Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis presents at national conference of the Livestock Conservancy
On Saturday, November 15, Dr. Janet Davis presented an invited lecture at the national conference of the Livestock Conservancy right here in Austin. Her talk, entitled "The Cattle Drives of Wall Street and Other Stories of Urban Livestock: 1866 - 1940," considered how animals that once roamed through city streets disappeared prior to World War II.See her abstract here:
In the middle of the nineteenth century, livestock were everywhere in the urban United States. In the nation’s largest city, cattle drives plodded through Wall Street and sheep manicured the grass at Central Park. Livestock muscle powered city transportation and commerce. Armies of hogs rooted through mounds of garbage, while chickens scratched for bits of food. In an age before refrigeration, American stockyards, dairies, slaughterhouses, and butcher shops spawned fetid olfactory clouds. Yet on the eve of World War II, the nation’s urban landscape had changed dramatically with the virtual disappearance of livestock. This paper explores the historical processes that led to this disappearance, including motorized transportation and cooling technologies, sanitation reform, and the rise of the animal welfare movement. This paper will also examine the cultural, social, and economic consequences of this transformation, as well as the nascent resurgence of urban livestock today.
For more information about the conference, see the Livestock Conservancy website.
Announcement: Rebecca Solnit speaks at UT tomorrow!
We're thrilled to announce that the Department of American Studies will present a talk by Rebecca Solnit tomorrow (Thursday, November 13) at 7:00 in the Prothro Theater at the Harry Ransom Center on campus at UT. Solnit will discuss her new collection of essays, "The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness." Books will be available for purchase, and a brief book signing will follow the talk. Support for this event was provided by the Austin Center for Photography, the Harry Ransom Center, the Department of Art and Art History, the Department of English, and the Humanities Institute through the Sterling Clark Holloway Centennial Lectureship in Liberal Arts.Hope to see y'all there!
Announcement: A Preview of the "Practices of Play" Symposium
This Friday, the Department will play host to what promises to be an incredible event: the "Practices of Play" symposium, an interdisciplinary series of talks and discussions, will "explore play as a mode of being in, exploring, and transforming the world of the early twenty-first century." Details about the event can be found here, and attendees (all are welcome) can RSVP at the event's Facebook page here.We're pleased to share with you a preview of some conversations that may emerge from the symposium. The speakers were asked to respond briefly to a question about play as method and practice - what does the concept of "play" mean to you, and how does play figure as a practice or method in your work? - and we reprint some replies below.
From Tanya Clement (School of Information, UT Austin):New to play as a critical method, I understand play as a situated and social, world-making and world-weary, rule-aware and rule-breaking, real-time act of performing critical interpretation. This method is of interest to me in my current research around designing infrastructure for access and analysis of digital sound collections in the humanities because the spoken texts we study (oral histories, poetry performances, speeches, folk songs and storytelling) are often playful: they are art, real-time performance, social interactions and personal expressions, at once subversive and reflective of the systems of our culture. How can play help us better understand, design, and build new opportunities for critical sound spaces?
From Eddo Stern (UCLA):/// STARTQuestion: What does the concept of "play" mean to you, and how does play figure as a practice or method in your work?Answer:Play is SubversivePlay is HumanisticPlay is ChaoticPlay is irresponsiblePlay is ControllingPlay is LiberatingPlay is about making friendsPlay is DeepPlay is revealingPlay is LogicalPlay is ObsessivePlay is CasualPlay is MasteryPlay is big businessPlay is safePlay is DecadentPlay can save the worldPlay is about KillingPlay is UnstablePlay is UnforgivingPlay is ImprovisationPlay is FuturisticPlay will ruin youPlay is IrrationalPlay is wastePlay is DangerousPlay is as old as a Dinosaur tailPlay is Science FictionPlay is FantasticPlay is MathematicalPlay is IlluminatingPlay is revengePlay is PhilosophicalPlay is LivePlay is DarkPlay is ChildishPlay Doesn't matter at allbut it doesEddo// END
From Randy Lewis (Department of American Studies, UT Austin):Play is less a method or practice for me right now than a subject of inquiry whose importance almost took me by surprise. In researching a book about contemporary surveillance culture in the Age of Snowden, I didn’t fully anticipate how important play, fun, entertainment and similar subjects would be to my work. Yet now, as I trudge through the dismal glitter of the security-entertainment complex, I see the pressures and temptations of “ludic surveillance” everywhere I go. As a result, my talk is focusing on two things: (1) tentatively mapping out this emerging cultural landscape and (2) exploring new paradigms that encourage us to see beyond the Panopticon to seemingly light-hearted modes of securitization.
From Carrie Andersen (Department of American Studies, UT Austin):For me, play has been an object of academic inquiry since I began my graduate work at UT. Although my initial work focused on play as a practice of engaging with contested historical narratives, my dissertation explores how both the physical and emotional experiences that videogame play evokes can be utilized for the decidedly not-so-playful practices of war and violence (and principally, combat through military drones). I wonder about the ways that play's ambiguity and unexpected complexity - I hope to excavate how play not only stimulates fun and joy, but also empowerment, anxiety, boredom, and fear - make it a potentially devastating practice when directed towards ethically and politically contentious ends.
And from Patrick Jagoda (Department of English, UChicago), Harrington Fellow and the Symposium's organizer:Play can inspire curiosity, reflection, imagination, confusion, involvement, flexible optimism, paranoia, apophenia, desire, dissatisfaction, ambiguity, community — and not always, as we may expect, fun. Play isn’t merely freedom. It can never wholly exceed a capitalist system that absorbs it and converts it into surplus value. Play is no mere outside. If play can be disturbing or subversive, it is in its anti-teleological and immanent character, insofar as it has only an internal purpose — it is never a means to an end. I’ll be sharing a much fuller overview of play on Friday at 10am, as the introduction to the symposium.
Graduate Research + Exhibition: Natalie Zelt on LaToya Ruby Frazier
Today, the first of two Austin-area exhibitions, both featuring the work of photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier and curated by the INGZ curatorial collective, opens at the UT Visual Arts Center, located in the ART building. INGZ's Z is AMS grad student Natalie Zelt, who wrote her master's report on Frazier. She elaborates on the project:
I had been familiar with Frazier's work for a while, but I have this problem where I tend to be extra skeptical of photographers working in the rustbelt who deal with deindustialization. It wasn't until I got to spend time in Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's exhibition "Witness" that I really got a sense of how her photographs work as both object and images on so many different registers. Seeing a solo exhibition really brings out the ways that she is conceptually using the history of photography as a tool in here work. That is part of why INGZ is bringing two exhibitions to Austin, both under the title "LaToya Ruby Frazier: Riveted."The black and white gelatin silver prints, the documentary style, her use of mostly analogue process and commitment to photography as an activist medium all harken to a history of photography that has been criticized for being aloof, marginalizing, and voyeuristic. Frazier is using this history and its criticisms when she makes these intensely personal and political images.But the study and engagement with her work begs to move beyond a masters project. Thats part of why the INGZ collective decided to bring two exhibitions to Austin. At a moment when the very city around us is experience industry driven growth, not all that unlike the boom in Braddock in the 1950s, it is important for people to bear witness to LaToya's experience.
The first exhibition is open at UTVAC until December 6th. Reservations for tours with the curators are available for classes and interested groups, please email info@ingzcollective.org for scheduling information. The second exhibition runs from January 15, 2015 to May 6, 2015 at ISESE Gallery in the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies (Jester A232A).