Humanizing Acts: Researcher's Roundtable examines the gifts of resisting the historical erasure of the COVID-19 pandemic with community and research. This is the podcast component of Humanizing Acts: Resisting the Historical Erasures of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. It features series contributors Dan Bustillo, Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz (Cognate Collective), and Mario Alberto Obando, Jr. This podcast has been edited and written by Mario Alberto Obando...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 18 min
“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life? This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mu...
May 26, 2023•26 min
“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life? This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mu...
May 26, 2023•25 min
“Tracing Everyday Upheavals in the Middle East” is a multi-campus project that departs from grand totalizing narratives of upheaval by unearthing intimate histories, complex presents, and imagined futures from across the Middle East. Our main research question is: What are the different stories and narratives of upheaval that we can derive from everyday life? This episode features a conversation between nine UC graduate students: Gehad Abaza, Banan Abdelrahman, Ingy Higazy, Mary Michael, Aida Mu...
May 26, 2023•20 min
What is the role of humanities centers and institutes, and what can they do to spark change in graduate education? In this episode, we speak with our mentors, Dr. Barbara Mennel (UF CHPS) and Dr. Kelly Anne Brown (UCHRI), in a wide-ranging conversation about how humanities centers and institutes function as an incubator for intellectual and professional networks, hubs for experimental programming, and safe spaces for grad students. We discuss how underfunding the humanities might lead to a host ...
Feb 10, 2023•1 hr 11 min
Given the crisis of declining student enrollments and tenure-track jobs, what is the role of scholarly organizations in facilitating systemic change? This episode, we speak with Dr. Joy Connolly about her role as president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works on fellowship design, change acceleration, and creating spaces for students, faculty, and administrators to craft a more sustainable future for the humanities. But first: A job ad that asks for too much and g...
Dec 07, 2022•58 min
Under Review Episode 4: Unwellness and the University (UCHRI X UF CHPS) How do we create spaces of care for one another in structures that make us unwell? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mimi Khuc, a writer, scholar, mental health advocate, and adjunct lecturer in disability studies at Georgetown University. We cover her advocacy for adjunct professors, mental health issues students face in grad school, the silencing of emotions in professional settings, and changing one’s career trajectory d...
Oct 13, 2022•56 min
The digital wave is sweeping the humanities, raising provocative new questions: Should podcasting count as a form of scholarship, and can the dissertation be other than a book-length monograph? In this episode, we visit the National Humanities Center’s virtual podcasting institute, where four PhD students (Lauren Cox, June Ke, Mirna Wasef, and Kevin Woram) met and collaborated on a podcast about digital intimacies during the 2020 lockdown. We caught up with them one year later. We also spoke wit...
Sep 08, 2022•53 min
We need to talk about work, and what’s not working, in graduate school. Graduate students are instructors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and researchers, but our stipends are often not enough to make ends meet. First, we look back at the Columbia University graduate student strikes with Sourav Chatterjee, a PhD student at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies program at Columbia. Then we chat with Dr. Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Graduate Feminist Dir...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Under Review is a podcast hosted by June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox, two PhD students who ask questions about humanities graduate education. In the first episode, we spoke with Dr. Rachel Arteaga, Assistant Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and co-author of ‘We All Have Levers We Can Pull’: Reforming Graduate Education.” We spoke about what we can learn from community colleges, the “prestige economy” of higher ed, resistance to alt-ac career paths,...
Apr 06, 2022•44 min
Under Review is a podcast about rethinking humanities graduate education, produced and hosted by two PhD students in the humanities, June Ke and Lauren Burrell Cox. In a time when 70 percent of academic positions are off the tenure track, we speak to experts about issues surrounding prestige, labor, contingency, and diverse post-doctoral pathways. This podcast is a collaboration of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the University of Florida Center for the Humanities ...
Mar 30, 2022•1 min
We explore the power and perils of fire. Standing apart from water, earth, and air, fire is discussed as a centerpiece of human developments, dynamics, and transformations, of narration across most all modes and forms of cultural expression, and as a catalyst for developments in food and shelter, not to mention sometimes unwelcome, if significant shifts in our contemporary culture. Joined by: Elizabeth Hoover (UC Berkeley), Abrahm Lustgarten (ProPublica), Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia), Brandi S...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 28 min
The driving question today is no longer whether this or that conflict is a civil war but what political work the notion of “civil war” is being exercised to do. States descend into civil wars when contrasting conceptions of life within them are deemed irreconcilable. Living, for a considerable proportion of the state’s inhabitants, is made unbearable. Those at least nominally controlling the state apparatus insist on obedience and deference to its way of being, on pain of erasure. Civil wars are...
Nov 02, 2020•1 hr 31 min
Counterfeit is our culture, our history forged, our idols fraudulent. We seek sources of truth as an active concept. But when the line dividing fact from fiction is buried beneath layers of bigotry, senselessness, and corruption, supposition becomes indistinguishable from the real, and we risk mortal wounds as victims to the powers of the false. How can we reinvigorate mechanisms of scrutiny and systems of representation? Where are the spaces from which the silenced might emerge? On Friday, Augu...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 32 min
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (City University of New York), AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield), Rafeef Ziadah (University of London), and moderator Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara) in conversation about movement as a vital keyword for understanding our fractious present— as collective mobilization, as social movements, as the circulation of ideas, as the shifting boundaries of the tolerable and the intolerable, as the movement of displaced populations, as constriction and its networkings of resis...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 34 min
On June 5, 2020, UCHRI gathered Angela Y. Davis (Emerita, UC Santa Cruz), Herman Gray (Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz), Gaye Theresa Johnson (UC Los Angeles), Robin D.G. Kelley (UCLA), and Josh Kun (USC) to think differently together about the structural conditions and explosive events shattering our times. In a wide-ranging conversation emerging out of the national protests in response to yet another spate of anti-Black police violence, these leading critical thinkers engage questions about intersecti...
