CHATs are our brown bag lunch series designed to showcase and discuss the research of Temple faculty. Presenters make a 30-40 minute presentation of their research, followed by open discussion. Each talk begins at 11:40 a.m. in the CHAT lounge on the 10th floor of Gladfelter Hall, and the sessions pause at 1:00 p.m. to allow participants to move on to other obligations. If you are interested in presenting in the 2006-07 year, please email Richard Immerman.
 Date: November 17, 2005
Dustin Kidd (Sociology) - "From Art to Politics and Back Again: Culture as Multiple Social Structures"
My work explores the relationship between art & politics, and focuses on the controversies surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this CHAT brown bag, I will actually be focused on my theory and conceptual work from the book. What began as a simple attempt to define, conceptualize, and operationalize art (which was really never that simple), turned into a larger crique of sociological assumptions about the relationship between art, culture, and structure--assumptions that tend to conflate art and culture while ignoring their structural qualities. I argue that art should be recognized as one of many cultural structures: systems that are infused with meaning and which enable/constrain social processes. This allows me to talk about art and politics using relatively comparable language and to compare their role as sources of meaning in the contemporary US. It also gives me a language for explaining some social changes through a focus on the points of intersection between art and politics.
Further information about my research and teaching can be found at my Website:
http://www.dustinkidd.com/
 Date: December 1, 2005
Todd Shepard (History) - "The Affirmative Action Republic: “Exceptional Promotion” in France (1956-1962) and the Race Question in the Cold War World"
Following the defeat of race-obsessed Nazi and fascist regimes, numerous social movements insisted that questions of race, anti-racism, imperialism, and anti-colonial nationalism were intertwined and demanded political responses. This talk explore how elements of the strategy that France adopted during its eight-year war to prevent Algerian independence (1954-1962) resembled official US efforts to respond to the Civil Rights Movement. The French Republic established policies meant to combat anti-Algerian racism and its effects—most surprisingly, a form of affirmative action avant la lettre--while vigorously denying that world events offered lessons for the Algerian departments of France. This talk will focus on France and the US as a window into attempts among government officials across the West to come up with politically palatable policies to respond to pressing demands for racial justice during the Cold War.
 Date: December 8, 2005
Priya Joshi (English) - "Bollywood: An Introduction, or A People's History of India"
Every day, over twelve million people go the movies in India. Seated on planks of wood and on the floor, in air-conditioned movie palaces and open maidans, the world's most avid cinema-goer watches the hundreds of films that roll out of the world's most prolific film industry.
Join Priya Joshi as we examine the pleasures of this cinema that has often been dismissed for being saccharine, melodramatic, and escapist. We will be watching short clips from Hindi films made in Bombay (or Bollywood, as it is often called) from the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s. We will discuss the manner in which these films embody public fantasies—those of family and friends, gender and masculinity, religion and nation, sexuality and the state—in an effort to examine how Bombay's blockbusters have dealt with India's preoccupation with its emerging modernity.
Films that we discuss include: Awara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), Mother India (1957), Pyaasa (1957), Bobby (1973), Deewar (1975), Sholay (1975), Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge (1995), Dil Se (1998), Mohabbattein (2001), Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2002), Kal Ho Na Ho (2003).
 Date: February 1, 2006
Bryant Simon (History, CHAT Faculty Fellow) - "Up-Close in the Flat World: A Case Study of Malay Teens and Starbucks in Singapore"
Last year, New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat sat on top of every bestseller list in the country for weeks on end. In this fat book, Friedman argues that Microsoft Office, Netscape, and a few other innovations are creating a single global economy and culture – a flat world. In this talk, Bryant Simon will look at the flat world up-close through the eyes of Malay teens hanging out at Starbucks in Singapore. Along the way, Simon will explore the cultural meanings of “America” and of globalization.
 Date: February 8, 2006
Lisa Rhodes (American Studies) - "Women in the American Rock Culture, 1965-1975"
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
This chat will cover a brief history of the role of women musicians in the rock culture from 1965 to 1975, focusing on how the changes in their roles reflected those occurring at the time in the larger culture. I will also discuss a bit of my new research on women rock instrumentalists performing during those same years and how playing an instrument affected women in the rock subculture.
 Date: February 22, 2006
David Wolfsdorf (Philosophy) - “Plato's early conception of ethical knowledge”
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
This paper examines and weds two topics in Plato's early epistemology: the so-called Socratic method and the epistemological priority of definitional knowledge. A standard view is that the early dialogues contain two methods, an earlier elenctic method and a later hypothetical method. The paper rejects the standard view and argues that the introduction of the hypothetical method in Meno is a theorization of the so-called elenctic method. The most recent view of the epistemological priority of definitional knowledge is that Plato or Socrates is indeed committed to the view that definitional knowledge of ethical kinds is necessary for all substantive non-definitional ethical knowledge. The paper rejects this view and argues that the evidence of the early dialogues is consistent with the view that knowledge of some essential properties of ethical kinds is attainable independently of definitional knowledge of ethical kinds. Finally, the paper weds the topics of the Socratic method and the epistemological priority of definitional knowledge by examining the question: what means do the early dialogues provide for achieving definitional knowledge?
The paper argues that the early dialogues pursue definitional knowledge of ethical kinds using hypotheses about the essential properties of those ethical kinds. The epistemological-methodological success of the early dialogues thus depends upon the cogency of the hypothetical method. The paper argues that the early dialogues provide but slim grounds for thinking that the hypothetical method is cogent. Thus, the early dialogues do not yield ethical skepticism, but neither do they yield a very satisfactory account of how ethical knowledge can be achieved. (Note: the talk will indeed be a talk; no paper will be read. And despite appearances, the talk will be accessible to non- specialists.)
