Forum for Research on Law, Politics, and the Humanities

I. Wednesday, October 6, 2010 
Book Discussion: Free Riding
by Richard Tuck (Harvard University Press, 2008)
Text is available at the UIC Bookstore, lower level

Why should anyone contribute to a joint enterprise if their contribution is tiny and they can just as easily “free ride” (i.e. get the benefit without making the sacrifice)? This is known as the “free rider problem.” Richard Tuck, Professor of Government at Harvard, has a distinctive take on this problem.

Tuck wonders whether this phenomenon of free riding is a timeless aspect of human nature or a recent, historically contingent one. He argues for the latter, showing that the notion would have seemed strange to people in the nineteenth century and earlier and that the concept only became accepted when the idea of perfect competition took hold in economics in the early twentieth century.

Tuck makes careful distinctions between the prisoner’s dilemma problem, threshold phenomena such as voting, and free riding. He analyzes the notion of negligibility, and shows some of the logical difficulties in the idea and how the ancient paradox of the sorites (how does the addition of another grain of wheat ever make a heap?) illustrates the difficulties.

Free Riding presents a bold challenge to the skeptical account of social cooperation so widely held today.

II. Thursday, November 18, 2010
Sandra Sufian, Medical History and Humanities, Department of Medical Education
and History of Disability, Department of Disability and Human Development, UIC
Work in Progress:  “Adoption Research: Pathologization and the Scientific Method”
Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

Sandra Sufian will present a working draft of a chapter of her book on the history of adoption, disability and pathology in America 1945-present. This paper-in-progress explores the ways in which adoption research–particularly studies about the psychopathology and IQ of adopted children– frames risk as disability and reflects larger social anxieties about mental and cognitive disabilities, dependency, illegitimacy and adoption as a way of forming family.

III. Rescheduled: April 05, 2011
Saidiya Hartman, Department of English, Columbia University
Public Lecture: “Wayward Lives and the Motion of History”

Professor Hartman’s major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is the author of“Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America”(Oxford University Press,1997) and “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). She has published essays on photography, film and feminism. She is beginning a new project on photography and ethics.

This event is part of the 2010-2011 Forum for Research on Law, Politics, and the Humanities series… Research in a range of disciplines has focused on institutional formations, legal structures, political rhetorics and social identities. This forum seeks to bring together scholars who approach these issues from a variety of perspectives. Meetings each year will be a mix of invited speakers, sessions focusing on UIC faculty work-in-progress, and discussions of agreed-upon texts.

Organized by Mark Canuel, English Department, and Stephen Engelmann, Political Science Department

IV. Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Lisa Freeman, Department of English, UIC
Work in Progress:“Performing the Body Public: The Gentlemen of the Inns of Court and James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace”

On February 3, 1634, just four days before William Prynne’s Star Chamber trial for his alleged attack on the King, the Queen, and the State in Histrio-Mastix:  The Players Scourge or Actors Tragaedie (1633), the lawyers of the four Inns of Court staged a magnificent, torch-lit procession through the streets of London.  Stunning as this spectacle was, it was not the only ‘shew’ that would take place that evening; for this procession was merely a prelude to James Shirley’s elaborately staged masque, The Triumph of Peace (1634), which the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court had commissioned for the occasion and would perform upon their arrival at the Banqueting Hall for the King and Queen.  While from a gross public relations perspective, it must have seemed particularly apropos for the lawyers to respond to Prynne’s allegedly seditious, antitheatrical diatribe with a visibly ostentatious display of theatricality, such a bald explanation hardly begins to account for the more subtle, strategic advantages that the lawyers secured for themselves when they decided to take up two of the most heavily symbolic and ritually-constrained forms of performance in the period:  a masque for a private, court audience and a public procession for the people through the streets of London.  By attending to the ways in which the entertainments they designed not only conformed to but also diverged from generic expectations, this paper illustrates both how the lawyers engaged with, and acted in response to, fundamental concerns in the period over the nature of sovereign power in the body politic and how they used the occasion to avouch common cause with the government of Charles I even as they articulated and publicized their separate political interests as, what I term, a substantial and independent body public.

I. Thursday, October 1, 2009 
Book Discussion: Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
by Ian Baucom (Duke University Press, 2005)
Text will be available at the UIC Bookstore, lower level

Thursday, October 1, 2009
3.00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo”. Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity.

II. Wednesday, October 21, 2009
UIC/Chicago-Kent Law and Society Symposium:
Scholars from across the disciplines at UIC and at Chicago-Kent College of Law meet in this symposium to discuss some central issues in political economy and the law.

Scholars from across the disciplines at UIC and at Chicago-Kent College of Law meet in this symposium to discuss some central issues in political economy and the law.

