This collaborative workshop between scholars at the University of Oslo and University of California, Berkeley, is a second follow-up, focused on preparing for publication an edited volume of papers from the initial workshop Oct 21-23, 2016, funded by a Peder Sather grant. The 2016 workshop focused on ritual and the other-than-human world in the context of environmental change. It was informed by new ontologies developed in the social sciences in the past two decades, and especially by theorists who are revisiting animism and materialism in radically new ways...
"Political Economies of Life in Early Modern France" proposes to hold a 2.5-day workshop on the Berkeley campus. Our subject is the emergence of "life" as a problem in the early modern period. This period witnessed the rise of demography and population statistics, the origin of modern economics in the specifically French science of "physiocracy" which argued that only agriculture created wealth and which focused attention on the physical state of the peasantry and away from the fearsome hunger of the urban poor. While many scholars and critics have noted the...
The project is based around the discovery of approximately two thousand hitherto-unknown texts by Ezra Pound: propaganda broadcasts written for and (in part) aired on Rome Radio during World War II. A primary purpose of the project is to prepare an edition of these texts (for Brill Publishers). In addition, there are supporting materials (for instance, correspondences), and a smaller edition of these will be prepared for Bloomsbury Academic. The project details a number of potential future avenues of research on this material, and a major international...
The project Face of Terror: The Social and Cultural Agency of Media in Globalized Environments aims to make a major contribution to the study of the social and cultural agency of media in globalized environments. In particular, the aim is to investigate media as providers of infrastructural conditions for the formation of identities and communities in present-day mediated and multicultural milieus. We approach these issues through a combined analysis of two problem areas where the framework conditions generated by media and communication technologies are of...
