Grad Research: E3W Roundtable Features Elissa Underwood as Panelist
A hearty welcome back from spring break (at least for you UT folks) from all of us at AMS :: ATX. We're kicking off the week by sharing what promises to be a fascinating panel discussion featuring one of our own graduate students, Elissa Underwood, as a panelist.Details below from the official event announcement:
In advance of the 12th Annual Sequels Symposium, the second Prequels event of Spring 2013 will focus on the work of Peter Caster, one of the conference's keynote speakers and a distinguished alumnus of the English department. Caster’s recent book, Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film (2008), is grounded in the proposition that “the history, literary and otherwise, of the United States is indivisible from that of its prisons.”Inspired by this work, a panel of graduate students, faculty members, and activists will offer perspectives and narratives that capture the realities of the American prison industrial complex. This discussion will open with a brief video montage of scenes from TV and film that best represent how American popular culture depicts the national prison system. In response to this montage, our panelists will share how their work reveals and communicates the realities of prison life in the United States. Panelists include Melissa Burch (Graduate Student, Anthropology), Rebecca Lorins (Texas After Violence Project), Elissa Underwood(Graduate Student, American Studies), Benet Magnuson (Policy Attorney, Texas Criminal Justice Coalition), and E3W's very own Barbara Harlow, who will serve as a moderator and respondent. We hope you will join us and add your voice to the discussion.
Grad Research: Visiting the "Food, the City, and Innovation" Conference
The following dispatch comes to us from MA student Natalie Zelt:This past weekend the Food Lab at the University of Texas co-hosted with Boston University two days of round table panel discussions on food, global urbanization and innovation. The sequel to a conference hosted at BU last year, each of the six panels were composed of an interdisciplinary array of academics, practitioners and innovators who were charged with answering one of six questions: What is Food? Do we need to rethink how we produce food? How are cities building resilient food systems? What will our urban food map look like? What is innovation as it relates to our food system? Food Start-ups: who, what, where, when, why?The interdisciplinary nature of each panel was extremely valuable to the conference overall as was the wealth of food thinkers and doers working in and around Austin. Placing architects next to sociologists next to urban garden managers next to artists and historians forced the majority of the panels to acknowledge the impact of both concrete problems (like frequent technological malfunctions of EBT machines when trying to adopt food stamps to a farmers market) and larger questions about the role of urban space in agricultural production. Strangely enough the most raucous panel proved to be on Saturday morning. Having the founders of three of Austin’s largest organic farms and food cooperatives, Johnson’s Backyard Garden, Farmhouse Delivery and Greenling, in one room with Chris Romano, the Global produce procurement team leader for Whole Foods Market, led to seemingly friendly but loaded conversation about economic growth in food innovation in Austin that was punctuated by lively additions from the historians on the panel.Only once, in the panel charged with spending two hours answering the question “Do we need to rethink how we produce food?” did the conversation fall into what felt like a tried feedback loop of food issues dialogue: continually reweighing environmental concerns against socio-economic issues of access and fair practices. Perhaps because, by 2013, the answer to the question under these panelists purview is clearly “yes.” Moderator John Doggett, did his best to push the conversation toward a centralized end, but unfortunately the group concluded with a frightfully complicated charge: the need to outline America’s definition of “good food” for the future.Finite solution forthcoming.For a full list of the participants see: http://foodincubator.wordpress.com/conference/
Recent Grad Research: John Cline's "Arterial America"
Our graduates do amazing things. Like this: recent Ph.D. John Cline is preparing to walk from New Orleans to Chicago for a project entitled "Arterial America." He is raising funds through Kickstarter to support the trip, and there are a mere 24 hours to go! Check out his description of the project:
The original idea behind Arterial America (www.arterialamerica.com) was simple enough: get from New Orleans to Chicago. As a music historian—I graduated with a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas last May—the pathway between those two cities is of enormous significance: it’s the distance between Louis Armstrong and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or between Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. But as this project shifted from idle thought to actual plan, it became clear that the way north has historically consisted of many routes, exceeding the bounds of a “Blues Trail” or even of an African American “Great Migration.” They go back to before Columbus, when American Indians followed what we now call the “Natchez Trace” across the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. That same trail was followed by boatmen from before the time of Mark Twain, hoofing it back to their hometowns after floating a raft full of goods to the port of New Orleans, returning with what coin remained in their pockets after the temptations of the Crescent City. The way north consists, too, of railways and roadways, and, of course, boats. And so, the plan is to walk from New Orleans to Memphis, following the back roads and bits of the Trace and Highway 61, catch a towboat from Memphis to St. Louis, and finally hop a train from St. Louis to Chicago. At the same time, I cannot travel the routes that I’m traveling and expect to find the “last of the Mississippi bluesmen.” Rather, what’s important at the outset is to keep my ears and eyes open to contemporary life.
