Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia: “Gabriel's War: Cartography and the Changing Art of War"

January 25, 2pm

Lexmark Room, Main Building

      Dr. Derek Gregory is a member of the Department of Geography and one of two Peter Wall Distinguished Professors at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  Dr. Gregory trained as an historical geographer at the University of Cambridge. His research focused on the historical geography of industrialization and on the relations between social theory and human geography and explored a range of critical theories that showed how place, space, and landscape have been involved in the operation and outcome of social processes. His 1982 book, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution, was staged on the classic ground of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. Following a move to Vancouver in 1989, Gregory’s work was reinforced by postcolonial critique, outlined in his 1989 book Geographical Imaginations. This new phase of work owed much to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it was much more concerned with the corporeality and physicality of travel – with embodied subjects moving through material landscapes – and with the constantly changing (often mislaid) cultural baggage of the travelers. And it paid attention what travelers mapped, sketched, and photographed – and to the consequences these representations had for their encounters.

This work on travel and travel writing was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, and the focus of his research shifted to the present. Drawing on his training as an historical geographer and his sense of the renewed power of Orientalism, Dr. Gregory traced the long history of British and American involvements in the “Middle East,” and showed how these affected the cultural, political, and military responses to 9/11. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004) showed how war quite literally takes place, and described in detail the violent ‘taking of places’ not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but in occupied Palestine. The study showed how the conduct of war connects the abstractions of geopolitics – the pronouncements of politicians, the strategies of generals – to the lives and deaths of countless ordinary men and women.

His forthcoming book, The Everywhere War, shows how the conduct of war is shaped by the spaces through which it is conducted; ranging from the global war prison at Guantanamo Bay through counterinsurgency in Baghdad and the drone wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan. His new research project, Killing space, is a critical study of the techno-cultural and political dimensions of air war. It focuses on three major campaigns: the combined bombing offensive against Germany in the Second World War, America’s air wars over Indochina, and the present use of UAVs in Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere.  It pays particular attention to the changing ways in which cities (and eventually people) have been visualized as targets within what is now called the ‘kill-chain,’ and to the different ways in which the media have represented and reported bombing to different publics.

The University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group is hosting the third annual Dimensions of Political Ecology: Conference on Nature Society.

Now in its third year, the 2013 Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference will provide opportunities to engage with contemporary scholarship on the political-economic causes and effects of environmental degradation and ecological change. With an interdisciplinary and international group of presenters, panelists, and keynote speakers, this year's conference will offer considerable insight into pressing contemporary questions relating to sustainability, global climate change, and local environmental conflicts. This year, we have over 200 scheduled presenters, representing a wide variety of geographic and disciplinary affiliations.

The final program can be view here.
 
Listen to a podcast about the Political Ecology Group below.

The dates for the event are 2/28 (5:30 PM) until 3/2 (10:00 PM).

The final program link is here.

The conference website can be found here.

And we also have a podcast.

Films of the Perestroika period--1980s-1990s

Networked Humanities: From Within and Without the University

A Digital Humanities Symposium

February 15-16, 2013

The University of Kentucky

Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Program

Keynote Speakers:
Kathleen Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas

Malcolm McCullough, Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan

Of all the topics of interest to the digital humanities, the network has received little attention among digital humanities proponents.  Yet, we live in a networked society: texts, sound, ideas, people, movements, consumerism, protest movements, politics, entertainment, academia, and other items circulate in networks that come together and break apart at various moments. While there exist networked spaces of interaction for digital humanities work – such as HASTAC or specific university centers -  we still must consider how networks affect traditional and future goals of humanities work. Have the humanities sufficiently addressed the ways their work, as networks, affect other networks, within and outside of the humanities? What might be a networked digital humanities or what is it currently if it does, indeed, exist? Can an understanding of the humanities as a series of networks affect – positively or negatively - the ways the public perceive its research, pedagogy, and mission?

The University of Kentucky’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Program invites proposals for a two day symposium devoted to discussion of the implications of a networked digital humanities. The symposium will bring together academic and professional audiences in order to rethink the taxonomy of humanities so that we emerge with a network of people and ideas beyond the traditional taxonomy of “humanities” work. Thus, talks will not be limited to traditional humanities areas of study. 

Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

·      Public humanities work

·      Networks among disciplines

·      Ecologies

·      Animal and human networks

·      Online spaces

·      Mapping/Geography

·      Economics and the humanities

·      Labor and the humanities

·      Digital production of texts

·      Community work

·      Workplace organization

·      The university as network

·      Archives and Obsolescence

February 15-16, 2013

Panels, roundtables, performative pieces, and alternative forms of delivery are welcome and encouraged.

No registration fee to attend or present. Please send 250 word proposals to  Jeff Rice j.rice@uky.edu  by September 1, 2012.

GWS Research Matters Series presents:

Melissa Stein

"Bodies of Knowledge:  Historical Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Biological Determinism"

A talk by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies, Ponoma College and Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association. What if the academic monograph is a dying form? If scholarly communication is to have a future, it's clear that it lies online, and yet the most significant obstacles to such a transformation are not technological, but instead social and institutional. How must the academy and the scholars that comprise it change their ways of thinking in order for digital scholarly publishing to become a viable alternative to the university press book? This talk will explore some of those changes and their implications for our lives as scholars and our work within universities.

Baker is the well known biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, and her eight other books include her collective biography of five feminists and suffragists American Sisters.