relations at the University of Southampton and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UCSD. He is the author of several books including Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (currently in its third edition); The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (second edition), as well as the editor or co-editor of Nietzsche’s New Seas, The Self and the Political Order, Public Space and Democracy, and The One and the Many: Ethical Pluralism in Contemporary Perspectives. He has written numerous articles and essays in a variety of journals. His most recent book is Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2012) [winner of the David Easton Prize, 2013]. He is currently working on a book on music, language, and politics in the period that extends from Rousseau to Nietzsche. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation, has been Visiting Professor at the Juan March Instituto in Spain and Warwick University in England, and was a Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University (2002-03). From 1990 until 2000 he was Editor of Political Theory. His Learning Our Native Tongue: Citizenship, Conflict and Contestation is in production at the University of Chicago Press.

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion, Third World Studies Program, and the Department of Political Science

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Feb. 20 - Juan of the Dead [student event]

Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Present

Juan de los Muertos / Juan of the Dead (2010)
Film screening for UCSD undergraduates

Juan of the Dead movie poster

Wednesday, February 20
11:00am-1:00pm
MCC 221, Communication Bldg. (between Solis Hall and Sequoyah Hall) 

Undergraduates are invited to watch a Cuban Zombie film with themes on politics and religion.

Free. No registration. Lunch and beverages will be served.

Mar. 5 - Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic

MICHAEL DAVIDSON

Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
3:00-5:00pm
Thurgood Marshall College Room, Price Center - Level 2, UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map | Price Center map | Level 2 map | visitor parking information.

Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His books include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His forthcoming book, Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic will be published by Oxford University Press. He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002). He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He lives in Solana Beach, California with his wife, Lori Chamberlin, and their grandson, Shiloh.

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Mar. 8 - Technoscience Symposium

Technoscience and Political Algorithms
Friday, March 8, 2019
9:30am-6:00pm
Atkinson Hall Auditorium, UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

 

A videorecording of this event is available on YouTube.

 

AGENDA

Introduction: 9:30am-9:45am

Babak Rahimi (UC San Diego)

Razvan Amironesei (UC San Diego)

Keynote Speaker: 9:45-10:30am

Don Ihde (SUNY)

Coffee break 10:30am-10:45am

Panel 1: Rethinking Technoscience: Culture, Religion and Modernity

10:45am-12:45pm   

Stewart Hoover (University of Colorado at Boulder)

Sun-ha Hong (Simon Fraser University)

Tom Boellstorff (UC Irvine)

Kamala Visweswaran (UC San Diego)

Lunch  12:45pm-1:45pm

Panel 2: Algorithmic Cultures and Power

1:45pm-3:15pm

Colin Koopman (University of Oregon)

Razvan Amironesei (UC San Diego)

Round table 3:15pm-4:30pm

Davide Panagia (UCLA)

Lilly Irani (UC San Diego)

Babak Rahimi (UC San Diego)

Kamala Visweswaran (UC San Diego)

Olivier Clain (Laval University)

Coffee break 4:30pm-4:45pm

Keynote Speaker: 4:45pm-5:45pm

Andrew Feenberg

(Simon Fraser University)

Conclusion: 5:45pm-6:00pm 

Caleb Scoville (UC Berkeley)

 

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion
UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)
Third World Studies Program
Department of Literature
UC San Diego International Institute
Institute of Arts and Humanities

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

Spring 2019

April 24 - 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami

The Global Forum at the International House and the Program for the Study of Religion Present

World Cinemas: 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
4:00pm-6:00pm
Great Hall at the International House
UC San Diego

A 1-hour screening of 24 Frames by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, followed by a discussion on World Cinemas based on the movie with Professor Babak Rahimi.

For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images—most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife—and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema. More about his film: https://www.criterion.com/films/29399-24-frames

More information on Kiarostami here: https://www.criterion.com/shop/browse?director=kiarostami-abbas

Free. Please register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wolrd-cinemas-24-frames-by-abbas-kiarostami-tickets-60550285534?aff=efbeventtix

Hosted by UC San Diego International House
https://www.facebook.com/events/402641320589662/

May 1 - Inspecting Muslims

SCHIRIN AMIR-MOAZAMI

Inspecting Muslims: Secular Power and the Politics of Knowledge Production on Islam in Europe
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
3:00pm-5:00pm
Literature Building, First Floor, Rm. 155 (deCertau)
UC San Diego

Free. No registration. Campus map. Visitor parking information.

Schirin Amir-Moazami is Professor for Islam in Europe at the Institute of Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Political Sciences and Sociology in Frankfurt/Main, Berlin, Aix-Marseille and Paris. She holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, Department of Social and Political Sciences.Schirin Amir-Moazami has published widely on topics related to Muslims in Europe, especially Germany and France, with a focus on political secularism, public controversies, body politics and governmentality. She is the editor of a blog, located at Forum Transregionale Studien called “Provincializing Epistemologies”. Most recently she edited a volume on the politics of knowledge production on Muslims and Islam in Europe (“Der inspizierte Muslim. Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung in Europa”). Currently she is finishing an English monograph which critically investigates integration politics oriented towards Muslims in Germany with the title “Interrogating Muslims. The politics of Integration in Contemporary Germany”.

SPONSORS
Program for the Study of Religion
Department of Literature
Third World Studies Program

PROGRAM ORGANIZER
Babak Rahimi
Associate Professor, Literature Department
Director, Program for the Study of Religion and Third World Studies Program

May 7 - The Departure [student event]

Program for the Study of Religion Presents

The Departure (2017)
Documentary Film

Tuesday, May 7, 2019
1:00pm-3:00pm
Literature 155 (deCerteau)

Students are invited to a screening of the Japanese documentary "The Departure" (2017). "Sad, tender and quietly moving, The Departure never says more than it needs to, much like its subject, a Buddhist priest who counsels those contemplating suicide."

Free. No registration. Lunch will be served.

Hosted by Professor Babak Rahimi (Literature).

Sponsored by Third World Studies, the Department of Literature, and Program for the Study of Religion.