Speaker Series: Faculty and Fellows Colloquium

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium
During the academic year, the BCICS Faculty and Fellows Colloquium series held each Friday from 12 - 1pm, at the BCICS building. At each session a Northwestern faculty member or visiting fellow presents current research to an interdisciplinary audience of faculty, fellows, and graduate students. The colloquium meetings last one hour, and lunch is provided by BCICS. Frequently informal discussion continues afterward.

The series is motivated by a desire build a greater sense of greater awareness of what other scholars on campus are working on, to promote interdisciplinary connections and discussions among faculty working on international and comparative research, and ultimately to develop a stronger community among BCICS affiliates. If you are interested in presenting your work in this series, please contact BCICS Associate Director, Brian Hanson bhanson@northwesten.edu

Current Events:

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PAST EVENTS

Winter 2008

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 01/18 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Rebecca Seligman, Department of Anthropology
Culture and Mental Health: Integrating Anthropological and Psychiatric Perspectives on Dissociation

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 01/25 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Amy Stanley, Department of History
The Enlightenment Geisha

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/01 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Jason Seawright, Department of Political Science
Civil Society and Unequal Political Representation in South America

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/08 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Liora Sion, Department of Sociology
Imaginary Masculinity Among Israeli Men During Reserve Duty

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/15 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Adrijana Marčetić, BCICS Visiting Scholar, Department of Philology, University of Belgrade
New Approaches to Literary Theory

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/22 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
TBA

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/29 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
TBA

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 03/07 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Mona Weissmar, Department of Psychology
Memory Transmission and Transformation

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Fall 2007

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/05 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Peter Carroll, Department of History
"The Place of Prostitution in Early Modern China"

During the late Qing and Republic, Suzhou state officials and business leaders openly exploited prostitution to foster economic development, especially along the railway station “horse-road” (malu) outside the northern city wall. City leaders correctly surmised that the “spill-over” from prostitution would support an array of other commercial activities. This practice, if not explicit policy, was not uncontroversial. Male and female reformers militated against female sex-work as a local and national shame that bespoke the noxious effects of male lust and capitalist exploitation. At the same time, some businessmen feared that the prominence of vice interfered with the expansion of licit commerce and development. In the end, many commentators agreed that prostitution and the prerogatives of male desire were inextricably linked to the fortunes of the greater urban economy.

This study will analyze local debates regarding the physical, discursive, and political-economic place of prostitution within the city during the late Qing and Republic. The paper will particularly focus on the critiques of prostitution leading to its “abolition” in 1929 and later “reintroduction” under a regime of state regulation in 1935. (The initiation of state-sponsored prostitution was explicitly linked to the ineffectiveness of abolition, as well as the deleterious economic consequences of wholesale prohibition.)

Most considerations of urban consumption during the Republican era have analyzed the social and discursive dimensions of the construction of the female consumer. This case study will provide a unique opportunity to assess the social patterns and discourse surrounding the male consumption of sex and their relation to the overall urban economy, including the consumerist behavior of women. This discussion will augment the field’s contemporary focus on Republican misogyny surrounding female consumers by highlighting anxieties concerning the economic dimensions of male sexuality, while also questioning to what extent-- or what particular aspects of-- the urban economy were explicitly gendered as male. This analysis will provide an opportunity for rethinking the significance and effect of constructs of male and female gender in the distillation of Republican concepts regarding urban citizenship and economic development.

As in other cities, prostitution was not confined to a particular area; brothels, street walkers, and other modes of sex work were spread throughout Suzhou – or, rather, extended throughout the city during the Republic as a result of rural economic hardship and the overall sexualization of urban space. Nonetheless, local discussions of prostitution often assumed an explicit spatial dimension. Whether due to the role of state and business authorities in promoting prostitution in certain locations or individuals’ concerns for particular districts, people considered the social and economic ramifications of prostitution within Suzhou as a whole, or, more parochially, for delimited areas inside or outside the city wall. This paper, therefore, will also provide an opportunity for reassessing the significance of “place” and “urban space” in the construction of early 20th c. notions of gender and consumerism.

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/12 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Elizabeth Hurd, Department of Political Science
"The Politics of Secularism in International Relations"

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/19 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Sevket Pamuk, BCICS Visiting Scholar, Department of Economics, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
“Export Oriented New Industrial Centers across Anatolia"

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 11/02 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Bruce Carruthers, Department of Sociology
"Trust and Credit: The Historical Development of Credit-Rating"

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 11/09 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Yi Qian, Kellogg School of Management
“Do National Patent Implementation Stimulate Domestic Innovation, International Trade and Technology Transfer?”

