As we recover from the social, economic, and political upheaval endured throughout the pandemic, fantasizing about futures beyond work has never been more urgent. Although feminists and domestic labor organizing have long advocated anti-work politics as a theoretical framework for the critique of capitalism, these conversations have largely missed the ways that sex workers and care workers have always integrated these politics as part of their strategies for getting by. Those excluded from the traditional categories of not only “labor” but also “human” and “citizen” are the ones who are, by necessity, imagining new political imaginaries and political subjectivities that can  account for their marginality. This working group weaves together perspectives on erotic exchange and feminized labor across geography (the U.S. south, Cuba, China, New York City, and Thailand), industry (porn work, domestic labor, rehabilitation work, full service sex work, and commercial BDSM), time (histories of slavery from19th century to the present), and discipline (history, anthropology, sociology, media studies, ethnic  studies, and poetry)

Some of the core research questions this working group will pursue include: 1) What anti-work practices and post-work futures have sexualized workers developed and how have these created solidarity and freedom? How do these perspectives demand rethinking contemporary neoliberal policy responses to migrant labor and commercial sex, as well as dominant assumptions around consent and legitimacy in sex work? 2) How does transactional  eroticism bear on questions of freedom, work agency, and legitimacy? How might the destabilizing effect of eroticism on transactional encounters open up new perspectives of freedom, work, agency, and legitimacy? How are these relations racialized and constituted through white anxieties of xenophobia and miscegenation? 

The symposium’s participants inquire into questions of anti-work in sex work across a vast diversity of experiences, ranging from Black full-service sex work in the Southern United States to Cuban jineteras who practice Santería to porn performers across the world to independent Professional Dominatrixes in New York City. The symposium will leverage the different methodologies and theoretical approaches spanning political theory, anthropology, history, sociology, and poetry and encompassing an interest in ethnography, oral history, community-based research methods and a vested interest in exposing archival silence.  

The envisioned outcome of this convening is to collectively write a special feature for Open Democracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery editorial platform on the themes covered. This initial convening will also assist our application for an NEH Collaborative Research Grant (due Dec. 2023) and a Russell Sage LOI for the Future of Work Research Program. Future proposals will aim to share our dialogue into different platforms including as an edited collection, but also as a digital exhibition that includes the contributions of artist and cultural organizer collaborators. 

Project Directors

• Elena Shih, Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University
• Emily Owens, David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

The field of Black internationalism has rapidly grown in the last several decades—with scholars in various fields exploring the interplay between national and global affairs and interrogating the diverse ways people of African descent have linked their political struggle with other nonwhite people across the globe. Most recently, scholars have worked to center women’s voices and experiences in the Black internationalist story. At the heart of this scholarship is a close gender analysis—not solely focusing on women’s ideas and activism but also thinking deeply about how women’s lives compare to and contrast with their male counterparts.

This symposium will feature new and groundbreaking scholarship in the field. It will bring together early-career and established scholars, graduate students, and independent scholars working on various aspects of Black women’s internationalism from the 19th century to the present day. Presentations will reflect the geographical breadth of the African Diaspora including Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Presenters and attendees will evaluate the state of the field and envision its future–theoretically, thematically, and methodologically.
 

Project Directors

Keisha N. Blain, Professor of Africana Studies and History, Brown University

Shaun Armstead, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Africana Studies, Brown University

Collaborators:

Ashley Everson, Ph.D. student, Africana Studies

Kiana Knight, Ph.D. student, Africana Studies

Katharina Weygold, Ph.D. student, American Studies

Mickell Carter, Ph.D. student, Africana Studies

In the last half century the categories of fiction and autobiography have been destabilized by a series of practices that center a more and more loosely identifiable first person. Classic forms of fiction and autobiography appear increasingly marginalized in favor of “creative nonfiction,” “auto-fiction,” “auto-theory,” and “critical fabulation.”

Overlapping with this literary trend is a troubling of the distinction between truth and fiction, evident in phenomena as different as the credibility of documentary and mediatized fact and challenges to authentic creation by artificial intelligence. It might be argued that the convergence of auto-inflected writing and fictionalized fact signal an epistemic shift as significant as Descartes’s thinking “I.”

The “Why Me?” project will convene a two-day colloquium that assembles writers and thinkers to examine the intellectual and epistemological impact of a reliance on first-person narration, or relation, that operates on the shifting sands of both subject formation and objective reality. Additional activities will include a subsequent series of seminars involving Brown faculty and students from History, Political Science, English (including the Non-Fiction Writing Program), the Data Science Initiative, and Literary Arts that build on the colloquium by analyzing the relation between first person writing and the crisis of documented fact.

Project Directors

• Timothy Bewes is Professor of English at Brown
• David Wills is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown

Scholarship has established that the experience of pain is culturally defined. Faculty members involved in this project seek to investigate how the treatment of pain is equally embedded in the social, economic, and political contexts that shape individual experiences of illness and institutional structures of care. Admission to a hospital draws a patient away from familiar remedies and substitutes new — and sometimes dangerous — pharmacology. Increasingly, there is limited overlap between the patient’s medicine cabinet and the provider’s formulary. With efforts to reduce opiate prescription alongside documented bias in prescription rates, there is a renewed urgency to understand pain pharmacology across historical, spatial, and cultural borders.

This research group proposes a journal club and lecture series that will bring together humanists, social scientists, and allied health professionals. Monthly meetings and public events will generate interdisciplinary discussions and a range of potential outcomes with opportunity for impact in the university, the hospital system. and the diverse communities of Rhode Island.

Project website: https://prescriptionpadpolitics.com/

Project Directors
    •    William Page, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, Brown University
    •    Kim Adams, American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow, Stanford University, Brown University
    •    Fred Schiffman, Sigal Family Professor of Humanistic Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Brown University
    •    Sarah Williams, Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Brown University

The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project will serve as a one-year digital humanities exploration of the visual and sonic possibilities for collecting, organizing, and presenting oral testimonies of women and girls who rap, DJ, and make beats. In turn, these findings will be used to support The Keeper Project, an ongoing research initiative led by hip hop artists, Akua Naru and Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka SAMMUS), as well as eminent hip hop scholar Tricia Rose, Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown. This project calls attention to the systematic erasure of women and girls from popular and scholarly accounts of hip hop artistry and innovation; and challenges these outcomes through the presentation of a rich counter-narrative, devised from careful documentation of their life stories, recorded works, headlines, hashtags, and notably, their absences. 

The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project will culminate in a public gathering, live music performance, and presentation in the spring semester of 2023.

