Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the fourth, and final, speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, April 19 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Tansen Sen! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Dr. Charlie Yi Zhang.

Title: A Global Asia Travelogue: Gita Bandyopadhyay and Her Travels in China in 1949–50

Lecture Abstract:
Gita Bandyopadhyay was the first Indian and most likely also the first woman from independent India to pen a travelogue on recently liberated China. Entitled Moskow theke Chin (From Moscow to China), the travelogue, written in Bengali, recounts Bandyopadhyay’s visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to attend the 1949 Conference of Women of Asia held in Beijing. The details about the conference, her meetings with various Chinese women, and her visits to other Chinese cities provide unique perspectives on the PRC. The travelogue also presents Bandyopadhyay’s critical views on the newly established Nehru government and demonstrates the brewing relationship between the PRC government and the leftist movement in India. This presentation examines the importance of this neglected travelogue to underscore the contributions of women to China–India interactions, the role of non-state actors in these exchanges, and the state of China–India relations prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. It also examines Bandyopadhyay's global connections with members of the feminist movement in Europe and the United States of America.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the second speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, March 1 at 2 pm ET in B&E Room 191 in the Gatton Business School with Dr. Arnika Fuhrmann! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

What does it mean to imagine “Asia” beyond the reductive visions of contemporary policy? This
talk explores the contemporary visual culture of Chinese pasts and colonial modernities, revived
in the cinemas, new media, hospitality venues, and other material sites of Bangkok. Examining
the doubling of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai across these sites, it investigates how a
transregional Chinese modernity that emerged under but always exceeded conditions of colonial
and national governance informs the present. As film directors such as Wong Kar-wai and hotels,
bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the
Chinese past of Bangkok’s old European trading quarters—this redeployment of (semi-)colonial
histories and Chinese urban pasts is emerging as a primary signifier of the good life and
understandings of Asia in the present. The deployment of this twentieth century translocal
modernity points to enduring regional imaginaries that diverge from global notions of “China
Rising,” the People’s Republic’s own Belt and Road Initiative, or the policies of the Association
for Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok—as a Chinese city—stands at the center of these
prominent, transregional revivals in which media and urban design projects speak of radically
different desires than those of current policy.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the first speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, February 16 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Matthew Kohrman! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

Michel Foucault died in 1984 at age 57. Since his untimely demise, an array of scholars have developed his notions regarding the cross pollination of sovereignty and biopower, with a new wave of publications triggered by Covid-19 (Murray 2022, Rouse 2021). Amidst this vibrant theory building, large blind spots have remained, including two perennials of human experience: patriarchy and easily cultivated psychoactive drugs. In this talk, I chronicle that a specific psychoactive botanical, native to the Americas, has had an oversized role in sovereignty’s shapeshifting amidst biopower. I trace how, from the Columbian Exchange onset, tobacco came to be regularly coded a prerogative of male dominance, placing it ‘in the room’ at the birth of sovereignty-biopower synergies. And I track how such synergies, from North America to China, have regularly piggybacked on a distinctive doubling inherent to tobacco, it being something which people have long characterized as life ending and life enhancing, even medicinal. I dub this pharmakonism: processes wherein regimes, notably patriarchal, accrue power by reconciling and leveraging a commonplace thing's shifting attributes, good and bad, tonic and toxin. I develop this concept vis-a-vis tobacco with the hope it'll aid more than abstract biopolitical musing. May it also help clarify why – despite much condemnation over the last century, despite ouster from many quarters of polite society – tobacco is smoked by more people today worldwide than ever before, it remains the number cause of preventable human death, and why, if you wish, you can lawfully purchase cigarettes in nearly every country you visit. 

Statistical Thinking About Home Run Hitting

Jim Albert

Emeritus Distinguished University Professor

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Bowling Green State University

Abstract

Baseball is remarkable with respect to the amount of data collected over the seasons of Major League Baseball (MLB) beginning in 1871.  These data have provided an opportunity to address many questions of interest among baseball fans and researchers.  This talk will review several statistical studies on baseball home run hitting by the speaker over the last 30 years.  By modeling career trajectories, one learns about the greatest peak abilities of home run hitters.  We know that players exhibit streaky home run performances, but is there evidence that hitters exhibit streaky ability? MLB has been concerned about the abrupt rise in home run hitting in recent seasons.  What are the possible causes of the home run explosion, and in particular, is the explosion due to the composition of the baseball?

One of the most widespread human experiences is the sense of being descended from those who came before. It is a basic way – sometimes people feel it the most basic way – of understanding, justifying, and contesting the organization of social life, including matters of family, class, place, race, and professions. Along with my co-authors Loka Ashwood and Jay Orne (we’re writing a book about this) in this talk I term this deep and abiding concern heritas: the authority of social relations we contend we did not choose because they descend from our embodied past. Heritas draws on two common conceptions of “blood” heritage, what we term physical blood and generated blood, a more figurative understanding. Embodied heritage gains social power through externalizing identity into the past and into nature through historicization and naturalization. Heritas is inescapably ideological, since no one can know for sure what went on in the past or what will go on in the future. But it is a felt ideology – deeply meaningful, capable of eliciting some of the strongest emotional responses of human experience. There is also a spirited quality to heritas’s felt ideology. Part of what people feel is a sense of the presence of descent, ghostly ties that tingle the flesh and enliven the blood. And heritas is recursive. It structures much of our social organization, which in turn shapes our felt ideology, configuring our sense of the justice of social power and the boundaries of commitment we show for one another’s well-being. Painfully, but crucially, heritas is a common source both of some of our most basic delights and worst torments. Heritas is a troubled joy, for we are troubled beings.

Professor Michael M. Bell is an accomplished agroecologist, environmental sociologist, and community scholar at the esteemed University of Wisconsin-Madison. He boasts an impressive collection of eleven published books, three of which have been granted prestigious national awards. Among his recent works are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, 2018), the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Sage, 2021). In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Professor Bell is also a gifted composer and performer of grassroots and classical music.