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 11/16 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Jeff Winters, Department of Political Science
“Oligarchy and Elite Rule”

Spring 2007

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 04/06 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
"European Union: Myth and Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier"
Michael Loriaux, Department of Political Science

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 04/13 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
“From the fields of Bangu: race and nationality in the life of a Brazilian soccer player”
Leonardo Pereira, CICS Visiting Scholar, Adjunct Professor of Brazilian Literature, UNICAMP, Brazil

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 04/20 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Peter Carroll, Department of History
Topic TBA

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 04/27 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
"From the Trenches: Political Expression among Youth in Lusaka, Zambia"
Karen Tranberg Hansen, Department of Anthropology

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 05/04 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
"Turkish Cinema"
Yeşim Burul Seven, BCICS Visiting Scholar and Professor of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 05/11 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
"Photography’s Other Histories: Contemporary Family Photography as a Challenge to the Discipline of Art/Photography History”
Mette Sandbye, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 05/18 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
“Innocents Abroad: Failure of the International Joint Venture with Pyramidal Group Firms”
Susan Perkins, Senior Lecturer, Kellogg School of Management and Organizations

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 05/25 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
“Representing Women in Iranian Cinema”
Hamid Naficy, School of Communication Studies

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FY2006-07

Previous Events:

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 01/12 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Sadik Rddad, CICS Visiting Scholar, Assistant Professor of English,
Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdeallah University in Fez, Morocco
“Cultural Encounters: Morocco in Anglo-American Travel Writing”

This presentation examines Anglo-American travel writing on Morocco immediately before and after the French Protectorate (1912-1956). On the one hand, it tries to draw critical attention to Morocco, which is conventionally and arbitrarily subsumed in the Middle East, depriving it of its cultural and historical specificities. On the other hand, by focusing on American and British Orientalisms, it aims at showing how the Western (mis)representation of the Orient is not monolithic, but rather changes across nation and history.

Sadik Rddad is Assistant Professor of English at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdeallah University in Fez, Morocco. He teaches American, British and Moroccan literatures, postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and cultural studies. He received an MA in English in 1990 and is currently completing a Ph.D. in English, focusing on Anglo-American travel writings on Morocco. He was recently awarded a Joint-Supervision Doctorate Grant by the Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange (Fulbright). He is a founding member of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Center and co-editor of the Moroccan Cultural Studies Journal. He has translated and published articles on Moroccan and Anglo-American travel literature, and Moroccan culture. He is currently editing a book on travel literature on Morocco. Sadik can be reached at : s-rddad@northwestern.edu .

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Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 01/19 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Kathy Thelen, Professor, Department of Political Science
Sebastian Karcher, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science
“‘ . . . back beyond Weimar they have become even more Bismarckian.’ Instituitonal
reproduction and instituitonal change: The case of the German Bundesrat”

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 01/26 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Thom McDade, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
“Is globalization bad for your health? Linking culture and
biology in the Bolivian Amazon”

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/02 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Robert Hariman, School of Communication Studies
"Liberal Representation and Global Order: The Iconic Photograph from Tiananmen Square"

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/09 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Paul Liffman, BCICS Visiting Scholar, Professor at the Center for Anthropological Studies of the
Colegio de Michoacán
"Museums and Indigenous Territoriality: Huichols at Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropologia"

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/16
Cancelled

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 02/23 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Yohanan Petrovsky, Professor, Department of History
"Jewish Encounter With Communism, 1920-1930: New approaches."

Faculty and Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 03/02 : Noon - 1:00 p.m.
Melissa Macauley, Professor, Department of History
"Chinese Sojourners: Crime and Migration in the South China Seas, 1856-1927."

Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 09/29 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Silvia Lara, Professor, History Department at the Federal University of Campinas and CICS Visiting Scholar
“Palmares, Cucaú and the Perspectives of Freedom in Seventeenth Century Brazil”

Palmares, a complex of fugitive slave settlements developed throughout the seventeenth century in the Northeast region of Brazil, is considered the largest and longest-lived Maroon communities (quilombos) in Brazilian history. Highlighted by the abolitionist literature and by the orthodox Marxist historians as a “saga of liberty”, its history remains, however, far from the questions of recent historiography of slavery in Brazil, and of power dynamics in Portuguese America. This presentation will focus on the assignment of a peace treaty between colonial authorities and the leader of Palmares, in 1678, resulting in the creation of Cucaú, a new free black community that survived briefly. It intends to link the history of Palmares to the polemics revolving around the legitimacy of slavery and the freedom of indigenous people in Brazil, and of Africans and their descendents in the Portuguese overseas dominions.

Silvia Hunold Lara is a Professor of History at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. She works on the history of slavery in seventeenth and eighteenth century Brazil. As a Resident Fellow in the Humanities Program at Northwestern University, she will focus on how certain Central African, indigenous and African American traditions could shape political and social choices of the inhabitants of Palmares in their daily life, war strategies and negotiations with colonial authorities. Her PhD was published in 1988 under the title Campos da Violência. Escravos e senhores na Capitania do Rio de Janeiro, 1750-1808 (Fields of Violence: a study of the relationship between slaves and masters in Rio de Janeiro, 1750-1808). Her new book on the relations between slavery, culture and politics in eighteenth century Portuguese America is forthcoming, by Companhia das Letras.

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Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/06 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Will Reno, Department of Political Science
"From Wars of Liberation to Warlords"

Abstract : Why have armed groups in Africa appeared to disintegrate into factional infighting in places that previously saw ideologically cohesive groups?