Project Director
Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Mellon Gateway Postdoctoral Fellow, Music, Brown University

Collaborators
    •    Akua Naru, Hip Hop artist, producer, activist, and scholar; Race & Media Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA), Brown University
    •    Tricia Rose, Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University
    •    Ashley Champagne, Director, Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University
    •    Karen Eberhart, Head of Collections Services and Metadata, John Hay Library, Brown University
    •    Cody Carvel, Digital Fellow, Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University
    •    Student Researchers

This symposium, scheduled to take place over two days in October 2019, will involve Brown and visiting faculty in creating a focused scholarly discussion about the position of religion and spirituality in black American music. While musicians, critics, and listeners have often asserted the centrality of religion and spirituality in black American music, discursive reticence among humanities scholars often limits discussion of the subject beyond this acknowledgement. The symposium will encourage discussion of questions possibly underlying this reticence: Do the humanities have a secular bias that does not sit well with questions of belief or faith? Is religion understood as a personal, private matter with no proper place in public-sphere discussion? Is the lack of substantive discussion an outcome of a drive to preserve, protect, and mark off a sphere of cultural experience and solidarity from the white gaze?

Beyond probing the limits of prior discussions, the symposium will bring together scholars from different disciplines, with specialists in the genres of jazz, gospel, blues, soul, funk, and hip hop, to discuss six topics. Those are: 1) the evolving history of the black church; 2) the rhetoric of “spirituality” vs. “religion” among musicians; 3) double-consciousness and the duality of “public” vs. “church” musical selves; 4) musical practices that originate in church music and can be found across genres; 5) the prime value given to affective transfer and audience participation in black music traditions; and 6) the threshold between secular and sacred in African-American discourses about music.

Project Director

Dana Gooley, Music, Brown University

Co-organizer

Charrise Barron, Religious Studies, Africana Studies, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University

Participants

HOME, FOR NOW., is a yearlong new play development project that will culminate in a public performance. The project takes its title from a play written by Brown undergraduate student Danielle Emerson, who is a member of the Dine tribal nation, and aims to develop a contemporary indigenous play script and performance informed by indigenous knowledge production, Dine practices and aesthetics, and indigenous theatre dramaturgy. Set on the Navajo Reservation, the play begins with an unexpected homecoming and sets into motion conflict over secrets and resentments among four siblings. The story interrogates intergenerational trauma and the cultural tensions between Christianity and traditional beliefs; western individualism and duty to family; colonial assimilation and Dine lifeways.

Over the course of two semesters, collaborators including faculty from Africana Studies, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, American Studies, a visiting scholar from the University of Central Oklahoma, and student research assistants will engage in research and script development and use the Rites and Reason Page 2 of 3 Theatre’s Research to Performance Method to systematically merge research, table readings, and public readings to prepare for a public presentation of the new work.

Once completed, the HOME, FOR NOW. script will be made available on NewPlayExchange.org, giving it an accessible online presence that will encourage future productions of the play. The larger aim of the project is to launch a permanent and thriving indigenous theatre on campus in partnership with the Rites and Reason Theatre and increasing community-building on campus while supporting the mission of the Native American Indigenous Studies Program at Brown.

Project Director

Sarah dAngelo, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

Collaborators

• Lisa Biggs, Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre, Brown University
• Carolyn Dunn, University of Central Oklahoma
• Adrienne Keene, American Studies, Brown University
• Elmo Terry-Morgan, Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre, Brown University

This project, centered on four collaborative, interdisciplinary workshops, will be a year-long study bringing together two trajectories of migration—of objects and people—which are usually studied separately by scholars from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Whereas art and objects from the global south and former European colonies migrate to major institutions and are subject to professional care, scrupulous documentation, and generous hospitality in museums, archives, and displays, human migrants who choose to or are forced to leave their homes do not have or cannot obtain the legal documents that would enable them to access most kinds of care and hospitality.

The project aims to examine flows of migrants as one inevitable offshoot of the destruction of colonized worlds and the extraction of its “best pieces” of art. While the millions of objects taken from colonized lands are now handled by museums, archives, and libraries according to modern principles and procedures of classification, migrants are also categorized and classified in ways ranging from “undocumented” to “asylum seekers” to “illegals.” The project recognizes the institutional discourse of salvation and preservation, applied to art and objects, as one of the founding principles of imperialism.

Through four workshops: Plunder, Art Making and Institutions; Gendered Approach to Restitution: Structural Amnesia andTrauma; Using Big Data to Intervene in Museums and Migrations; and Patterns of Restitution and Communities, Brown faculty members and visiting scholars will explore how scholarship can participate in changing the historical and theoretical landscape in which people and objects caught in different patterns of migrations can be perceived adequately. The project also seeks to intervene in the discourse on restitution.

Project Director

Ariella Azoulay, Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Collaborators

• Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology, Modern Greek Studies, Brown University
• Vazira Zamindar, History, Brown University
• Achille Mbembe, University of Witwatersrand
• Susan Slyomovics, UCLA Tamara Lanier, plaintiff, Lanier v. Harvard College
• Benjamin Crump, civil rights attorney
• Felwine Sarr, Universite Gaston Berger, Senegal
• Bénédicte Savoy, Technische Universität Berlin

This project will bring together interdisciplinary humanities scholars across campus to consider the topic of migration from a person-centered perspective. With the aim of moving beyond the two opposed discursive frameworks that reduce all migrants to a threat, on the one hand, and a symbol of universal right to freedom of movement, on the other, the project will gather faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students for monthly workshops and meetings. It will also hold a year-long speaker series consisting of two fall and two spring lectures for the campus community that highlights the work of scholars external to Brown who conduct narrative and person-centered migration research.

These initial activities would inform a potential University initiative on migration – for example a migration studies initiative – that would convene scholars around this topic over multiple years. The collaborators’ proposed activities would aid in developing the infrastructure necessary to do so.

Faculty Co-Directors

• Kevin Escudero, American Studies, Brown University
•  Andrea Flores, Education

Brown University Collaborators

• Dixa Ramirez, American studies and English, Brown University
• Zhenchao Qian, Sociology, Brown University

A two-day long symposium--and related activities—devoted to the topic of “Neurodiversity: Science, Politics, Culture,” to be held at Brown in April of 2019. The symposium will serve as an occasion to gather together a diverse group of speakers and participants—from both within and beyond the Brown community—who are addressing some of the complex social, cultural, and political dimensions of neurodiversity from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Neurodiversity is a term originated by autistic self-advocates seeking to de-pathologize autism and other forms of neurological, mental, and cognitive difference. Working in partnership with a number of campus units from across divisions—including (potentially) the Departments of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and American Studies, the Pembroke Center, the Cogut Center, the Brain Initiative for Brain Science—the symposium will explore the wide-ranging implications of this concept for understanding the science, politics, and culture of neurological disability and difference.

Presented in conjunction with a seminar that Leon J. Hilton (Assistant Professor, TAPS) will be offering as part of his Spring 2019 Cogut Faculty Fellowship, the symposium will provide important opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students to help with the organization and production of a major academic event. The symposium will also provide a significant opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. While acknowledging the historically complex relationship between biomedical, social scientific, and lay/activist knowledges and practices surrounding these issues, it is our hope that this symposium might provide opportunities for truly inter- and cross-disciplinary exchange, across a range of constituencies and communities. Our list of possible keynote speakers includes Lydia Brown, Steve Silberman, Melanie Yergeau.and Laurent Mottron (see bios, below).

