The Center provides event management and financial administration for conferences funded both by the annual CIS competitive conference awards and by other agencies and departments. Support services can include grant management, logistic oversight and organization, and advertisement.
Learn more about current conferences and workshops below.
Spring 2021 (Virtual Event)
The conference organized by the University of California, Riverside (UCR) Music Department in collaboration with UCR ARTS’ Culver Center of the Arts explores the contributions to transnational sound and vision, and new forms of audiovisual art in our current time. The event is structured around Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898-1948) unfinished silent film ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1930), which will be screened with a new commissioned electroacoustic music composition. Though Eisenstein did not fully realize his film project, an edited version of his original footage was released in 1979. This remarkable film became emblematic in film scholarship, not only in the context of Eisenstein’s transnational aesthetics, but especially for its embodiment of the significant shift that occurred at that time from the sensory, experimental regime of modern art to the process of massification of the senses in the global mass culture. In addition to the premiere of ¡Que Viva Mexico! with a new sound/music track, the conference will present an artistic event with the screening of new audiovisual works curated through an international call along with a symposium featuring distinguished invited scholars on cinema studies, media studies, music, and the humanities.
*Due to the impacts on travel and in-person meetings caused by COVID-19, conference dates are tentative and will be confirmed soon.
Sponsored by UCR ARTS, the Center for Ideas and Society and the UCR Department of Music.University of California. Additional sponsorship from the Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding through a grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute.
Organizers
Paulo Chagas, Music
NIkolay Maslov, Culver Center of the Arts
2021-22 – dates TBD
The symposium “Co-Productions: Literature, Media and Diaspora in the Japanese Transpacific” is a two-day event of panels, roundtable discussions and engagement with local historic sites involving scholars from Japan and the UC system in Spring 2021. This international symposium builds on the intellectual and community-building work of transpacific working groups (TPWG) active at UCLA and UCI. The theme of “coproduction” derives from cinema studies, and in Asian Studies has been used to show how cinematic co-productions have produced a new transpacific regional identity–that traverses Asia and North America–based on interlocking labor practices, investments, representational codes, and distribution.
This symposium adapts “co-production” in four senses to articulate transpacific connections between Japan and North America that began with nineteenth-century migration. First is the organization shared between four departments: Comparative Literature and Languages (John Kim and Anne McKnight); Media and Cultural Studies (Setsu Shigematsu); English (Traise Yamamoto); and History (Catherine Gudis). This co-production allows us to newly engage the fields of Japanese diaspora and Japanese American Studies in recognition of the co-figuration of regional and racialized identities. We define co-production in a second, broader sense as the material, epistemological and social dimensions of exchange across the Pacific, including the colonial conditions that precipitate migration and displacement. Third, we envision co-production between researchers and community organizations that preserve local historic sites such as the Harada House. The last mode of co-production is graduate student involvement facilitating guided tours, panels and roundtables that will address human-machine-labor-technology assemblages in the transpacific; diasporic literature, media co-productions, and the co-production of legal and philosophical discourses.
Papers will be pre-circulated and assigned to commentators, including graduate students facilitating dialogue with scholars from Japan and other UC campuses. Details and calls for papers are forthcoming.
*Due to the impacts on travel and in-person meetings caused by COVID-19, conference dates are tentative and TBA.
Sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society and the Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding through a grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute.
Organizers (in alphabetical order):
Catherine Gudis, History
John Kim, Comparative Literature and Languages
Anne McKnight, Comparative Literature and Languages
Setsu Shigematsu, Media & Cultural Studies
Traise Yamamoto, English
Fall 2021
Critical Anti-Violence Research and Action (CARA) is a working group of faculty and graduate students at UC Riverside with a thematic foci of racialized gender violence, feminist carceral studies, decolonial feminist methodologies, and building bridges between scholarly research and community organizing. Established in Fall 2019, CARA emerged from a recognition of a critical mass of scholars at UCR whose research interrogates gendered violence critically , or through an analytic that interrogates the relationship between state-based and structural power and intimate forms of violence.
