Announcement: AMS Graduate Conference this week: "Home/Sick"

Join the graduate students of the Department of American Studies at UT as they put on a conference that takes on the theme "Home/Sick" this Thursday and Friday, April 2 and 3. The keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Kim Tallbear (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UT Austin) on Thursday, April 2^nd at 6pm in NOA 1.124. Dr. Tallbear will give a talk called, "Molecular Death and Redface Reincarnation: Indigenous Appropriations in the U.S." Panels will take place Thursday and Friday in the Texas Union. See below for a full schedule, or click here.The following is a description of the conference theme from the organizers:

The death of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri this August, the immigration crisis centering around the influx of children from Central America to the United States, and the recent panic over the spread of the ebola virus can all be read as the newest manifestations of a long-running pattern throughout American history and culture: the relationship between constructions of “healthy” communities, the fear that these communities will be violated, invaded, or contaminated, and the mobilization of these fears as justification for action in the name of community preservation. The history of the United States is littered with rhetorical constructions of safety and security, purity and contamination—as well as with the results of very real processes of violence, displacement, and exclusion. The 2015 AMS Graduate Student Conference considers constructions of home and health, and explores how these concepts have been and continue to be mobilized in the construction and erasure of American communities, families, and selves.

Schedule for PanelsThursday, April 2Registration 1pm- 5pmSinclair Suite (UNB 3.128), Texas Union2:00pm - 3:30pm - Panel 1: Surveillance at HomeTexas Governors' Room (UNB 3.116), Texas Union3:45pm - 5:15pm - Panel 2: Sick: Bodies and AffectTexas Governors' Room (UNB 3.116), Texas UnionFriday, April 3Registration 8:30am - 5:00pmEastwoods Room (UNB 2.102), Texas Union9:00am - 10:30am - Panel 3: Race and Reconfiguring the HomeChicano Culture Room (4.206), Texas Union10:45 - 12:15 -  Panel 4: Home in Digital LifeChicano Culture Room (4.206), Texas Union1:45 - 3:15 - Panel 5: Leisure, Labor, and Contested HomesChicano Culture Room (4.206), Texas Union3:30 - 5:00 - Panel 6: Gulf Coast Oil and the Labor of Self, Loss, and the SouthChicano Culture Room (4.206), Texas Union

Grad Research: PhD student featured on television series 'American Canvas'

We are thrilled to be able to draw your attention to the great work our graduate students do both on and off campus. PhD student Kirsten Ronald, who is writing a dissertation about social dance, gentrification, and cultural preservation, is featured in a segment that was recently filmed for the program American Canvas on the cable channel Ovation TV. The segment follows Ronald as she leads two-step dance lessons at The White Horse in Austin. The episode airs this Wednesday, March 18, at 9pm Central Time. You can find the channel number for your cable provider here.Ronald shared the following with us about her research about and through dance:

Most of us in American Studies are lucky enough to study what we love, and I’m no exception – I’ve been an avid two-stepper almost since I set foot in Texas, and I research and write about social dance, gentrification, and cultural preservation in Austin.  I also teach beginning two-step classes at a few bars around town.  My co-teacher Houston Ritcheson and I were thrilled when the folks from American Canvas, a new cultural travel show on Ovation TV, asked if they could come film our class at The White Horse for their pilot, and now we’re super psyched to announce that the Austin episode is airing, and we’re in it!  With fingers crossed that they made us look far cooler than we actually are, please check it out: March 18th at 9pm on Ovation.

Announcement: 'LaToya Ruby Frazier: Riveted' exhibition reception tomorrow!