Finally, it is our hope that this symposium might provide a galvanizing event to jump-start future Disability Studies programs and initiatives on campus. With the support of a Pembroke Center Seed Grant, we would hope to explore avenues for publishing the proceedings of the symposium as well as plant the seeds for the formation of a Disability Studies working group that would bring together faculty and students working on issues related to disability and neurodiversity from across the university. Both neurodiversity and disability studies are rapidly growing areas of intellectual inquiry at Brown and indeed nationally; the support of a Pembroke Seed Grant would position Brown to become a leader in this developing field of research.

Faculty Collaborators

• Leon J. Hilton, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (Project Director)
• Nick Ramos, Africana Studies and Cogut Center

Doctoring in Years 1 and 2 at Alpert Medical School is a two-year, five-course, required pre-clinical program designed to teach the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors of the competent, ethical, and humane physician. In the classroom, students work in small groups with an MD and social and behavioral scientist (SBS) faculty pair, as well as standardized patients to learn medical interviewing, physical examination, oral presentation, written documentation, counseling, and professionalism skills.

Over the last several years, students in the Doctoring Program have begun to explore themes in the classroom related to structural competency. The goal of introducing our students to these themes early in their medical education is to encourage them to recognize how social, economic, and political conditions produce health inequalities, and to recognize the ways that institutions, neighborhoods conditions, market forces, public policies, and health care delivery systems shape symptoms and diseases.

Doctoring faculty and students recognize that classroom discussions on themes such as LGBTQ patient care, interpersonal violence, explanatory models of illness, cross-cultural communication, and social determinants of health, are a crucial part of the Doctoring curriculum. However, what students glean from these discussions is often limited in scope and depth by individual instructor knowledge and time constraints, often resulting in some students having only a superficial understanding of these topics’ intersectionality and complexity. In addition, traditional methods of teaching biological science-based curricula do not always translate into effective modalities for teaching social science disciplines.

The project is a result of both faculty and student feedback that student learning in the Doctoring Program would be enhanced by a hands-on experience in the community that highlights the role providers can play in recognizing social justice and meeting the needs of all patients. By offering medical students increased exposure to diverse populations in settings where patients receive services, we aim to have our trainees approach patient care with increased empathy and understanding. Hence, this pilot study aims to answer the following research question: Do experiential learning opportunities in the community enhance pre-clinical medical students’ structural awareness and empathy?

Ultimately, through knowledge of and exposure to underserved communities in Providence, the aim is to train future physicians who are better prepared to identify and analyze relationships between structural factors and health outcomes, and who are able to demonstrate a higher understanding of structural and cultural competency in their approach to patient care. Once partners are identified and students are oriented to the pilot project, students will choose three out of four experiential sessions in the community including, but not limited to, the following themes: LGBTQ healthcare, interpersonal violence, end-of-life care, immigrant/refugee health, disability, health of incarcerated populations, homelessness and health, etc.. The workshop will give students the opportunity to engage in dialogue on structural awareness topics that they explored during the previous 8 weeks, as well as ask questions to their peers and small group facilitators in a safe learning environment.

Faculty Collaborators:

• Steven Rougas, MD, MS, FACEP (project co-director), Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medical Science and Director of the Doctoring Program
• Julia Noguchi, MA, MPH (project co-director), Assistant Director of the Doctoring Program and an Assistant Professor of Medical Science
• Kristina Monteiro, PhD, Director of Assessment and Evaluation in the Office of Medical Education and Assistant Professor of Medical Science
• The Reverend Janet M. Cooper Nelson, Chaplain of the University, Director of the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life and faculty member at Brown
• Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, JD, MA, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the Alpert Medical School and of Health Services, Policy and Practice

A few years ago, a motion-detection device for a popular videogame platform went to market with the promotional tagline “You are the controller!” Microsoft promised players that this new camera-based technology would recognize and respond to their every move, allowing for full-body gameplay experiences. But as players with Afro hairstyles or other "big hair" silhouettes soon discovered, the Kinect had not been calibrated to make sense of some of the bodies that entered its frame. If it locked onto their figures at all, it created a distorted map of their moving joints, identifying their hair silhouettes as disproportionately large heads and consequently misinterpreting the scale relationships among their other body parts. Meanwhile, other emerging surveillance technologies have no such trouble identifying black and brown bodies—though their recognition is as dehumanizing as the Kinect’s blindness, geared to serve the racial profiling needs of the carceral state.

Motion-detecting game systems, networked surveillance cameras, interactive robots running "affective computing" software, and virtual reality platforms are all technical interfaces that choreograph human bodies and hinge on forms of differential recognition. Machines are increasingly designed to identify humans and parse their intentions through algorithm-driven analysis of distinctive gestures, physical features, and vocal utterances. At the same time, these technologies often rely on universalizing assumptions: they conjure normative human bodies, liberal subjects promised sovereign control over their interactions with machines. The empathy hype around new virtual reality experiences likewise relies on seldom-interrogated ideas about sameness and difference: for instance, the idea that virtually occupying another kind of body might generate flashes of visceral understanding of another’s experience, magically transcending difference, and encouraging pleasurable claims of “I know exactly how you feel”—always at a safe distance.

The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) was founded by Co-Project Director Sydney Skybetter in 2015 to address exactly such critical and inter-disciplinary complexity. CRCI aims to meaningfully engage expertise from the arts, sciences, and humanities, as well as individuals representing the widest possible spectrum of ability, gender identity and cultural heritage. The programmatic intention is to scaffold invited participants’ equal sharing of their vast and differing expertise. Thus, instead of offering hierarchic academic programming, CRCI facilitates a “flipped” convening wherein participants are guided to discuss matters of greatest consequence to them, with interlocutors found on site.

For this new iteration of the CRCI conference, we propose to bring together scholars, designers, artists, and engineers working across technologies of choreography, control, and recognition to investigate how sameness and difference are functioning as organizing principles for choreographic interfaces—and how we might productively intervene in the ongoing development of these technologies. We are particularly interested in counter-choreographies that exceed the capacities of machinic perception; strategies for developing virtual reality experiences that engender challenging, unresolved engagements with various forms of difference; and theories of interaction that rely on the messy trial-and-error process of developing intimacy rather than the clean, controlled production of empathy-at-at-a-distance. We will be inviting 30 to 40 attendees to participate, most of whom will be self-funded. We hope to offer travel and stipend support to a core group of 8–12 participants who will play a leadership role in facilitating small-group discussions, take part in a public roundtable, and present separate public lectures and/or visit courses in the few days leading up to the conference (including visiting a 1000-level seminar course, “Digital Media and Virtual Performance,” that Miller and Skybetter will be co-teaching that semester). In selecting this core group we are particularly interested in the perspectives of those who have personal, professional, and political reasons to be skeptical of techno-utopian promises of universal recognition—i.e., those pursuing multidisciplinary work grounded in the theory and practice of intersectional embodied difference.