John has raised 72% of his goal and has until Tuesday, January 15, 12:54pm EST to reach 100%. Check out the Kickstarter here and follow John on his project blog here.
Andrew Gansky Introduces PhotoLab at the Harry Ransom Center
The following post comes to us from UT AMS doctoral student Andrew Gansky, who is co-organizer with Andi Gustavson of a new working group called PhotoLab designed for graduate students and the Austin photographic community.
American studies has a penchant for calling itself interdisciplinary, and our students take classes across campus and read into any number of fields to bear out this constitutive ethos. Yet it’s easy enough to walk into a course in another department and simply meet it on disciplinary terms, trying to satisfy the instructor’s expectations regarding how students should read, write, and think. It can be difficult to figure out how to put varying fields and ways of thinking in conversation without creating an incompatible cacophony of ideas, theoretical language, and methodologies, or feeling as though you’re trespassing on academic territory where you have no real business being. There is no simple formula to figure out precisely what it means to work as an interdisciplinary scholar.With this in mind, Andi Gustavson, my fellow graduate student, has been working for some time with Professor Steven Hoelscher to put together an Institute of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center that brings together scholars, practitioners, and artists from all across campus, drawing faculty from anthropology, art history, English, geography, history, photojournalism, RTF, studio arts, and of course, American studies. The kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations this institute hopes to foster is a promising gesture for those desiring to present and discuss work beyond their specific area of expertise.To help make this institute more accessible to students, Andi and I have been organizing a corollary working group, PhotoLab, open to graduate students and the larger Austin photographic community. We want the group to be useful for participants, so we will spend a large portion of our monthly meetings workshopping papers and bodies of photographic work. In conversation with group members, we will likewise develop public presentations and publishing agendas, and we will facilitate interactions with working photographers and similar groups at a variety of institutions. But we also hope PhotoLab will be fresh, stimulating, and imaginative—that it will foster an environment where students can present their ideas on equal footing and will have no need to maintain jurisdiction over photographic subfields. We are excited that PhotoLab brings together working photographers, students in studio arts, and participants who study or utilize photography for a wide range of research goals.Some of our participants include an anthropologist who uses photos taken by research participants to produce collaborative ethnographies and interactive documentaries; a geographer and active photographer who uses photography as both a tool and a subject to engage with air fields and the city of Marfa, Texas; a studio photographer who backlights newsprint weather maps to reveal verso images or text superimposed in unexpected ways; a Radio/Television/Film student who studies how photographs have historically described, defined, and evoked the often tenuous and shifting threshold between bodies and technology; and a professional photographer whose recent work deals with installation views as a class of photography with implications beyond the utilitarian value of document.Each of these participants will bring substantially different perspectives and sets of practices to PhotoLab, and the photographs each makes or studies encompass a broad range of aesthetics, purposes, and methods. By focusing on photography in its multivalent forms from numerous perspectives, PhotoLab will hopefully shed light on how we can make, manipulate, and write about photographs that are instruments, documents, and artworks, such that the depth of our work can match the inherently undisciplined nature of our photographic subjects.