Faculty and Grad Research: Foodways Texas Symposium

This past weekend, graduate students in Elizabeth Engelhardt's "American Food" class took part in the second annual Foodways Texas Symposium here in Austin. At this year's event, Dr. Engelhardt's class presented work from an oral history project they are doing in partnership with Foodways Texas and the Texas Restaurant Association. In small groups, the students visited four "iconic" Texas restaurants to interview their owners, snap photos, and gather ephemera, and they shared these stories and images at a well-attended afternoon panel.Dr. Engelhardt notes that "these restaurants have great stories, represent the diversity of the Texas food and restaurant culture and celebrate the racial and ethnic diversity of our state." Marvin Bendele, Executive Director of Foodways Texas, comments, "We view this oral history project as an opportunity to highlight the diverse food cultures of the Lone Star state by way of its thriving and storied restaurant industry. We expect that through our partnership with the Texas Restaurant Association, we will be able to create an extensive oral history archive that will be utilized by future generations interested in our food and foodways history."Stay tuned tomorrow for more on this exciting oral history project (and some beautiful photos!). In the meantime, check out this great write-up on the symposium by Addie Broyles on the Relish Austin blog over at Austin360.

Faculty Research: Janet Davis lectures at UVA Circus Festival

This week, our very own Dr. Janet M. Davis will be lecturing as part of a circus festival sponsored by the Department of Drama at the University of Virginia. Her topics will include circus history and animal welfare--a combination of work already published and her current book project, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (under contract with Oxford University Press). Specifically, Dr. Davis will be talking to theater audiences after three performances of George Brant's play, "Elephant's Graveyard." The veteran clown, Steve Smith, and the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus will also be performing as part of the festival. Audiences at UVA are in for a treat!

Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis on Unplugging at Flow

Dr. Randy Lewis has a new piece over at Flow that questions why it is so difficult to imagine unplugging from the constant buzz of electronics that characterizes modern life:

Yet… are we not curious about how it would feel to experience the “great unplugging”? Would we relish the ensuing silence as we restore the old ways of communicating and connecting with one another? Or would we lapse into a languorous funk without Google and HBO, Avatar and Annoying Orange? Would we feel permanently stuck in the isolation tank of our own boredom, marooned with the hideousness of our own organic thoughts? Would we start sketching the “Real Housewives” on the walls of our condos in crayon, breathlessly narrating their erotic adventures like an ancient bards singing the tale Odysseus and the sirens? Would we pine for our iPhones, laptops, and flatscreen TVs like postmodern amputees cursing the loss of our cyborg appendages? Would we grieve for our machines?Probably. But what fascinates me is how loathe we are to even imagine this scenario. We are increasingly unwilling to contemplate the absence of the various screens that convey so much of our entertainment, sociality, and labor. Like Francis Fukuyama’s Cold War “End of History” argument in which capitalism’s apparent triumph over socialism foreclosed any discussion of alternatives, the new media juggernaut is so powerful that it has blotted out our ability to imagine anything else. We are all hopeless screenagers now.

I'm reminded here of a neuroscience experiment described at io9 last October:

A group of researchers from Germany and the UK designed a fairly complex psychological test to determine how people planned for negative events in the future. First, they asked the about the likelihood of 80 different disturbing events happening, such as contracting a fatal disease or being attacked. After they'd recorded people's responses, researchers told each subject the actual, statistical likelihood of such events happening. In some cases, people had overestimated the likelihood and in some cases they'd underestimated it.Then, after some time had passed, the researchers asked subjects again about the likelihood of these events happening to them. Interestingly, they found that people had a much harder time adjusting their expectations if the real-world statistical likelihood was higher than what they had first guessed. They had little trouble adjusting expectations for a more favorable outcome. It was as if people were selectively remembering the likelihoods of future events — forgetting the bad odds but not the good ones.

What does this mean? io9 sums it up nicely:

Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering undesirable information about our odds of dying or being hurt. And that's why nobody ever believes the apocalypse is going to happen to them.

I think there are lessons to be drawn from these findings with respect to our reliance on technology, too. Perhaps our inability to imagine a world without these [im]material comforts, even though many of us actually lived in that world, is a chemical intervention to protect us. Because we are so individually and socially embedded in technology, maybe imagining the scenario of loss that Randy wonders about is too much for our grey matter to handle.Read the piece in its entirety here.

Faculty Research: Janet Davis on the Circus

One of the best things about American Studies is how it enables telling histories through unexpected popular culture artifacts and experiences: baseball, toys, children's literature - or, in this case, the circus. Dr. Janet Davis is slated to give a talk at the Historic Asolo Theater in Sarasota, Florida, on how the circus shaped the development of modern American society, and the Sarasota Herald Tribune has a lengthy feature on her work.Here's an excerpt:

The evolution of the circus, which first came to America in the late 1700s but was in its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, parallels growth in American society, sad Davis, whose focus is on social change rather than development of infrastructure.Women, for example, were circus performers from the earliest days, but public perception grew and changed over the decades. The performing arts were a place “of general ill repute for women, and the circus was definitely no different,” she said.But by 1890, female circus performers were prominently featured in the circuses’ advertising, marking “a real transformation in the public place of women in American life. It’s occurring at exactly the same time that women are becoming actively involved in reform movements in America, going to college, working in factories. It’s accompanying this general shift of American women out of the home and into public life.”

Check out the full article here!