The conference will be designed not only to catalyze further collaborations among faculty and students based at Brown, but to seed and nourish a network of individuals strategically placed to make a transformative difference in the design of new choreographic interfaces and their subsequent enculturation through artistic practice, popular entertainment platforms, and industrial and governmental applications. We have tentatively scheduled the conference for March 9–11, 2018.

Funded Participants

We aim to invite between four and six funded participants from the Hyphen-Labs and Deep Lab collectives. Depending on the level of funding we can raise, we hope to be able to support presentation of some of their recent work in Granoff Center studio spaces—for instance, the Hyphen-Labs virtual reality experience Neurospeculative Afrofeminism, recently featured at Sundance (see http:// www.sundance.org/projects/neurospeculative-afrofeminism). The descriptions and biographical information below are drawn from each collective’s or individual’s website, with minor adaptations.

Hyphen-Labs is an international team of women of color working at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Through our global vision and unique perspectives we are driven to create meaningful and engaging ways to explore emotional, human-centered and speculative design. In the process we challenge conventions and stimulate conversations, placing collective needs and experiences at the center of evolving narratives. The makers of Neurospeculative Afrofeminism include Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, an engineer, artist, and researcher (co-founder of Hyphen-Labs); Ashley Baccus-Clark, a molecular and cellular biologist and 3 multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, and systems of belief; Ece Tankal, an architect, moving image maker and multidisciplinary designer operating at the intersection of art and human interaction; and Nitzan Bartov, an architect, game designer and artist whose work is a mashup of architecture, spatial storytelling, and pop culture.

Deep Lab is a collaborative group of cyberfeminist researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers that research privacy, surveillance, code, art, social hacking, race, capitalism, anonymity, and the infrastructures of the 21st century. Members of Deep Lab are engaged in ongoing critical assessments of contemporary digital culture, and work together to exploit the potential for creative inquiry lying dormant in the deep web. Deep Lab was founded by artist Addie Wagenknecht, who holds a Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and has previously held fellowships at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City, Culture Lab UK, Institute HyperWerk for Postindustrial Design Basel (CH), and The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Other prominent members of Deep Lab include Simone Browne (bio below), Kate Crawford, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, a Visiting Professor at MIT's Center for Civic Media, and a Senior Fellow at NYU's Information Law Institute and Maryam al-Khawaja, a Bahraini human rights activist.

We also hope to invite the following individuals based at academic institutions, spanning a broad range of disciplines and career stages:

Sarah Bay-Cheng is Chair and Professor of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College, where she teaches theater history and theory, dramatic literature, and intermedia performance. Her research focuses on the intersections among theater, performance, and media including cinema history, social media, and digital technologies in performance. Recent publications include Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010) as well as essays in Theater, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Theatre Journal, among others. She currently co-edits the Palgrave book series, Avant-Gardes in Performance with Martin Harries and is a co-host for On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies podcast. Bay-Cheng frequently lectures internationally and in 2015 was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Simone Browne began her faculty position in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, where she teaches and researches surveillance studies and black diaspora studies. Her first book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, examines surveillance with a focus on transatlantic slavery, biometric technologies, branding, airports and creative texts. She is an Executive Board member of HASTAC. She is also a member of Deep Lab, a feminist collaborative composed of artists, engineers, hackers, writers, and theorists. Along with Katherine McKittrick and Deborah Cowen she is co-editor of Errantries, a new series published by Duke University Press.

Ashley Ferro-Murray is a curator and scholar whose work investigates the intersections between movement, digital culture, and interactive technology. She is the curator of theater and dance at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. Previously, FerroMurray was the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Time Global Fellow at New York City’s public arts organization, Creative Time. Ferro-Murray is at work on a book project titled Choreography in the Digital Era: Dancing the 4 Cultural Difference of Technology. This project charts international artists who make space for feminist, queer, disability, and postcolonial perspectives in the engineering industry, global networks, biomedicine, and borderlands.

Amy LaViers is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab where she develops robotic algorithms inspired by movement and dance theory. She is the recipient of a 2015 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). She has worked in the area of advanced manufacturing, through an industryuniversity consortium, the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM), defense, and healthcare, and forged interdisciplinary ties with the UVA and UIUC Dance Programs and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, where she completed a Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA) in 2016. She completed her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech where she was the recipient of the ECE Graduate Teaching Excellence Award and a finalist for the CETL/BP Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. Her dissertation included a live performance exploring the concepts of style she developed there. Her research began at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in dance and a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Whitney Pow is a doctoral candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University, where she studies queerness, embodiment, phenomenology, surveillance, interface, affect, and video games. She was a 2014-2016 research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, and has presented her work as a game designer and scholar at the NYU Different Games Conference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, the Console-ing Passions conference, the Embodiment and Intersectionality in Games Studies Workshop at the University of Illinois Chicago, and the Queerness in Games Conference at the University of Southern California. She regularly speaks on panels about race, queerness, gender, video games and social media, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Video Game Art Reader, a peer-reviewed journal focused on video games as art through history, theory, criticism and practice. She is a former contributing editor and writer at Autostraddle.

Research Group Participant Bios

Kiri Miller is an ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on participatory culture, popular music, interactive digital media, and virtual/visceral performance practices. She is Associate Professor of Music at Brown, with additional faculty affiliations with American Studies, the Center for Race and Ethnicity in America, and Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Her latest book, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media (Oxford, 2017), investigates how motion-sensing interfaces teach choreography, cultivate new embodied experiences of popular music, and stage domestic surveillance as intimate recognition. Her previous monographs are Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford, 2012) and Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Illinois, 2008). She has published articles in Ethnomusicology, New Media & Society, Game Studies, American Music, the Journal of American Folklore, and Oral Tradition, among other journals. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the American Council of Learned Societies. Miller's course offerings at Brown include Musical Youth Cultures, Digital Media and Virtual Performance, Black Sound, Introduction to Ethnomusicology, Music and Technoculture, and Ethnography of PopularMusic.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. His dances have been performed around the country at such venues as The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Boston Center for the Arts, Jacob’s Pillow and The Joyce Theater. He has consulted on issues of cultural change and technology for The National Ballet of Canada, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, New York University and The University of Southern California, among others. A sought-after speaker, he lectures on everything from dance history to cultural futurism, most recently at Harvard University, South by Southwest Interactive, TEDx, Saatchi and Saatchi, Dance/USA, NYU and MVR5. He is a Public Humanities Fellow and Professor at Brown University, where he researches the problematics of human computer interfaces and mixed reality systems. He is the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI), which convenes ethnographers, anthropologists, speculative designers and performing artists to discuss the choreography of the Internet of Things. He produces shows at Joe’s Pub, SteelStacks and OBERON with DanceNOW[NYC], has served as a Grant Panelist for the National Endowment of the Arts, is a Curatorial Advisor for Fractured Atlas’ Exponential Creativity Fund, and is the winner of a RISCA Fellowship in Choreography from the State of Rhode Island.