In 2020-21, the group will host “Making Space: Emerging Theories and Interventions in Critical Anti-Violence Research,” a two-day workshop that will include faculty and graduate student presentations on interdisciplinary research exploring various forms of epistemic, social, and political resistance to structural gendered violence, as well as guided discussions on developing areas of research on
connections between gendered violence and statecraft, biopolitics, subject formation, and the carceral state. The presentations will be followed by a creative roundtable format to cultivate conversation between the participants to identify new connections across fields and new areas of interrogation. The purpose of the workshop is to illuminate emerging scholarship on transnational, national, and local anti-gendered violence scholarship and movement building that remain at the margins of anti-violence scholarship across fields.
Faculty Coordinators:
Alisa Bierria (Ethnic Studies)
Andrea Smith (Ethnic Studies)
Spring 2022
Envisioned by a newly-established Indigenous Choreographers at Riverside (ICR) Advisory Circle centering Cahuilla guidance, this gathering is a week-long, community-led, multi-part, embodied engagement with the land upon which UCR is located, called Pachappa by Íviatem (Cahuilla) peoples. The collaborative process of creating this conference, with local Íviatem, Máara’yam (Serrano), Tóngva , and Payómkawichum (Luiseño) community members providing primary guidance, is part of its outcome. In this, we follow walangax, a Cahuilla concept meaning from the beginning, the base of strength and a dynamic point of potentiality via interconnectedness. ICR Cahuilla Advisory Circle leaders proffer a deep, decolonial, and reparative engagement with the cosmology of this land. In Cahuilla bird songs, human existence emerges through migration, honoring ancestors’ journey around Turtle Island three times, and thus forming Cahuilla people in interconnectedness. In this and other ways, Cahuilla cosmology registers how those who are now here already form part of the Cahuilla story. The conference might involve Native leaders articulating protocols for connection with those on their own paths of Indigenous migration; those trafficked through forced labor; and descendants of colonizing settlers. This might involve people who are not Native to this area enacting their connection with it in a variety of creative ways, such as Indigenous-to-Indigenous sharing of dance practices, and registering how different Indigenous people have followed the path of dance to hold histories of past and future. It might involve practicing being in good relation through various sensory practices (gift exchanges, land outings, Native plant teachings, fireside star stories). Whatever it becomes, it will involve sharing time, knowledge, space, energy, song, dance and food in transformative, reparative, and healing ways, and be guided by a desire for “achaqwa exma unum Temal,” may all be in good relationship on Earth, a phrase of good intention offered by Cahuilla elder Katherine Kitchen.
Faculty Coordinators:
Jacqueline Shea Murphy (Dance)
María Firmino-Castillo (Dance)
Winter 2022
The Imperial Legacies: Caribbean Genealogies of Racialization Across Disciplines conference analyzes the ways in which the Spanish imperial logic of the colonial period laid the groundwork for a racial, cultural, political, and aesthetic order that has shaped Caribbean societies up to now. The project articulates a theory of the Caribbean by explaining how the Spanish colonial legacy imposed its own epistemological framework to understand and explain the “new world”, while also looking at indigenous discourses and practices offering counter-hegemonic alternatives of apprehending the world and combating colonialism. Most specifically, this symposium seeks to identify how Afro-Caribbean communities offer subaltern philosophical and political tools to reimagine novel ways of militancy. The project aims to analyze complex articulations between aesthetics and political procedures, asserting that their combined effects can lead to the most effective material critique. The goal is to study modes of political activism that are able to transcend essentialist notions of subjective agency, by looking instead at the ways in which affect structures our political relation to the world. Finally, a key objective is to identify subaltern practices leading to political transformation in ways that reconceptualize the notion of militant agency. The project methodology proposes the analysis of racializing discourses, that is, language practices that classify and discipline people, objects, places, and practices into social categories marked as inherently dangerous or Other. Of special interest are the legitimized forms of racism that are not explicitly discriminatory, but which covertly reproduce and reinforce practices that keep augmenting the gap between those who belong, and those who are marginalized.
Faculty Coordinators:
Marta Hernández Salván (Hispanic Studies)
Jacques Lezra (Hispanic Studies)
Miguel Vásquez Rivero (Departamento de Filosofía y Sociedad, Universidad Complutense de Madrid)