Jul 21, 2020•1 hr 26 min
For our final installment of our talkbit series interrogating civil war, we spoke with Jennifer Terry, professor of gender and sexuality studies at UC Irvine, about her 2017 work, Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America, in order to investigate the symbiotic logic by which war and the advanced world of biomedicine are intertwined. How might war look differently if medicine had never progressed into the reparative world of prosthetics? Together, we talk ...
Feb 07, 2020•22 min
Since its founding, UCHRI has funded Residential Research Groups for faculty and graduate students to engage in collaborative work around a specific topic. In Spring 2019, the topic was Truth, broadly conceived. UCHRI welcomed convener Aaron James in philosophy at UC Irvine, and participants Wayne Spencer Coffey in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, Robin Derby in History at UCLA, Liron Mor in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, Poulomi Saha in English at UC Berkeley, and Abigail Stepni...
Jan 24, 2020•1 hr
As part of its Fall 2019 inquiry into civil war, UCHRI gathered colleagues from across the UC system and beyond for a lecture and seminar discussion about how racial formation and aesthetic tradition mutually constitute what we think of as the essential form of the civil subject: the autonomous, universal individual that has been a bedrock of Western political ideology since the Enlightenment. Here, Distinguished Professor of English, David Lloyd (UC Riverside), critically interrogates what he c...
Dec 18, 2019•1 hr 12 min
In this installment of our ongoing series of audiovisual conversations on civil war, Mei Zhan considers our theme as a conceptual device in relationship to her work, past and present. Currently, Zhan is writing an ethnography on the invention of a new kind of classical Chinese medicine on the edges of the healthcare establishment in China. She examines how these experiments in thinking, doing and being aim to "bring medicine back to life" in entrepreneurial China. In this interview, we discuss t...
Oct 07, 2019•27 min
In this edition of UCHRI’s Talkbits on civil war, Dipesh Chakrabarty reflects on the politics of survival, flourishing, and postcolonial worldmaking in a time of accelerated planetary destruction.
Oct 03, 2019•28 min
Since its founding, UCHRI has funded Residential Research Groups for faculty and graduate students to engage in collaborative work around a specific topic. In Spring 2019, the topic was Truth, broadly conceived. UCHRI welcomed convener Aaron James in philosophy at UC Irvine, and participants Wayne Spencer Coffey in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, Robin Derby in History at UCLA, Liron Mor in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, Poulomi Saha in English at UC Berkeley, and Abigail Stepni...
Sep 16, 2019•44 min
The Instagram user Lil Miquela (@lilmiquela) has 1.5 million followers, lucrative advertising deals with giants in the fashion industry, and a management team dedicated to helping her craft her influential personal brand. She’s also a self-identified robot. In this episode, seminar participants discuss the strategic use of Lil Miquela’s biracial identity, progressivism in the fashion industry, and ideas of a digital post-racial future.
Jun 07, 2019•28 min
In Spring of 2018, a white Utah teenager named Keziah Daum posted photos of herself and her prom date on Facebook and Twitter. She was wearing a red qi pao (or cheongsam), a traditional Chinese dress popularized in China in the 1920s. Twitter users quickly responded that her decision to wear the dress was an example of cultural appropriation. Others argued that it was simply cultural appreciation. In this episode, seminar participants discuss the way that national and international media reporte...
Jun 07, 2019•56 min
In this installment of our ongoing series audiovisual conversations on civil war, Bishnupriya Ghosh helps us think civility as a handmaiden to power, traversing histories of colonial violence and contemporary populisms.
May 23, 2019•11 min
In this installment of our ongoing series of audiovisual conversations on civil war, Caren Kaplan unpacks the history of aerial technology and warfare in order to underscore the limits of perception, the precariousness of seeing from above, and to trace the intricate web that binds war and everyday life.
May 01, 2019•22 min
The Council of Graduate Schools’ Doctoral Initiative on Minority and Attrition Completion measured the ten-year completion rates for PhDs and found that all students currently stand at 57%, while Latinos complete their degrees at a rate of 51%, and African Americans at 47%. These numbers are limited to STEM fields and do not reflect, for example, notably higher attrition rates in the humanities with a 42% completion rate overall. High attrition rates can be causally linked to problems of graduat...
Apr 02, 2019•36 min
In this podcast, we hear from Cynthia Estremera, PhD candidate in English at Lehigh University, Irene Sanchez, PhD, University of Washington alumni and ethnic studies instructor with the Azusa Unified School District, and returning guest Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, assistant professor of sociology at UC Merced and author of “Birthing both a baby and a PhD as a Woman of Color” on the topic. Together, these guests share their experiences in navigating the challenges of motherhood at various stages o...
Dec 12, 2018•21 min
For most of those who have devoted the better part of a decade to earning a PhD in the humanities, a doctoral degree and the experience of earning it holds a deep, inherent value. And yet, higher education struggles to articulate the nature of that value, often resorting to traditional economic notions of earnings and transferrable skills. In this podcast, we explore the concept of value as it is defined within multiple disciplines and contexts.
Sep 26, 2018•30 min
Episode 1: What is Diversity? examines social justice issues and inclusivity in higher education, centering on the perspectives of faculty, administrators, and graduate students from underrepresented groups. These groups include women, those who identify as LGBTQ, individuals from working-class backgrounds, and people of color. As the United States becomes increasingly diverse, graduation rates for advanced degree holders, management level staff positions, and faculty fail to reflect these chang...
Sep 26, 2018•20 min