Sarah Wilbur is a choreographer and dance scholar and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at Brown University for the 2016-2017 academic year. She received her M.F.A in Dance and her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance Studies from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. She researches infrastructure and dance performance in a US context with particular attention to how the practical and corporeal dynamics of institutional belonging shape opportunities in the dance field. Her research areas include dance studies, performance studies, cultural studies, social theory, political philosophy, U.S. art/cultural policy, cultural materialism, cultural production, socially-engaged performance, institutional ethnography, and theories of institutionality and corporeality. In addition to preparing a book manuscript based on her ethnographic and archival research on policymaking practices and relations in the Dance Program at the US National Endowment for the Arts, Sarah is currently at work on essays about regimes of competition in US dance funding (Oxford Handbook on Dance & Competition), and on rationales for infrastructural ethnography as a dance-based analytic (Futures of Dance Studies Collection/Oxford U Press)

Animal Studies is an emerging field that supports exploration of interspecies relations and interdisciplinary investigation into non-human animality as a critical site of difference. Extending across the creative arts, humanities, social sciences, and life sciences, the “question of the animal” entails a revisiting of boundaries assumed to separate humans from other species. Questions of rights and ethics are prevalent, but the attention to the animal as life form informs a wide range of intellectual projects across the disciplines. These include approaches to the animal as wildlife, companion species, scientific specimen, object of curiosity, exploitation or collection, industrial “produce,” literary and aesthetic figure/theme/form, ecological actor/indicator, and vulnerable (or endangered) subject.

The growing academic interest in animals in recent years has emerged partly as a response to an increased awareness of ecological interconnectedness, threats to biodiversity and natural habitats, and concerns relating to the ethical treatment of and meaningful coexistence with animals. Leading scholars across the disciplines have converged around the necessity of rethinking the terms of humanist and scientific inquiry. Scholars are considering the ways in which species difference has historically and conceptually been linked to the production of other forms of material, political, cultural, and symbolic difference, including those of gender, race, and class.

Faculty members participating in the newly formed Animal Studies Working Group at Brown University share an interest in all of these questions with particular emphasis on those that favor a thinking of animality as what may trouble preconceived notions of human sovereignty, autonomy, and knowledge; that is, as what may complicate humancentered orientations of historical, cultural, and scientific narratives. Our symbol the Geo Bird, a figure from an Aztec clay seal, represents our broad global and chronological interests.

Seed grant funding will support monthly discussion groups, a research assistant, guided field trips, co-sponsorship of the 2016-17 Animal Lecture Series, and bringing a faculty member from another university with an established Animal Studies program to Brown to consult about programmatic and curricular development.

• Nancy Jacobs, Associate Professor, History (project director)
• Palmira Brummett, Visiting Professor, History
• Constance Crawford, Adjunct Lecturer, Theater Arts and Performance Studies
• Thalia Field, Professor, Literary Arts
• Iris Montero, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities
• Thangam Ravindranathan, Associate Professor, French Studies
• Rebecca Schneider, Professor, Theater Arts and Performance Studies
• Andrea Simmons, Professor, Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences
• Ada Smailbegovic, Assistant Professor, English

One of the great strengths of the humanities at Brown is the cross-disciplinary engagement of its faculty and graduate studies with the legacy of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded during the interwar period, it consisted of dissidents who did not feel at home in the capitalist, fascist, or communist systems of the time.

Writers and thinkers from the Frankfurt School such as Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer continue to inform discussions of critical theory, literary studies, modern media, as well as critical approaches to gender, class, and race, both in and beyond German Studies. Scholarship and translation work of Brown Faculty, such as Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schestag, and Kevin McLaughlin, play a critical 3 role in the dissemination and study of Frankfurt School thought in the English-speaking world.

To build upon the shared concern of Brown’s humanities faculty with this lineage of modern thinkers and to create a larger forum for the diversity of perspectives brought to bear upon it, this project entails the organization of an international conference on the critical question of what it means to inherit the contested legacy of the Frankfurt School. Questions to be considered at the conference include the problems of intellectual and cultural inheritance, as well as issues of transmission, survival and reception. The conference will address the problem of wishing to inherit a critical legacy without knowing how; it will also devote itself to the threat of unreadable legacies.

Seed grant funds will be used to support a three-day conference consisting of presentations by Brown faculty and graduate students from various departments, as well as distinguished speakers from a broad range of national and international institutions. The aim of the conference is to initiate scholarly exchanges among Brown faculty and graduate students and senior scholars from some of the most prominent universities in Brazil, Europe, and North America. The group plans to publish a collection of essays based on the proceedings, written by scholars from a variety of disciplines including critical theory, film studies, history, literary studies, and philosophy.

• Kristina Mendicino, Assistant Professor, German Studies (co-director)

• Gerhard Richter, Professor German Studies and Comparative Literature, Chair of German Studies (co-director)

Lissa (Still Time) is a narrative adaptation of original field research by Sherine Hamdy in Egypt about kidney and liver disease and research by Coleman Nye about breast cancer in the United States. The narrative is focused on two strong women characters at the center of critical life-or-death decisions involving medical technologies, global health inequalities, 4 and political revolution.

Seed grant funds will help to present the research and story in three ways. 1) A graphic novel, to be published through the University of Toronto Press and through Anne Brakenbury’s ethnographic series, will feature two fictionalized characters based on indepth sustained ethnographic and interview research. 2) A digital platform, hosted by the Brown Digital Scholarship Initiative, will explore more deeply the conceptual themes of the graphic novel, including bioethical conundrums, the political economy of global health, and the uneven effects of biomedical technologies, religious difference, and political instability against the backdrop of the Arab Spring. 3) A documentary film will present the process of the collaboration including a research trip to Egypt and the development of the characters.

The project seeks to explore questions about the following issues:

• The vulnerability of people to health/disease in the context of poor health governance, particularly with deregulation of manufacturing and toxic waste disposal
• The problematic of women’s health and bodily autonomy to their reproductive viability
• The problems of over-treatment and iatrogenesis (treatment-induced illness)
• How societies wager life-and-death decisions in the context of restrained resources
• The problems of commodifying health and the body, privatization and patenting of scientific information, including the BRCA gene, and the consequences of this for individual patients and global health more generally

The project aims to establish a lasting collaboration between Brown, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Watson Institute, and the Pembroke Center for the publication of visually rich scholarship and research. It seeks to translate academic ideas about gender, sexual autonomy, religion, ethics, and politics into accessible and emotionally resonant stories about characters with whom readers can identify. In this way, the project aims to present important interventions for rethinking the politics of global health in an easily accessible format that invites a wide readership.

• Sherine Hamdy, Associate Professor, Anthropology (project director)
• Alice Coleman Nye, Assistant Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University
• Paul Karasik, Instructor, Illustration, Rhode Island School of Design
• Francesco Dragone, Independent Filmmaker
• Caroline Brewer, student, Illustration, Rhode Island School of Design
• Sarula Bao, student, Illustration, Rhode Island School of Design

This project brings together faculty from across the university to form a working group to develop and present research on the history, representations, manifestations and presences of war. In parallel with the Pembroke Center’s four-year research initiative on “Thinking War Differently: A Collaborative Critical Project,” the working group is a forum for faculty from different disciplines to establish and explore common theoretical and methodological questions. Most of Brown’s humanities and social sciences departments have at least one faculty member whose research addresses an aspect of war.