 Date: March 1, 2006
Rickie Sanders (Geography and Urban Studies, Women's Studies, CHAT Faculty Fellow) - "Images of the City in Popular Culture"
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
Rickie Sanders will share some very preliminary thoughts on popular culture and its role in shaping contemporary urban society. She suggests that rather than viewing cities as places/spaces with specific characteristics or ways of living, they are perhaps better understood as abstract receptacles for displaced feelings about other things. Using portrayals of the city in literature, film, and music she explores questions like, “What does “the city” mean to its inhabitants? How do they understand and make sense of it? What role does it play for the individual? Is it a place, an idea, or a way of life? This very informal gathering will be used to exchange ideas, information, and engage in critical discussion.
 Date: March 22, 2006
Dr. Patricia Melzer (Women’s Studies Program) - “'Death in the Shape of a Young Girl': Media Representations of Women Terrorists and Feminist Reponses during the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977”
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
Can political violence ever be considered feminist? This talk examines the involvement of women in left-wing terrorist groups in the 1970s in Germany in the context of a feminist ideology that propones non-violent political activism. Contrary to feminist definitions of women’s political strategies as “naturally” non-violent, female terrorists consciously employed political violence. This gendered transgression sparked a debate on violence as a political means within feminist groups. “Death in Form of a Young Girl” revisits the debate on women’s participation in “armed struggle” as it was taking place within movement publications during the “German Autumn.” Many of the movement publications were responding to sexist media coverage of female terrorists, which fed public hysteria around women employing political violence. This created a dialogue between feminists, mainstream culture, and radical political activists, in which these groups debated how these terrorist acts constituted a violent disruption of both social contract and gender prescriptions. My examination of the debate challenges the feminist analysis of the 1970s that too quickly dismisses women’s participation in radical political groups, as well as the current tendency of historical representations of these movements to leave gender unexamined.
 Date: March 29, 2006
Kathy Biddick (History) - "Share the Fantasy? An Unbecoming Crusade"
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
Where is the NOW in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 2005)? This presentation will think about the temporal politics of this film across its circuits of history, desire, and the global market:
• circuits of national heritage and film tourism in Al-Andalus (Spain) and Morocco
• circuits of masculinity, masochism and white male paranoia in Hollywood
• literary circuits of historical texts depicting the trauma of Christian atrocity rendered in the historical Crusades to Jerusalem
• circuits of economies of chivalric sacrifice (then …and now?)
I will discuss ways in which the film can help us to problematize the way in which Western critical theorists such as Antonio Negri, Jean Luc-Nancy, Slavoj Zizek theorize the “event” and how their own temporal politics seem to render them reluctant to discuss the emergence of queer multitudes of “democracy” in the global landscape of the jihad.
 Date: April 5, 2006
Jonathan Skinner (CHAT Fellow, English) - "Wastelands (since 1950): The Poetry of Vacant Lots"
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
What is the place of contemporary poetry? To judge from dominant trends in literary criticism, at least since the river sweating oil and tar of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," poetry seems to have affected anything but the disturbed kinds of landscape most common to our globalized, industrialized, "post colonial" environment, swarming with highly mobile populations. What does it mean to repel "invasive" species while welcoming "multicultural" expression? And how, outside the mode of lament for "lost" landscapes that seems original with Western literature itself, does poetry address humanity's increasingly troubled relationships with other species?
Let's look beyond pastoral fondness for idealized landscapes and put aside, for the moment, the entrenched perspective of the "local" or even the "regional." Is there a middle term between urban (supposedly social) and rural (supposedly natural) landscapes? Is it possible to de-idealize the literary treatment of landscape, or should we look for different ecological and aesthetic ideals?
I'll discuss some examples of writing that engages wastelands, "vacant lots" or what gardenist Gilles Clément calls the "Third landscape" of untended ("invasive") species and successional habitats: from the industrialized watershed of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, to Robert Smithson's entropic "Tour of the Monuments of Passaic," to Charles Olson's "archaeology of morning" (on Dogtown Commons just outside Gloucester), to more recent post-colonial approaches such as Lisa Robertson's celebration of the "soft" architecture of the blackberry bush, James Thomas Stevens's "Half-breed's Guide to the Use of Native Plants" or Cecilia Vicuña's seed poem "Precarios."
I'd like to suggest focusing on the "Third landscape" as a way to place formally adventurous work that is not "about" but "for" the material life of other cultures and species.
 Date: April 12, 2006
Oliver Gaycken (English) - "The Horror of Seeing Too Well": Media Fantasies of X-Ray Vision
Start Time: 11:40 a.m.
End Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: CHAT Conference Room
Both the cinema and the X-ray made their public debuts in December of 1895.
These technologies share more than a common birthday, however; both media are emblematic of the transformation of visuality in modernity. The sense that “all that is solid melts into air”—to invoke one familiar phrase describing the experience of modern life—derived to no small extent from the spatial and temporal manipulation that the cinema and the X-ray made available.
The introduction of new technologies often gives rise to what Carolyn Marvin has called “media fantasies”—understandings of innovations that, while perhaps not technically accurate, are nevertheless valid and often fascinating expressions of popular desires and anxieties about technological progress. The chat will examine some of the fantasies that surrounded the X-ray in the media of fiction, cartoons, and especially the cinema, ranging from 1896 to more contemporary examples, such as Roger Corman’s X—Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). |
