Several extra-credit opportunities are listed below. Choose one, attend it, and write a one-page response (double spaced, 1 inch margins) to the event. This extra-credit paper is worth 5 points and should be turned in as a hard copy to the course instructor or teaching assistant. Please note, only one event per student will be considered for extra credit.
In your response paper, please be sure to:
- Provide the event title, speaker/artist, location, date.
- Reflect on this event and how it relates to our class.
Wednesday, May 13
Arab Feminist Activism: From the Arab Spring Revolutions to Diasporic Liberation Movements
Stice Feminist Lecturer of Social Justice Dr. Nadine Naber
Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies & Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
May 13, 7:00-8:30 pm
Kane Hall 210
This lecture brings anti-imperialist Arab feminist activism into conversation with transnational and women of color feminist scholarship that has established that the US war on terror developed more broadly through the restructuring of US domestic and foreign policy. This restructuring entailed an expansion of the conjoined heteropatriarchal, racist, and classist structures of the prison industrial complex (PIC) and the military industrial complex MIC. The lecture will focus on anti-imperialist Arab feminist activism within three periods of heightened political crisis for people of the Arab region: the second Palestinian intifada at the turn of the twenty-first century; the Arab spring revolutions of 2011; and the attacks on Arab American social movements of 2014-15. These periods provide important lessons for feminist scholars and activists working to craft strategies for confronting the heteropatriarchal forces of colonialism, war and racism and internal communal and familial forms of gender violence simultaneously. They also illustrate the need for furthering feminist research and practice that can account for political struggles that go beyond the territories of nation-states and are not bound by them. For instance, anti-imperialist feminist activism calls upon us to hold the sexist underpinnings of Israeli occupation or the US war on Iraq and the targeting of Palestinian feminists such as Rasmea Odeh in the US within the same spatial-temporal frame–without erasing the asymmetry in the balance of powers between women facing the bombs and the bulldozers in the Arab region and those who have been forced to belong to diasporas of empire in the US.
Sponsored by the Earl and Edna Stice Lectureship in the Social Sciences. Free Lecture — Open to the Public.
Thursday, May 14
Janice Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication, Northwestern University
May 14, 3:30-5:30 pm
HUB 145
Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral history interviews with former girl zine producers as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this presentation will explore the significance of the fact that dissident and non-conforming girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty years. Some were directly inspired by Riot Grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened across zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and at punk performances both in the 90s and later. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks. The fact of this social, material and temporal variability raises important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary genre and, correlatively, whether the girl zine explosion itself should be construed as secondary effect of the apparently pre-existing Riot Grrrl phenomenon. Tracing the different itineraries and trajectories that these zines followed over time raises additional questions about whether these two social occurrences should be understood as an event, a social movement, a discourse, a political intervention, or something else. In seeking to explore these issues, the paper will raise questions about how to think the recent history of feminism and its relationship to other “new social movements” at a time of significant economic, political, and technological change in the 1980s, 90s, and into the 21st century.
Janice Radway is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (UNC, 1984), which recently won the Fellows Book Award as a ‘classic’ in the field from the International Communication Association, and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire (UNC, 1997), as well as co-editor of American Studies: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2009) and Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1945, which is volume 4 of A History of the Book in America (UNC, 2014).
Reception to follow.
Co-Sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Textual Studies Program, the Department of Communication, and the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies.
Thursday, May 21
Culture, Art, and the Self with Anthropologist and Artist Ruth Behar
This is unique opportunity for UW students to join in conversation with anthropologist and artist Dr. Ruth Behar. Conversation will be facilitated by Dr. Monica Rojas-Stewart, Assistant Director of the Jackson School Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, a community artist, activist, and scholar. The discussion will address the questions, “How do you bring your full self into your academic work?” and “How can the arts help you do that?” Students are welcome to bring questions for Dr. Behar about her life and work. Free lunch will be provided.
RSVP required here.
May 18-22
Visual Ecologies and Solidarities (VES)
Click the link below for a full schedule of events. You can choose to attend one or more for the extra-credit option.
CHID is proud to be a co-sponsor of Visual Ecologies and Solidarities (VES), a week-long set of linked lectures, conversations, and panels on the power of art in the Americas. Linked to two CHID Study Abroad programs, VES brings artists and activists from Guatemala, Martinique and Peru to the University of Washington in an effort to emphasize the principles of reciprocity, critical engagement, and collaborative scholarship that guide CHID International. This group of accomplished artists provides invaluable opportunities for new connections and possibilities for cultural agency in the Americas.
Please join us for this exciting set of talks, conversations, and artistic production. And please forward widely! You can find more details for all events here.
Until May 17
Indigenous Beauty
Seattle Art Museum (Downtown)
The immense variety of Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection reflects the diversity of Native cultures. This superb exhibition offers more than great works of art and cultural artifacts—it is an invitation to explore other worlds.
Deeply engaged with cultural traditions and the land, indigenous artists over the centuries have used art to represent and preserve their ways of life. Even during the 19th and 20th centuries, when drastic changes were brought by colonization, artists brilliantly adapted their talents and used the new materials available to them to marvelous effect.
Until June 21
Indo-Persian Art at the Crossroads
Seattle Asian Art Museum (Volunteer Park)
Indo-Persian Art at the Crossroads presents works from SAM’s collection of art that illustrates continuities between Indian and Persian painting while highlighting the subcontinent’s place as a cultural crossroads between Europe and Asia. From the 11th century onward, northern India was ruled by a number of Muslim sultanates, culminating in the establishment of the Mughal dynasty in 1526, the most dominant Islamic empire in the history of the subcontinent.
May 2-Oct 4
Chiho Aoshima: Rebirth of the World
Seattle Asian Art Museum (Volunteer Park)
Welcome to the fantastic world of Chiho Aoshima. This might just be our future.
Who’s to say that as technology advances, as natural disasters rise, as the organic world blends with the manmade, that smartphones will not become smart buildings? That skyscrapers will not stand up and walk among mountains? That ghosts and spirits don’t already float through our world?
Aoshima’s work has undeniably dark images but a positive attitude. There’s no evidence of fear in her art. Her murals, digital prints, and drawings don’t want to escape from society or from the future. Instead, she seems to embrace all possibilities, including a world where the skeletons and ghosts reside alongside the rest of us.
Her work may look like a surreal fantasy. But ask Aoshima, and she’ll tell you she’s showing us the reality that our beautifully chaotic world may be hurtling toward.
When asked about her inspiration, Aoshima answered, “The evolution of human civilization is great; humankind thinks nature precious, but it is difficult for humankind and nature to coexist. I represented these two souls that cannot understand each other through the images of buildings and mountains.”
This is the future—and she’s prepared to live in it.
May 23-June 21
2015 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition
Henry Art Gallery, Upper Level Galleries (UW Campus)
Each year, the Henry presents the University of Washington’s School of Art + Art History + Design’s Master of Fine Arts and Master of Design thesis exhibition. Throughout their program, students consult with academic advisers and working artists to develop advanced techniques, expand concepts, and discuss critical issues. They emerge with a vision and direction for their own work, which is embodied in the pieces they have chosen to present.
The exhibition features the work of Maria Rose Adams, Matthew Schau Allen, Tim Coleman, Shaghayegh Ghassemian, Katherine Groesbeck, Scott Ichikawa, Morgan Mangiaruga, Coley Mixan, Ryan Moeck, Sarah Norsworthy, Krista Schoening, Abigail R. Steinem, Amanda C. Sweet, Zheng Wu, Lanxia (Summer) Xie, and Kun Xu.