Click Here to Download the Full Zuckerman Conference Program
April 7 & April 8, 2011
Featuring Keynote Talk from Professor Elaine Scarry, Harvard University
SPONSORS
Sponsored by: the Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows Program
Co-Sponsored by: The Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Graduate Student Advisory Council
ABOUT
Two ideas motivate the Mellon Program Biennial. Extending the guiding intellectual animus of the program, we bring together Mellon Program alums to engage each other and current fellows in interdisciplinary conversations about their current research, and open these conversations to the wider Columbia community. The Zuckerman Conference is the focal point of this effort. The conference is also motivated by the importance and pleasure of social relationships in our professional lives.
SCHEDULE
April 7 — Buell Hall (“Maison Française”), Ground Floor
8:45 to 9 a.m. — Welcome and Acknowledgements (Peter Bearman, Department of Sociology & Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center/Columbia University; William McAllister, ISERP & Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center/Columbia University; and Harriet Zuckerman, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
9 to 10 a.m. — Keynote by Elaine Scarry, Professor of English and American Literature and Language and the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University
Title: Soldier’s Dissent in Homer and Hobbes
10:15 to 11:45 a.m. — Panel 1: Socially Useful and Problematic Effects of Forgetting and Ambiguity
Immigrant forgetting in Romano-Egypt promotes identity formation; ambiguous Janus-like boundary objects help fund the new states of Israel and Ireland; and forgetting and misremembering scientific health research in early 20th century Africa cost lives.
Panelists:
Anna Lucille Boozer (Department of Archaeology/University of Reading), “Migration and Memory: Lessons from the Egyptian Desert” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Dan Lainer-Vos (Department of Sociology/University of Southern California), “Between Gift-Giving and Market Exchange: The Pragmatic Organization of Economic Transactions” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Jennifer Tappan (Department of History/Portland State University), “The True Fiasco: Efforts to Combat Protein Malnutrition in Uganda and the World, 1950-1974” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Discussant: Alvan Ikoku, Department of English and Comparative Literature/Columbia University
Noon to 1 p.m. — Panel 2: Democratic Political and Cultural Practices: Revolutionary Change and Deceptive Stasis
How elections in authoritarian regimes can cause those regimes to collapse (is current Egypt a case?); and how democratic anti-racist multi-culturalism in the U.S. helps maintain the political, economic, and ideological structures of neoliberal economic globalization.
Panelists:
Graeme Robertson (Department of Political Science/University of North Carolina), “Elections, Revolutions and Political Change in the Post-Cold War Era” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Jodi Melamed (Department of English/Marquette University), “Rationalizing Violence in Neoliberal Multiculturalism” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Discussant: Felipe Gaitan-Amman, Department of Anthropology/Columbia University
2 to 3:30 p.m. — Panel 3: How Modern Cultural Forms and Markets Emerge: Politics and Stories
Modernist art in South Asia arises from the secular state and individual; modern “European culture” is shaped by Nazi political aims; and modern markets for health therapy research develop from stories about what the future will look like.
Panelists:
Karin Zitzewitz (Department of Anthropology/Michigan State University), “Art as Secular Practice: Modernist Art in Contemporary India”
Benjamin Martin (Department of History/San Francisco State University), “’European Culture’ as Soft Power: How Nazi Germany Rearranged the Assignment of Literary Capital” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Sophie Muetzel (Social Science Research Institut in Berlin/Germany), “Stories and the Emergence of a Market” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Discussant: Anderson Blanton, Department of Anthropology/Columbia University
3:45 to 5:15 p.m. — Panel 4: How the Unimportant Becomes Important, And Vice Versa
The post-WW I city of Fiume and African-American Presidential campaigns are thought to be sidelights to their respective main events, but are they? On the other hand, why did successful privateering merchants of the 18th century allow themselves to disappear into the British Royal Navy?
Panelists:
Dominique Kirchner Reill (History Department/University of Miami), “Rebel City: Fiume’s Challenge To Wilson’s Europe, 1919-1920”
Christina M. Greer (Department of Political Science/Fordham University), “Symbolic Candidacies and the Significance of Alternative Parties: A Historic Analysis of African Americans Seeking Executive Office, 1872-2008”
Henning Hillman and Christina Gathmann (Department of Sociology/University of Mannheim), “Overseas Trade and the Decline of Privateering” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Discussant: Natan Dotan, Department of Sociology/Columbia University
April 8 — Philosophy Hall, Room 301
9 to 10 a.m. — Panel 5: What Constitutes Work?: Social and Individual Welfare
Public assistance for poor families in the U.S. has moved from a language of welfare-support to that of work-support, yet what should we think constitutes work that is socially just and acceptable?
Panelists:
Chauncy Lennon (Economic Fairness Initiative/Ford Foundation), “The End of Welfare As We Know It?: The Fall of Cash Welfare and The Rise of Work Supports.”
Julia Maskivker (Department of Political Science/Rollins College), “Self-Realization and Justice: A Liberal-Perfectionist Defense of the Right to Freedom from Employment” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Discussant: Jeffrey Lenowitz, Department of Political Science/Columbia University
10:15 to 11:45 a.m. — Panel 6: Violence, Identity & Control
How violence and responses to it form British and South Asian identities in 19th century India; white Southerner and African-American identity in 19th and 20th century U.S.; and how to think about the epistemological bases of identity formation.
Panelists:
Elizabeth Kolsky (Department of History/Villanova University), “Reconsidering the Colonial Security State: Notes from the Northwest Frontier of British India” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Mattias Smångs (Department of Sociology & Anthropology/Fordham University), “Whiteness from Violence: Lynching and White Identity in the U.S. South, 1882-1915” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Emily Erikson (Department of Sociology/Yale University.), “Formalist and Relationalist Theory in Social Network Analysis” (DOWNLOAD PAPER)
Discussant: Jessica Hammer, Department of Cognitive Studies in Education/Teachers College
Noon to 1 p.m. — Conversation (Elaine Scarry, Peter Bearman and William McAllister)
Elaine Scarry Bio:
We are very happy to have Professor Elaine Scarry as our keynote speaker, as she brings learning from diverse disciplines to investigate questions that arise in widely different fields. Elaine Scarry is a professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, holding the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value chair. Among her many research interests have been theories of representation, the language of physical pain, the structure of verb al and material making in art, science and the law.
Academically, Professor Scarry was initially known for her work The Body in Pain, a searing, definitive study of pain and its infliction. In this life-changing book, she argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world, and contrasts this with human creation, which leads to the making of the world. She is perhaps most widely known for her New York Review of Books articles, which argue that fairly common electromagnetic interference may have been responsible for the devastating crashes ten years ago of TWA 800 and EgyptAir 990 rather than the more singular explanations that are usually given.
The titles of Professor Scarry’s books convey the range and depth of her interests and intellect. She has written Resisting Representation, On Beauty and Being Just, Dreaming by the Book, Rule of Law, Misrule of Men and, most recently, Thinking in an Emergency. This last work explores how modern democratic governments have undermined democracy by invoking the idea of emergency to eschew thinking in order to bypass constitutional provisions concerning civilian surveillance, presidential succession, the use of torture and the declaration of war. Drawing on the work of philosophers, neuroscientists, and artists, Professor Scarry shows how thinking and rapid action are compatible, that practices we dismiss as mere habit and protocol represent rigorous, effective modes of thought that are crucial in times of crisis.
Professor Scarry received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and her A.B. from Chatham College.
For further questions please contact Bethany Kell, kbk2113@columbia.edu
