The next American Studies graduate student workshop of the semester will be held on Monday, March 26, from 3:30 - 5:00pm in the Scott Hall Commons, room 105. All faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend.
Karla Padron will workshop her talk entitled, "Traveling in Times of Restriction: Conundrums and Critiques of Interdisciplinarity as Border Crossing"
Border-crossing is often used as a metaphor when speaking about interdisciplinarity. Yet, as traveling through and across traditional academic fields gains momentum, so does the massive incarceration of immigrants and those perceived as such. The irony is that while certain academics enjoy an "open-border" approach to research, immigrants are enduring higher incarceration rates and other confining policies. This paper asks, what are the implications of adopting an open-border framework in the academy at a time so heavily marked by the detention and incarceration of people of color? Expanding on this conundrum, this paper analyzes the problem of praxis in the social sciences and the humanities while arguing for a social justice model within interdisciplinary practice.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson will workshop his talk entitled, "The Libertarian Shift in American Political Culture: A Case Study"
Since the 1970s, as commentators and scholars have focused on social issues and "culture wars" that divide Republicans and Democrats, American political culture has undergone a tectonic shift towards a libertarian vision of the individual, the state, and politics. While part of this shift was the result of conservative activism, it has also been connected to another major development in American life: the rise of personal computing and the Internet. While the media has focused on "Twitter revolutions," I argue that new technologies have accelerated the rise of libertarianism and "networked individualism,"
and present a case study of the "peak oil" movement, a contemporary social movement of self-identified liberals and leftists who have created a virtual movement organized along conservative individualistic lines, with a libertarian vision of the "post-carbon" future.