This working group will bring together Brown faculty and graduate students from a wide range of disciplines to study different meanings and uses of the term ‘war,’ to explore its different aspects and modes of articulation and to question the role wars play in modern politics – including in post-colonial processes in the form of “liberation wars.” Special attention will be paid to different forms of opposition to war, that is, to pacifist and suffragist movements, to their writings and events, to civil protest and actions, to anarchist gathering, feminist-socialists opposition and various cultures of hypochondria and their uses as means to evade the draft, cultures that produced figures such as the absconder, runaway, fugitive, defector, renegade, turncoat or traitor. The working group will explore a variety of visual and textual material in studying the role of technologies in the perpetuation of wars, the political and economic interests 2 in determining war end(s) and beginning(s), women’s role and participation in wars and their subordination through rape as well as narratives and figures of war over time.

Thanks to seed grant funding from the Pembroke Center, the faculty working group will be a venue for interested faculty and graduate students to share their research. It will meet once a month, with one or two faculty members and/or graduate students presenting works in progress, informally, at each meeting. The project will culminate with a guest lecture, identified according to the interests of the group.

• Esther Whitfield, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies (project co-director)
• Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture (project codirector)

A recent study published in Nature analyzed over 5,400,000 peer-reviewed articles in the natural and social sciences published from 2008 to 2012, in journals around the world (Lariviere et al. 2013). They found that articles with women authors (whether sole authors or co-authors) are cited less frequently than those without. These findings on gender disparities in citation are consistent with the main trend of research that has been done since the 1970s on the nature and extent of gender’s impact on the production of knowledge and the evaluation of scholars.

The discipline of anthropology is an increasingly female field in terms of the production of PhDs and the make-up of university faculty rosters in the discipline (the American Anthropological Association membership is now 64 percent female). Indeed, the Nature study cited above found the gender disparity in citations to be most pronounced in the most male-dominated fields like computer science, engineering, and math. The editor of the American Anthropologist, the discipline’s flagship journal, examined the pattern of citation to his journal’s articles for the 3 decade of the 2000s in a recent article (Chibnik 2014). Using a very basic research design, he interpreted his results to indicate an absence of gender bias in citation, at least for this set of articles.

This research project will examine a wider array of four disciplinary journals, code them for the subdisciplinary and topical foci of each article, and otherwise follow the lead of a well-designed study of gender citation patterns in the field of International Relations (Maliniak, Powers, and Walter 2013). Funding will be used to pay Brown graduate students to undertake coding and data analysis of hundreds of articles. Seed grant funds will also support a workshop with project team members as well as other Brown faculty.

• Catherine Lutz, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies (project co-director)
• Matthew Gutmann, Professor of Anthropology; Director of the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes; Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies (project co-director)
• Susan Short, Professor of Sociology; Faculty Associate, Population Studies and Training Center (project co-director)
• Jessica Katzenstein, Graduate Student, Anthropology
• Virginia Dominguez, Professor of Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; former president American Anthropological Association

Freedom’s Cost positions children and youth at the center of the post World War II African American movements for civil rights by addressing activism’s personal and communal costs. Blending civil rights movement histories with the burgeoning fields in trauma studies, the project adds dimension to the heroic narrative, exposing complicated and long-term realities for many young people. The black freedom struggle and the fight for equality often utilized the language of war. Activists saw themselves as foot soldiers in a nonviolent movement army against 4 formidable state-sanctioned powers. Therefore Freedom’s Cost involves a rethinking of activism, mental health, and loss, through the interdisciplinary lenses of race, childhood studies, trauma studies, psychology, memory, and the literature of war and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Seed grant funds will bring together veterans to tell their stories alongside health care providers who themselves are veterans and practitioners. Held on the Brown campus, the gathering will include a closed meeting of participants and a public symposium to allow Brown’s students to meet and hear from the participants. The seed grant will also support a research assistantship for Hassani Scott ’17, who will participate in the Brown-Tougaloo exchange in the Fall of 2015 and will work directly with Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.

• Françoise N. Hamlin, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies (project director)
• William Beardslee, Gardner Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Director, Preventative Intervention Project at Judge Baker Children’s Center
• David J. Dennis, Sr., Founder and Director, Southern Initiative Algebra Project
• Cynthia Goode Palmer, Executive Director, Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Tougaloo College
• Hassani Scott ’17, concentrator in Africana Studies
• Robert Smith, President and Chief Executive Officer, Central Mississippi Health Services, Inc.
• Hollis Watkins, President, Southern Echo, Inc.

In recent years, scholars in many disciplines have produced an outpouring of work on the  histories and societies of indigenous people in the Andes (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia  and Chile). This recent interest is due in part to the extraordinary growth of indigenous  ethnic mobilization and political parties in the Andean world, but goes far beyond that  subject into the study of history, anthropology, sociology, literature, and performance  studies, among others. But there has been all too little conversation among the disciplines.

Thanks to seed grant funding from the Pembroke Center, a group of Brown professors and  students from the departments of Anthropology, History, Music, Hispanic Studies and  others have formed the Andean Project. Over the 2014N15 academic year, the Project will  host a series of lectures and public performances, both academic and of general interest, at  Brown. The first will be a panel discussion to coincide with Brown’s First Readings  program on the film Oil$&$Water, a documentary about the struggles around oil extraction  in eastern Ecuador that features David Poritz ’11 and the organization he created to  establish a fair trade certification for oil. The Andean Project also will run a workshop for  sharing and critiquing workNinNprogress by the participants. The Andean Project’s goal is to  build the visibility of Andean Studies at Brown, to foster interdisciplinary conversation and  collaboration, and to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for future work or  study in Latin America.

• Laura Bass, Associate Professor and Chair, Hispanic Studies
• Jeremy Mumford, Lecturer, History

This project draws upon the social movement scholarship in Africana Studies,  Anthropology, Political Science, History, and Feminist Studies to explore Black women’s  grassroots activism in Jamaica. Research collaborators will pursue the following questions:  1) When and how do Black women lead and participate in grassroots political  organizations?; 2) What are the primary social and political issues driving Black women to  organize in their local communities?; 3) How do Black women mobilize around racial,  gender, class, and sexual interests and advance feminist theories of intersectionality?; and,  4) How have the shifting trends in governance shaped contemporary grassroots social  movements in Jamaica and the broader Caribbean? 

The seed grant will support research projects on social movements against forced land  evictions, art and theatre-based activism, and Rastafari women’s philosophy and  engagement in gendered anti-racism politics. The group hopes to host one-day seminars at  Brown and the University of the West Indies, Mona led by Anthony Bogues and Maziki  Thame to explore key ideas in Caribbean political thought and developments related to  black women’s grassroots activism. This collaborative research project will result in a  special journal issue.  The project is also partially supported with a grant from the Watson  Institute for International Studies.