Moderators:
Walter Benn Michaels, UIC
Katharine Baker, Chicago-Kent College of Law

Speakers:
Bette Bottoms, UIC
“Psychological Perspectives on Race in Cases involving Child Victims and Offenders”

Stephen Engelmann, UIC
“Fairness, Efficiency, and the Making of Markets”

Nancy Marder, Chicago-Kent College of Law
“Theories of Juror Bias, Voir Dire and Jury Decision-Making”

Mark Rosen, Chicago-Kent College of Law
“The Constitutional Principle of Democratic Integrity: A Critical Re-examination of the Political Gerrymandering and Voter Identification Cases”

This program is free and open to the public.

III. Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University
Public Lecture: “Future Measures:  How to Calculate–for a World Without Oil?”

Timothy Mitchell is Professor of Arabic Studies at Columbia University. He is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity. He is author of Colonising Egypt, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity and numerous articles on topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His current research brings together the fields of STS (science and technology studies) and postcolonial theory in a project on “Carbon Democracy,” which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks.

IV. Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Nicholas Brown, Department of English, UIC
Work in Progress: “Reading Resistance: Three Options and a Choice of Numbers”

How are we to understand the movement of cultural forms across the surface of the globe when the political and economic relationships that structure such movement are understood to be unequal? The approach I will take here is to outline three approaches that explicitly take this problem as their starting point, before attempting to systematize them and draw some conclusions.

Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

I. Thursday, October 16, 2008 
Book Discussion : Democracy Past and Future, by Pierre Rosanvallon (Columbia University Press, 2007)
Text is available at the UIC Bookstore, lower level

Thursday, October 16, 2008
Democracy Past and Future is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon’s most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life.
One of Europe’s leading political thinkers, Rosanvallon proposes in these essays new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice, and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy’s trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon’s historical and philosophical approach examines the “pathologies” that have curtailed democracy’s potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. All in all, he adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy. Above all, he asks what democracy means when the people rule but are nowhere to be found.

Well known throughout Europe as a historian, political theorist, social critic, and public intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon was recently elected to a professorship at the Collège de France.

II. Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Bradley Greenburg , Department of English, Northeastern Illinois University
Work in Progress: “Virtue Reconciled to Pleasure: Historical Principles and Reformation Historiography in Shakespeare’s Rewriting of Foxe”
Paper to be distributed in advance.

Bradley Greenburg, Department of English,
Northeastern Illinois University

Wednesday, November 19, 2008 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

My paper argues that Shakespeare’s creation of the character we know as Falstaff, who was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, marks his disagreement with the kind of polemical history exemplified by John Foxe in his massive martyrology, Actes and Monuments. Foxe’s historiographic method provokes a dramatic response in the form of the fat knight who operates as a counter-ideological historical principle that reinscribes the textual complexity of historical discourse.

Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

III. Monday, February 23, 2009
Saba Mahmood, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Public Lecture: “Freedom of Expression and Moral Injury: Thinking Through the Danish Cartoon Controversy”

Saba Mahmood, Department of Anthropology,
University of California, Berkeley

Monday, February 23, 2009

Saba Mahmood’s research interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of secular modernity in postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005) and co-editor of Contested Polities: Religious Disciplines and Structures of Modernity with Nancy Reynolds(a special issue of Stanford Humanities Review, 5(1), 1995).

IV. Tuesday, April 14, 2009 
Amalia Pallares, , Departments of Latin American and Latino Studies and Political Science, UIC
Work in Progress: “Impossible Activism: Representations of the Family in the Immigrant Rights Movement”

Amalia Pallares, Departments of Latin American and Latino Studies and Political Science,
University of Illinois at Chicago

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

This paper analyzes some of the ways in which immigrant rights activists have relied on the issue of family separation to appeal for comprehensive immigration reform. I first discuss the reasons why activists have increasingly relied on the family frame to make their claims. Next, using specific case studies, I argue that these appeals, however, rely on constructions of family that can be simultaneously empowering and contradictory. Finally, I reflect on the political and theoretical implications of relying on family as a plural subjectivity.

Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

I. Thursday, October 4, 2007 
Book Discussion : Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity,
by Talal Asad (Stanford University Press, 2003)

Thursday, October 4, 2007 from 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

Opening with the provocative query “What might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.

Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the strangeness of the non-European world and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion), the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.

The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

II. Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Corey Capers, Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Workshop: “Black Voices/White Print: Towards a Genealogy of U.S. Public Blackness, 1764 – 1834.”

Thursday, October 4, 2007 from 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

Opening with the provocative query “What might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East.

Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the strangeness of the non-European world and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion), the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined.

The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

III. Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, Vanderbilt University
Public Lecture: “Due Process and Lethal Confinement.”

Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities,
Vanderbilt University

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

Due process–when it is due and how much–is crucial to the lives of those restrained in their liberty. Yet in the current war on terror, no protection is more threatened. Among those labeled ” the worst of the worst ” especially offshore at Guantanamo Bay, the innocent fare far worse than those who have been charged with terrorist acts. A history of these conditions of disfigured personhood and civil incapacity recalls the legacy of due process in slave and prison law.

IV. Tuesday, April 1, 2008 
Sophia Mihic , Department of Political Science and Philosophy, Northeastern Illinois University
Workshop: “Interpretation, Political Theory and the Hegemony of Normative Theorizing”

Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

I. Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Book Discussion: “The Philosopher and His Poor, by Jacques Ranci’re”,
Duke University Press, 2004.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall
TEXT AVAILABLE IN UIC BOOKSTORE, LOWER LEVEL

What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them?

Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor, (1983: trans. 2004), meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role-sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. This study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do nothing else than their own work. It offers readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor.

This discussion is part of Forum For Research on Law, Politics, and The Humanities, organized by Mark Canuel (English) and Stephen Engelmann (Political Science).  Research in a range of disciplines has focused on institutional formations, legal structures, political rhetorics and social identities. This forum seeks to bring together scholars who approach these issues from a variety of perspectives. The four meetings each year will be a mix of invited speakers, sessions focusing on UIC faculty work-in-progress, and discussions of agreed-upon texts.

Text available at UIC Bookstore, lower level.

II. Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Ellen McClure, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Workshop: “What’s Wrong With ‘Absolutism’ (And Why We Should Care)”

Forum for Research on Law, Politics, and the Humanities

Workshop: “What’s Wrong With ‘Absolutism’ (And Why We Should Care)”

Ellen McClure, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese,
University of Illinois at Chicago

Wednesday, November 29, 2006 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

While the concept of ‘absolutism’ has been challenged by historians for some time, it retains a certain cachet in literature and cultural studies. I argue that the term ‘divine right’ better characterizes seventeenth-century French efforts to legitimize the monarchy, and that an appreciation of the complexities inherent in ‘divine right’ allows a different picture of the siècle classique to emerge. I also hope to discuss the implications of the resurgence of divine right vocabulary in today’s political discourse.

III. Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Wendy Brown, Political Science, University of California at Berkeley
Lecture: “Porous Sovereignty / Walled Democracy”

IV. Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Philip Schofield, Director, Bentham Project
History of Legal and Political Thought, University College, London
Workshop: “Jeremy Bentham and the British Intellectual Response to the French Revolution”
To register and to receive the paper, please contact huminst@uic.edu

Paper to be distributed in advance.

I. Thursday, September 29, 2005
Book Discussion: “Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity”, by Timothy Mitchell

II. Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Timothy Holbrook, Assistant Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law
Workshop:” Curing Heterosexuality: Moral Signals and the Potential for Expressive Harms in Patent Law “

Timothy Holbrook, Assistant Professor of Law,
Chicago-Kent College of Law

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

The genetic revolution has lead to numerous discoveries regarding the influence of genes over human behavior. What role, then, does the patent system play in this revolution, particularly for potential genetic discoveries relating to behaviors or characteristics of marginalized groups, such as gays, the deaf, and high-functioning autistics? Specifically, can the award of a patent by the Federal government communicate the message that these groups are pathologically flawed and should be “cured”?.

III. Tuesday, March 7, 2006
David Theo Goldberg, Director, University of California Humanities Research Institute
Public Lecture: “On Racial Europeanization”

IV. Monday, April 17, 2006
Mark Canuel, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago
Workshop:” The Two Abolitions”

Forum for Research on Law, Politics, and the Humanities

Workshop: “The Two Abolitions “

Mark Canuel, Department of English,
University of Illinois at Chicago

Monday, April 17, 2006 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall

“This paper, the last chapter of a larger project on punishment in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, investigates the relationship between the abolition of slavery and the abolition of the death penalty. It argues that these interconnected discourses ultimately worked to reveal a disturbing truth about the slave’s freedom: the freedom of slaves, frequently analogized to the criminal saved from the gallows, depended precisely upon their subjection to lenient yet rigorous punishment.”

Paper to be distributed in advance. Contact huminst@uic.edu

Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Book Discussion: Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.

Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Stanley Fish, Dean Emeritus, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences;
Professor of English; Chair, Religious Studies Committee, University of Illinois at Chicago
Workshop: “How Hobbes Works”

Friday, February 4, 2005 
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell, Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College
Public Lecture: “On Lawful Lawlessness: Clemency in the Killing State”

Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Sharon Holland, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago
Workshop: “Death in Black and White: A Reading of Marc Forster’s ‘Monster’s Ball”

For additional information, please contact Mark Canuel (mcanuel@uic.edu) or Stephen Engelmann (sengelma@uic.edu).