This project examines the future of ideology and central organization in African insurgencies. It addresses the death of ideological alternatives among armed groups, in the wake of liberation from Colonialism and apartheid. Such questions are relevant for understanding the (so far) limited mobilizing capacity of radical Islamist and other movements of contemporary international society.

Will Reno is a specialist in African politics and the politics of “collapsing states.” His current work examines violent commercial organizations in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans and their relationships to state power and global economic actors. Reno's research takes him to places such as Sierra Leone, Congo, and Central Asia where he talk to insurgents (including so-called "warlords"), government officials, and foreigners involved in these conflicts. His books include Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone (Cambridge, 1995) and Warlord Politics and African States (Lynne Rienner, 1998). He is completing the forthcoming volume, The Evolution of Warfare in Independent Africa.

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Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/13 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Andreas Niederberger, Visiting Professor Department of Political Science and Political Science Professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Germany
“Democracy in World Society? Normative Foundations and Historical Prospects”

Abstract: One of the most prominent criticisms of the present world order concerns the lack of democratic legitimacy. This criticism has inspired attempts to reform international organizations and associations and it is also at the background of some important proponents of the so-called “anti-globalization”-movement. But at the same time it challenged democratic theorists to consider whether the available democratic theories are really adapted to the new constellations, or whether they should be revised – without transforming them into general, but not necessarily democratic theories of good governance.

This talk will present a model of transnational democracy designed to be normatively convincing, even though it revises essential elements of “classical” democratic theories. The talk will examine if and to which degree such a conception of transnational democracy could serve as an interesting perspective for the development and reform of international institutions and structures.

Andreas Niederberger, current research focuses on the principles and the constitution of transnational democracy as a cosmopolitan political and legal structure. He studies the revision of existing conceptions of justice and democracy and the role of (international) law in a legitimate global political structure. Professor Niederberger has published and edited books and articles on action theory, democratic theory, the European Union, “just war” theory, the philosophy of international relations, and poststructuralist political philosophy and theory. He studied in Frankfurt/Main (Germany), Paris (France) and St. Louis (USA) and previously taught philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main (Germany).

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Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/20 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Ernesto Laclau, Visiting Professor Comparative Literature Studies
"The Discursive Construction of Social Antagonisms "

Abstract : The presentation will be focused on three theoretical categories which are central to Professor Laclau’s work :

• empty signifier / hegemony
• naming / singularity
• social heterogeneity

A few concrete examples will also be mentioned.

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Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 10/27 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Laura Hein, Professor in the Department of History
“Enlarging the Picture: the Feminist, Pan-Asian Artistic Practice of Tomiyama Taeko”

The work of artist TOMIYAMA Taeko, now 85 and still going strong, powerfully reimagines war responsibility and pan-Asianism in very beautiful ways. She is artistically adventurous, for example exploring new media such as slides (1970s), collages (1980s) at computer graphics (1990s) at ages when many other artists are hanging up their paintbrushes, and has articulate, thoughtful explanations of how she ties her artistic experimentation to her political efforts. Her strategies include a layering of meaning by highlighting diverse influences, for example images of skulls and bodies that not only evoke war's destruction but also the art of Kawanabe Kyosai, a 19th century Japanese painter, Jose Posada, a 20th century Mexican painter, and Hieronymus Bosch, a 15-16th century Dutch painter.

Laura Hein's current work is on oppositional political communities and
political expression in postwar Japan. One piece of this is an edited
book on Tomiyama. She is also currently working on postwar practices of art collecting and museum establishment that were designed to counter rather than enhance state power. Her 2004 book, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Community and Expertise in Postwar Japan, will be brought out in Japanese by Iwanami Press in early 2007. A co-authored essay, with Akiko Takenaka, "Exhibiting War in Japan in the United States in the 1990s," will appear in Pacific Historical Review in January 2007.
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Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 11/03 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Pablo J. Boczkowski, Associate Professor, School of Communication ”When more media equals less news”

This paper examines content homogeneity, understood as the degree to which different media focus on the same stories during a particular news cycle, in Argentina's leading print and online newspapers. It focuses on the role of technical practices across media and over time-during a decade for print and during 24 hours for online. The analysis shows three main patterns of homogenization: a) an increase in the level of homogeneity in print newspapers tied to their online counterparts' practice of publishing breaking and developing stories during the day; b) an increase in the level of homogeneity in online newspapers as the day unfolds; and, c) a densely interconnected web of homogeneity across print and online newspapers in 2005. We draw from these findings to make contributions to research on online news and media sociology, and to reflect upon the direction and meaning of changes in journalistic form in the current media environment.

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies—with courtesy appointments in the Department of Sociology, the Medill School of Journalism, the Institute for Policy Research and the Media Management Center. He is also External Faculty Affiliate at Columbia University’s Center on Organizational Innovation and Visiting Faculty at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella’s Business School in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Before coming to Northwestern, he was Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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Faculty & Fellows Colloquium :: Fri 11/10 : 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Akram Zaatari, Video Artist and Film Director, Beirut, Lebanon
“Borders are representations of conflicts”