• Keisha Khan Y. Perry (Project Director), Assistant Professor of Africana Studies 
• Anthony Bogues, Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences and Critical Theory; Director,  Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
• Maziki Thame, Lecturer in the Department of Government, University of the West  Indies, Mona
• Nicosia Shakes, doctoral candidate, Africana Studies
• Shamara Alhassan, doctoral student, Africana Studies

Lars von Trier’s films – including Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2014) – are  unsettling, urgent, and often controversial. His films raise questions about gender and  violence, the politics of the foreigner, the disabled and the immigrant, conditions of work in  neoliberal economies, marriage, morality, and more.  Project organizers have invited  scholars to submit papers for a special issue of the online journal, Theory & Event – an  interdisciplinary journal with a reputation for cutting edge theoretical and political  inquiry.

Seed grant funds will support the screening of a number of von Trier’s films and the hosting  of a conference at Brown in November that will feature scholars who have been invited to  submit to Theory & Event.  The Brown community will be invited to join scholars at the  conference in thinking specifically about the films of Lars von Trier and about film as a  political and aesthetic technology. The conference will bring together scholars from all over  the world working at the intersections of classics, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies,  racial politics, political science, philosophy, humanities and communications arts, and film  studies. The aim is not only to generate political commentary on von Trier’s films, but also  to use his films as an occasion to develop new work in political, literary, film, feminist, or  critical theory.

• Bonnie Honig (project director), Nancy Duke Lewis Professor (-elect), Modern Culture  and Media and Political Science
• Anthony Cokes, Professor, Modern Culture and Media

This working collective of seven scholars will explore the problems of humanism and  humanness across several interrelated fields, including anthropology, Black studies,  geography, history of art and architecture, literary studies, and women and gender studies.  Through collaborative and interdisciplinary engagements developed through thinking,  research, and writing, members will generate and share primary research pertinent to both  their discrete disciplines and the wider concerns of humanistic study. Topics of interest  include aesthetics and cultural production, diaspora, feminism, gender, (collective)  memory, representation, social survival and sustainability, and space, place, and  geography. 

Seed grant funding will support the development and broad dissemination of research  findings, the creation of related pedagogical tools, and teach-ins and other collaborative  forums for learning and exchange. Funding will also support professional development,  including participation in conferences and other convenings and the organization of a  public symposium at which collective members will present their work to the larger  community. The funds will also help members develop new courses to offer to Brown’s  students.

• Rebecca Louise Carter (project co-director), Assistant Professor of Anthropology and  Urban Studies 
• Courtney J. Martin (project co-director), Assistant Professor of History of Art and  Architecture 
• Karida L. Brown, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, Cogut Center for the Humanities  Graduate Fellow
• Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of African American Literature,  Northeastern University
• Patricia Anne Lott, Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of  Slavery and Justice 
• Lara Stein Pardo, Postdoctoral Research Associate, John Nicholas Brown Center for  Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage 
• Linda Quiquivix, Independent Scholar

By retrieving the significance of Asian interaction with the Americas to the cultural,  political, and economic development of American societies from the 16th through the 19th centuries, researchers will re-examine prevailing historical narratives from a new  perspective that challenges the dominant colonial/imperial legacies and framework of U.S.  and Latin American histories. The project will examine resources in the John Carter Brown  Library, devoted to the study of the Americas, that relate to Asia.  European discovery of  the Americas took place within the context of trying to reach Asia and exploration of the  Americas was framed by maritime and commercial ambitions regarding Asia. Scholars will  explore how these two regions were intertwined during this period. 

Seed grant funding will support a symposium and related workshops as steps toward the  goal of forming an interdisciplinary, transnational consortium for the study of East Asia and  the Americas, to be housed in Brown’s Department of American Studies. The consortium  will bring valuable archival and visual resources reflecting the important historical place of  Asian interaction with Americans to the forefront, placing them in an academic context  which allows scholars to use them.

• Evelyn Hu-DeHart (project director), Professor of History
• Caroline Frank, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
• Robert G. Lee, Professor and Chair of American Studies
• Margot Nishimura, Deputy Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library

During the early modern period, the Global Lowlands (now Belgium and the Netherlands)  connected outwards to every part of the globe through trade, colonization, expanded  knowledge, material culture, and consumption.  Trade enabled the Lowlands to import  many things into its culture, art, and science.  Exotic eastern objects such as Turkish  scimitars and rugs were prominently featured in Dutch art, and physicians formed  botanical collections with specimens from as far away as China, Africa, and the Americas.  Likewise, indigenous communities around the globe were changed forever through  exchanges with the Lowlands.

This project will organize a yearlong seminar for faculty, graduate students, and scholars  from other institutions that will culminate in an international conference, “The Global  Lowlands: Dutch and Flemish History and Culture in a Worldwide Perspective,” to explore this period of global exchange. Its interdisciplinary approach will encourage scholars to  take up questions germane to religion, language, gender, commerce and labor that  transcend contemporary notions of national boundaries and traditional field-bound methodologies. 

• Evelyn Lincoln (project director), Professor of the History of Art and Architecture  and Italian Studies
• Hal Cook, Professor of History; Director of the Program in Renaissance and Early  Modern Studies
• Jeffrey Muller, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture

A complex array of laws, policies, and practices has resulted in an epidemic of incarceration  and recidivism in the U.S. criminal justice system. The lack of adequate access to  community-based care for mental illness and addiction has contributed to this devastating  epidemic, and created a public health and human rights crisis in both criminal justice  settings and in the largely poor, nonwhite communities from which most criminal justice  populations come and to which most will return. The Affordable Care Act extends Medicaid  coverage to most low-income citizens, which should lead to increased availability in the  community of Medicaid-financed mental health and substance abuse treatment services for  former prisoners and others at risk of criminal justice involvement. But financial barriers  are not the sole reason people fail to get healthcare. Health behaviors are embedded in  social, economic, cultural and policy frameworks. 

Seed grant funds will be used to bring together medical, public health, and social science  researchers at Brown to identify and address non-financial barriers to care. The Miriam  Hospital’s Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights will organize a series of  interdisciplinary symposia on campus, drawing on Brown’s proven strengths in  researching issues affecting criminal justice involved populations. This forum will provide  an opportunity to explore the potential synergies among medical, public health, and social  science faculty and researchers to develop the multidisciplinary response required by the  nation’s entwined epidemic of incarceration and the health crisis in its most vulnerable  communities – low income and predominantly of color. Drawing on the expertise and  experience of practitioners in corrections and public health, the project hopes to translate  research into practical solutions to barriers to care that will be of direct utility to  policymakers and public agencies that implement the new healthcare laws. 

