CVGC UCI

Critical Visual Geographies Collective

[cvgc-uci-blog]

[UPDATED EVENT] The Critical Visual Geographies Collective presents:

Professor Rachel C. Lee on Wednesday, November 30 @UCI

Nov 30 | 3 PM  | UCI HG 1010  | The Chemical Sublime: Chimeracological Capacities and Disability Epistemology, with a response from Professor Jennifer Terry (UCI, Gender & Sexuality Studies)

Join the Critical Visual Geographies Collective for our final conference event featuring Professor Rachel C. Lee. Drawing upon poetic, (auto)ethnographic, survey research, and novelistic accounts of both environmental disaster (Bhopal gas leak) and slow endocrinological violence (sensitivity to everyday chemicals), this lecture first outlines the gendered barriers to representing the fog brought on by the toxic burden of synthetic chemicals—an effect of consumer capital and industrial modernity’s chemical dependence (e.g., in textile manufacture, agriculture, gardening, and home furnishings). Second, Lee turns to the polyvocal intelligences emergent from those attuned or reshaped by toxic exposures that are sung in forms we tend to construe as the opposite of data—poetry, speculative fiction, and stimming (tactile communication with vibrant matter). Only through a framework attentive to transgenerational epigenetic effects (chronologies of long latency) and an embrace of cross-species resemblances, Lee argues, can we responsively attend to both the ‘costs’ of incautious habits of the past and respect those perhaps permanently altered by their openness to environmental effects.

Rachel C. Lee is a Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU 2014) received the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies. She is currently the Director of the Center for Study of Women at UCLA and heading a multi-year research project entitled “Life(Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism.

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective (CVGC) is an interdisciplinary initiative led by graduate students in the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. The CVGC seeks to foster an engaged community of students and faculty that complicates how the “visual” and “geographic” are theorized. We believe that these terms are particularly impacted/impactful in this contemporary moment marked by incredible global racial violence. The CGVC is committed to rethinking sites of knowledge production, archival practices, and collaborative digital work.

Free and open to the public. To RSVP visit https://goo.gl/forms/3IgeWWwgnWZlw99h2

[cvgc-uci-blog]

Rachel C. Lee is a Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU 2014) received the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies. She is currently the Director of the Center for Study of Women at UCLA and heading a multi-year research project entitled “Life(Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism. RSVP HERE

[cvgc-uci-blog]

[UPDATED EVENT] CVGC Presents: Professor Rachel C. Lee on Wed, Nov 30 @UCI

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective presents:

Professor Rachel C. Lee Wednesday, November 30 @UCI

Nov 30 | 3 PM  | UCI HG 1010  | The Chemical Sublime: Chimeracological Capacities and Disability Epistemology, with a response from Professor Jennifer Terry (UCI, Gender & Sexuality Studies)

Join the Critical Visual Geographies Collective for our final conference event featuring Professor Rachel C. Lee. Drawing upon poetic, (auto)ethnographic, survey research, and novelistic accounts of both environmental disaster (Bhopal gas leak) and slow endocrinological violence (sensitivity to everyday chemicals), this lecture first outlines the gendered barriers to representing the fog brought on by the toxic burden of synthetic chemicals—an effect of consumer capital and industrial modernity’s chemical dependence (e.g., in textile manufacture, agriculture, gardening, and home furnishings). Second, Lee turns to the polyvocal intelligences emergent from those attuned or reshaped by toxic exposures that are sung in forms we tend to construe as the opposite of data—poetry, speculative fiction, and stimming (tactile communication with vibrant matter). Only through a framework attentive to transgenerational epigenetic effects (chronologies of long latency) and an embrace of cross-species resemblances, Lee argues, can we responsively attend to both the ‘costs’ of incautious habits of the past and respect those perhaps permanently altered by their openness to environmental effects.

Rachel C. Lee is a Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU 2014) received the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies. She is currently the Director of the Center for Study of Women at UCLA and heading a multi-year research project entitled “Life(Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism.

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective (CVGC) is an interdisciplinary initiative led by graduate students in the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. The CVGC seeks to foster an engaged community of students and faculty that complicates how the “visual” and “geographic” are theorized. We believe that these terms are particularly impacted/impactful in this contemporary moment marked by incredible global racial violence. The CGVC is committed to rethinking sites of knowledge production, archival practices, and collaborative digital work.

Free and open to the public. To RSVP visit https://docs.google.com/a/uci.edu/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdcHfS3f69Iu4xUoF3NsSmPbOD6WsIliSnJ-sAbpQ5ZQSAmvg/viewform?c=0&w=1

Event made possible by a grant from the Humanities Commons and co-sponsored by the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Department of Asian American Studies.

[cvgc-uci-blog]

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective presents: Professor Rachel C. Lee, Virtualness of Race: Target Practice, Crowd Sourcing, Haircuts, and Bodily Resourcefulness  

Wednesday, June 1 |  5:30 PM  | UC Irvine HG 3341 Join the Critical Visual Geographies Collective this June for our final conference event featuring Professor Rachel C. Lee who will present a multimedia talk on the virtualness of race. Using examples from video games, bioart, surveillance videos, plastic surgery, and online crowd sourcing, this talk theorizes the distinctive gendered and racialized ways that contemporary artists and laypersons use the platform of Asian embodiment (and its exquisite corporeal materials) to outline attenuated and symbiotic rather than sovereign acts of agency.  Lee attends to the various sensory techniques and spatial scales through which these artists comment upon and variously unsettle the continuities among imperial vision, xenophobia, war tactics, and the harnessing of a somatic, erotic, and biological plasticity coded as Asiatic. The talk expands upon the critical biopolitical studies method outlined in The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU, 2014).

