The New Directions in Culture, Theory, and Politics speaker series returns this winter with presentations by Sha LaBare, Eric Cazdyn, Sally Tallant, Danijela Majstorovic, and Leigh Clare La Berge. Topics include ecology, futurity, curatorial practice, identity and power in a postsocialist context, and debt's impact on U.S. literary cultures.
'Sha' LaBare
"Colorless Green Ideas: On Ecology and Science Studies"
January 24 / Humanities Centre L-3 @ 3:30 p.m.
Sha LaBare is a speculative philosopher and advocate of radical ecological ethics. His work has appeared in Science Fiction Film and Television, and his essay "Chronicling Martians" appears in Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Science Fiction and Science.
Eric Cazdyn
"1,2,3,4…There's No Future Anymore: The Image and Political Desire"
February 7 / Humanities Centre L-3 @ 3:30 p.m.
Eric Cazdyn works on the cinematic and aesthetic figurations of capital and its attendant structures of thought and feeling. He is the author of five books, including The Already Dead andAfter Globalization (with Imre Szeman), and his work has appeared in journals such as Materialisms, Modern Language Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Social Text.
Sally Tallant
"Local Operations - Experiments in Situated Curatorial Practice"
February 13 / Art Gallery of Alberta @ 7:00 p.m.
Sally Tallant is the Director of Liverpool Biennial - The UK Biennial of International Contemporary Art. Recent projects include The Edgware Road Project, Skills Exchange; Turning the World Upside Down, which was comprised of large-scale sculptures by Anish Kapoor in Kensington Gardens; and Disassembly with Runa Islam, Christian Boltanski, Yona Friedman and Faisal Abdu'Allah. She has curated and organized exhibitions in a wide range of contexts including the Hayward Gallery and artist-run spaces, hospitals, parks and public spaces.
Danijela Majstorovic
"What Cultural Studies Does: Discourse, Identity and Power in a Postsocialist/Postwar Context"
February 28 / Humanities Centre L-2 @3:30 p.m.
Danijela Majstorovic is an assistant professor in the area of linguistic, cultural, and media studies in the Faculty of Philology in Banja Luka. She also works in the Faculty of Philosophy in Tuzla and the Gender Studies programme at the University of Sarajevo. She is the author and director of two documentary films (Kontrapunkt za nju and Posao snova), and has published over 20 journal articles academic journals and one monograph: Diskurs, moć i međunarodna zajednica (Discourse, power and the international community).
Leigh Claire La Berge
"Debt in an Expanded Field"
March 14 / Humanities Centre L-3 @ 3:30 p.m.
Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. She has written on politics in the university setting, Slavoj Žižek, and the TV show The Wire, and is currently completing the book Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Form in Contemporary American Literary Cultures.
Eric Cazdyn, Danijela Majstorovic, and Leigh Clare La Berge will also be leading graduate student seminars on February 8, March 1 and March 15, respectively. Students from all departments are welcome to participate. Please contact Brent Bellamy (bbellamy@ualberta.ca) for information, readings, and to sign up.
New Directions in Culture, Theory, and Politics is sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, Department of English and Film Studies, and the Art Gallery of Alberta.