We are pleased to announce that the second exhibition associated with LaToya Ruby Frazier: Riveted has officially opened at the John L. Warfield Center ISESE Gallery in JES A230. The gallery will be open to the public from 12 - 5, Wednesday - Saturday, through May 9, 2015. This exhibition features video and photographic work previously unseen at UT that emphasizes the intimate stakes of Frazier's political and artistic practice.This exhibition was organized by INGZ Collective, a curatorial collective that includes our very own American Studies PhD student Natalie Zelt. Join Natalie and the rest of the INGZ Collective for a curators talk and exhibition reception tomorrow, Tuesday February 24, from 4 - 6pm in JES A230. And mark your calendars for LaToya Ruby Frazier's upcoming residency at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, which will include an artist talk and exhibition reception on April 22.

Grad Research: Graduate presentations abound this semester

We recently highlighted some of the folks presenting at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles November 6-9. But our students and faculty present all over the place. Here are just a few examples of the exciting new research UT AMS grad students are sharing around the country this semester:Andrew Gansky

Graduate student Andrew Gansky recently attended the Society for the History of Technology Annual Conference in Dearborn, Michigan, and took part in the SIGCIS Workshop. His presentation was titled, "The Meaning of Life in the Automated Office." Here's what Andrew had to say about his paper:

Many previous studies have looked at computer automation, or the displacement of human workers with computerized processes, through the lenses of labor and economics. However, the effects of automation extend far beyond the workplace. I examine automation as a fundamentally social technology, which helps engineer human relationships as technological feedback loops. In this paper, I focus on Control Data Corporation's proposals to computerize and automate the American Indian national education system during the 1970s, and critique the application of teaching machines as the displacement of human care and responsibility for maintaining a functioning educational system.

Josh KopinGraduate student Josh Kopin presented his paper, "A Cosmonaut in Palomar: Seeing, Showing, and Imagining In Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup" at the the International Comic Arts Forum. Josh sent us the following snapshot of his paper, and he has a longer description of the event here:

Although the Palomar of Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup comics is something of a backwater, a small town where news always seems to come late, Hernandez populates it with characters who have dreams that go beyond the town’s limitations, even as he centers their lives there. Although they could easily be trite or descend into kitsch, the stories set in Palomar are involved in defending the dignity of those characters and the legitimacy of what they want, both in the context of the small town and outside of it. Perhaps the most instructive of the many ways that Hernandez mounts this defense is the way he relates his characters’ imaginations to visual culture external to Palomar; this talk will discuss the ambivalent relationship that Palomar has with outside visual influence, beginning specifically with the moment in the 1985 story “Space Case” when Luba’s daughter Guadalupe, recently introduced to the mysteries of the cosmos, looks out her window and finds the churning sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In order to illuminate the relationship between seeing and imagination, in order to figure out of if Guadalupe sees the same thing we see, I will approach questions of seeing, showing, and imagination in Hernandez’s work by further investigating the music teacher Heraclio’s relationship with and attempted dissemination of high art, and the presence, in “An American in Palomar,” of American photographer Howard Miller, who embodies Palomar’s conflicted relationship with seeing and showing as he looks at the town and the town looks book at him. These investigations will show both that, for Hernandez, ambivalence, perhaps even doubt, is the key to dignity and legitimacy, and that in his supposedly beleaguered backwater we can find a metaphor for comics’ relationship to other kinds of art.

Jeannette VaughtPhD candidate Jeannette Vaught organized the panel "Beyond the Laboratory: Animals and the Culture of Scientific Knowledge" for the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Chicago. The following description of the panel and her contribution to it comes to us from Jeannette:

This panel looks at places where animals and science intersect beyond a strict research setting. Investigating material from across the globe, spanning the sixteenth century to the present, the panelists show how the use of animals in the production of scientific knowledge gets at larger questions about how scientific knowledge is used, what cultural anxieties it informs, and how animals continually shape the definition of science. Jeannette will join the panel, made up of scholars from a range of institutions, home disciplines, and career stages, to present her talk "Envisioning Living Tissue: Race, Animality, and Conflicts Over Vivisection in 1920s America." This paper considers the battle over vivisection in 1920s America, showing how arguments for and against the practice depended on problematic conceptions of race and animality.