Rachel C. Lee is a Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU 2014) received the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies. She is currently the Director of the Center for Study of Women at UCLA and heading a multi-year research project entitled “Life(Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism.

The Critical Visual Geographies Collective (CVGC) is an interdisciplinary initiative led by graduate students in the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. The CVGC seeks to foster an engaged community of students and faculty that complicates how the “visual” and “geographic” are theorized. We believe that these terms are particularly impacted/impactful in this contemporary moment marked by incredible global racial violence. The CGVC is committed to rethinking sites of knowledge production, archival practices, and collaborative digital work.

Free and open to the public. 

RSVP: http://goo.gl/forms/ZddswcClcfOYOEgE3 

 Event made possible by a grant from the Humanities Commons and co-sponsored by the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. 

[cvgc-uci-blog]

Please RSVP here!

[cvgc-uci-blog]

[cvgc-uci-blog]

[cvgc-uci-blog]

[cvgc-uci-blog]

[cvgc-uci-blog]

Conversations on Race & Space with Professor Scott Kurashige Tuesday, February 16, at UC Irvine

Workshop:

Diversity with Racism: Los Angeles History from Above and Below 9:00 - 11:00 AM **RSVP Requested** Please RSVP here.

Lecture:

"Looking Like the Enemy": Islamophobia and the Forgotten Lessons of Japanese American Internment 5:00 - 6:30 PM Open to the public.

[cvgc-uci-blog]

"Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs": A seminar with Professor Anna Everett

Tuesday | October 27 | 11am - 1pm | UCI | HG 3341 RSVP to be sent seminar paper (lunch will be provided) Bluejeans Meeting ID: 1773220118 http://bluejeans.com/1773220118

A paradigm shift of sorts has occurred in the procedural rhetorics and gameplay structures of videogames over the last two decades where race and gender in games intersect, though the changes are not nearly enough. Gamers now negotiate and amplify the joy and pain of their videogame fandom quite publicly and enthusiastically as game characters of color are gaining some new visibility as optional play (OP) and must play characters (MPC). As powerful narrative agents in action-adventure, open-world and first- and third-person-shooter genres in mainstream, casual and online gaming spaces (including networked games on Xbox Live), black women as MPCs in successful mainstream gaming franchises and action-adventure game brands are redefining the gaming experience in terms of 21st-Century multicultural, multiracial heroic character ideals. This seminar explores some benefits and drawbacks of gaming’s tepid embrace of black women and girls as sheroes of play in popular game titles. Online fora, video games journalism, and recent scholarship on intersectionality in gaming industry theory and praxis will be at the center of this pedagogical encounter. Not to tamp down the excitement of black girl gamers and fangirls savoring this moment, but my analyses leads me to caution: “be careful what you ask for!”

[cvgc-uci-blog]

RSVP: Talks with Professor Anna Everett 10/27 @UCI

Talks with Professor Anna Everett Tuesday, October 27 @UC Irvine 11am - 1pm     | Seminar "Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs" - HG 3341 RSVP to be sent the seminar paper (lunch will be provided) 4:30 - 6:30pm  | "Hashtag Activism in the African Diaspora: The Revolution Will Be Tweeted Out” - HG1030 RSVP Join the Critical Visual Geographies Collective this October for our inaugural event featuring Professor Anna Everett who will present a multimedia talk on how African Diasporic communities persistently leverage Twitter to challenge endemic racial biases and disparities affecting black peoples in America and across the globe. What is the existential power and the limitations of Black Twitter specifically, and hashtag activism more broadly? With the advent of revolutionary social media technologies, and the ubiquity of smart phone videos, Twitter has become a powerful digital panopticon in the hands of tech savvy black Millennials and their 21st century global communities of practice (#BringBackOurGirls, #BlackLivesMatter, #JusticeforTrayvon). In this way black digital natives on black Twitter turn Gil Scott-Heron's maxim on its head by uploading videotaped acts of racial oppression and aggression, thereby ensuring, the revolution will be live-tweeted. Anna Everett is a Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her many publications include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide, and Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. She is finishing a new book on President Obama, social media culture and the Where U @ Generation. The Critical Visual Geographies Collective (CVGC) is an interdisciplinary initiative led by graduate students in the Culture & Theory and Visual Studies programs at UCI. The CVGC seeks to foster an engaged community of students and faculty that complicates how the “visual” and “geographic” are theorized. We believe that these terms are particularly impacted/impactful in this contemporary moment marked by incredible global racial violence. The CGVC is committed to rethinking sites of knowledge production, archival practices, and collaborative digital work. Free and open to the public. For more information email [email protected].   Event made possible by a grant from the Humanities Commons and co-sponsored by the Visual Studies and Culture & Theory programs at UC Irvine.

[cvgc-uci-blog]