• Josiah D. Rich (project director), Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
• Nicole Alexander, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine
• Curt Beckwith, Associate Professor of Medicine 
• Lundy Braun, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies
• Jennifer Clarke, Associate Professor of Medicine
• Jennifer Johnson, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
• David Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Community Health and Medicine
• Glenn Loury, Professor of Social Sciences and Economics
• Amy Nunn, Assistant Professor of Medicine
• Nickolas Zaller, Assistant Professor of Medicine

Medicalization has been studied as a consequence of the ever-expanding reach of medical  institutions in post-industrial capitalist societies, whereby processes such as birth,  emotion, or poverty are recast as objects of medical intervention. Medical professionals  have long been involved as clinicians in a range of political, social, and nationalist projects  where they have used the language and authority of medicine to counter repressive and  problematic governmental practices. This project will examine the role of medicine in  movements for social change – be they progressive, radical, conservative, or reactionary.  Seed grant funding will support a working group that will examine a range of clinician-led  and -affiliated social movements, such as: attacks on Arab doctors who are perceived to  side with the rebels in the Syrian conflict; U.S. and European based surgeons who provide  surgical care as part of social justice agendas in poor countries; race-based genomic  medicine and attempts to address health disparities and inequalities with implications for  pathologizing and medicalizing race and racial difference; and, the socialization of doctors  in the U.S. and the de-politicization of community health and social medicine. The working  group will bring together faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students to engage in  a year-long facilitated reading group and conclude with a symposium that brings together  participants and invited scholars to workshop papers and new projects related to the  project theme. 

• Adia Benton (project director), Assistant Professor of Anthropology
• Sherine Hamdy, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
• Soha Bayoumi, Lecturer in the History of Science (Harvard University)
• Dianne Ritchie, Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine
• Harold Cook, Professor of History
• Lundy Braun, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies

Working with a network of feminist scholars, artists, and teachers around the world, this project will initiate a “cyber learning experiment” that creates a distributed online collaborative course (DOCC) on the topic of “Dialogues in Feminism and Technology.” This DOCC will engage experts in Science and Technology Studies, media artists, online learning instructors, and media systems designers and involve instructor and student participants at fifteen universities and colleges in the U.S. and abroad. Project leaders aim to demonstrate a work of collaborative feminist technological innovation for the purposes of addressing the educational needs of students interested in advanced topics in feminist Science and Technology Studies. The DOCC will add to the digital archive of material on the history of women and technology and illuminate the contribution of feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship to the histories of science and technology. Project leaders also aim to engender a set of digital practices among women and girls, to teach and encourage their participation in writing the techno-cultural histories of the future by becoming active participants in the creation of global digital archives.

The project will make available a shared set of learning materials such an online space for social exchange, and a set of prompts for collective and collaborative learning activities. The project will also invite experts to participate in a set of moderated dialogues that will be videotaped and shared online. The funding from the Pembroke Center seed grant will make possible several of these video dialogues.

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
• Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies, Pitzer College
• Anne Balsamo, Dean of the School of Media Studies, New School for Public Engagement
• Tara Nummedal, Associate Professor of History, Brown University
• Kelly Dobson, Associate Professor of Digital + Media, Rhode Island School of Design

The Middle East remains one of the areas of the world where first cousin marriage is pervasive. Many theories attempt to explain the social benefits that might outweigh the genetic deterrents for particular communities, such as the maintenance of property and wealth within the family, or the reduced cost of out-marriage arrangements. Yet these benefits may have lower appeal as tribal affiliation and land-based family economies erode in the face of global capitalism, urbanization, the nuclearization of families, wage labor, the hegemony of medicalized “risk” discourse, the participation of women in the economy, and the decrease in fertility rates. The “common wisdom” in Western societies is that first-cousin marriage should be avoided because of the genetic risk posed to offspring. Yet in the U.S., state bans on first-cousin marriage, begun in the late 19th century, were aimed against immigrants and the rural poor and pre-date modern genetic discourses of risk (Ottenheimer 1996, Kuper 2002). Many geneticists have argued that the increased risk of inheriting recessive and dominant autosomal disorders with first-cousin marriage is clear, but also modest, and no larger than the increased risk associated with advanced maternal age (Modell and Darr 2002).

This project will explore the willingness of people in Egypt to marry first or second cousins despite the knowledge about increased risk to offspring, and public health messages and medical authorities’ attempts to actively discourage such marriages. Egypt represents an important site for such research because consanguineous marriage is neither blatantly stigmatized and medicalized as it is among South Asian immigrants in the UK, nor is it fully normalized as in the Arab Gulf. Field research and data collection will take place in collaboration with geneticists at the National Research Centre in Egypt, which receives patients referred from all over the country who seek diagnoses and information regarding inherited diseases, often in their children. The major research aim is to understand how women and men across classes and generations understand the benefits and risks of cousin marriage. The project will culminate with two campus-wide collaborative meetings to explore the research findings.

• Sherine Hamdy, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Kutayba Alghanim Professor of Social Science, Brown University
• Tanya Dailey, Clinical Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Brown University
• Beshara Doumani, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History, Brown University
• Stephen Bush, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University
• Samia Temtamy, Professor of Human Genetics, Egypt’s National Research Centre
• Samira Ismail, Clinical Geneticist, Genetics, Egypt’s National Research Centre

Against a backdrop of increased activism and cultural revitalization among indigenous peoples in the Americas, this project will bring together scholars to explore how emergent forms of cultural performance reveal new patterns in indigenous mobilization and alliances across borders. It will facilitate dialogue among scholars whose work focuses on distinct peoples and regions throughout the Americas, north and south of the Rio Grande. This geographic barrier is rarely traversed in existing scholarly work on indigenous sociocultural change, but indigenous activists and artists are increasingly exchanging information and experiences across this boundary, and understanding global indigeneity requires similar efforts at crossing political and conceptual boundaries.

Funding from the seed grant will support an interdisciplinary working group at Brown that will meet monthly and culminate in a symposium in late 2013. The symposium will feature a collaborative conversation between leading scholars from throughout the Americas as well as indigenous artists-activists. The ultimate goal of this research group is to produce an edited volume and a grant proposal aimed at establishing a hemisphere-wide working group to conduct further research.

• Paja Faudree, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
• Joshua Tucker, Assistant Professor of Music, Brown University

The project will organize a series of approximately eight seminars, each with two or more speakers to address three central research questions:

1. What/Do health-related NGOs contribute to public health in the countries in which they operate?
2. How do NGOs attempt to mediate or mitigate forces producing inequalities in health and health care?
3. What are the key factors or conditions affecting their successes and failures?

The project will establish and maintain a website with short papers and presentations that summarize the major debates on the roles of third sector organizations. The collaborative work taking place in the seminars will include students and faculty across disciplines, contribute to the publication of three or four scholarly papers in peer reviewed journals or as book chapters, and seek to develop a develop a working group to assess potential applications for National Institutes of Health grants.

• Ann Dill, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brown University
• Linda Cook, Professor of Political Science, Brown University
• Geri Augusto, Visiting Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University
• Lundy Braun, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies
• Nitsan Chorev, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brown University
• Susan Cu-Uvin, Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice
• Masako Ueda Fidler, Professor of Slavic Languages, Brown University
• Marida Hollos, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
• Josiah Rich, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology