Worldy Compositions:
Humans and Non-Humans in the Making of Global Publics
Georgetown Global Humanities Faculty Research Seminar Series, 2015
“Worldly Compositions” is an innovative platform for research exchanges that explore qualitative research methodologies in a transnational context, beyond humanistic inquiry focused solely on human agents or state actors. The seminar series focuses on three key areas—MEDIA, MUSEUMS, and MATTER—where scholars are contributing to new practices and understandings of global public cultures and political structures that involve humans and nonhumans, from paintings to drones, satellites to nuclear waste.
SEMINAR 1: MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURES
Media, in its earliest uses, was an “intervening agency, means or instrument,” and only later came to mean “mass communication.” Drawing upon the etymology of the term, this seminar seeks to understand how media acts materially in changing transnational contexts, insisting on the ways “mass communications” are made possible through social and technical infrastructures. In this way, we seek to examine the underpinnings of global communications through case studies that highlight how media comes to be shorthand for diverse and changing networks of humans and nonhumans. We then ask how media infrastructure might be used to analyze these relations and the power dynamics they incorporate.
Featuring Presenters: Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan); Lisa Parks (University of California-Santa Barbara); Caetlin Benson-Allot (Georgetown University); Katherine Chandler (Georgetown University)
SEMINAR 2: DECOLONIZING MUSEUMS
Museums have become increasingly animated over the past two decades: ever more tightly integrated in tourist economies, they have remade themselves into affecting, interactive environments for experiencing material culture. They have also become important venues for cultural recognition and diversity education. Bringing together expertise from different fields, this seminar asks how new theoretical approaches and museum practices manage to “activate” objects for projects of historical reckoning and repair. What institutional histories drive or impede such activations?
Featuring Presenters: Margaret Werry (University of Minnesota); Andrew Zimmerman (George Washington University); Nancy Bercaw (Smithsonian Institute); Katrin Sieg (Georgetown University)
SEMINAR 3: ACTIVE MATTER
Continual economic, ecological, and political crises—from financial crash to oil spill, earthquake to ebola—underscore a need to reflect on the active nature of matter in human affairs. Investigating material exchanges and the interventions of nature, artifacts, and apparatuses within global political economy and culture questions assumptions about what is human/humanity; it also challenges political orderings reliant upon personification, nationalization, immunity, or rights. This workshop considers the efficacy of material ecologies across different scales and arenas of social action, from international law or architecture, to everyday objects or the human body. How does a more “materials-oriented” arts and sciences prompt new ways of doing politics and ethics, and new understandings of participation and what constitutes a “public”? How might a (non-positivist) materials-focused approach to international affairs precipitate more worldly understandings of citizenship, security, harm, and intervention—from peacekeeping mission to environmental justice, biomedical vaccination to cultural diplomacy?
Featuring Distinguished Presenters: Paul Jackson (University of Delaware); Laurie Palmer (University of California-Santa Cruz); Mubbashir Rizvi (Georgetown University); Shiloh Krupar (Georgetown University)
“Worldly Compositions: Humans and Nonhumans in the Making of Global Publics”
The imperative of “worldliness” is a cornerstone of Global Humanities initiatives, namely the ability to think critically and approach complex global problems as citizens of the world. Political theorist Hannah Arendt used the term amor mundi (“love of the world”) to characterize the human condition as an unfinished project: Whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it is a decision that ultimately determines the meaning of human existence itself. Adopting Arendt’s framework as a methodology for investigating the role of the humanities in global affairs, the “Worldly Compositions” seminar series aims to develop a wider sense of human affairs and global knowledge and action through two interconnected research goals: First, the seminars will explore the intersection of research and qualitative methodologies in a transnational context. The seminars feature an interdisciplinary forum of scholars who have taken up the call for worldliness by challenging conventional ways of doing and presenting research, re-arranging fields of knowledge, and opening up new areas of humanistic engagement.
Second, the seminar series will forward a research agenda that contributes to new understandings and practices of “making publics.” We open up Arendt’s formulation of the human condition to underscore how amor mundi gestures toward a new sense of the public as something that is enacted. Encompassing a worldwide network of relations, the participatory aspects of this public formation extend beyond the human. Worldly action is possible through increasingly global material exchanges and networks. Faculty research shared in the seminar series will investigate how social institutions, knowledge structures, technologies, actors and objects are mobilized in the shaping and transforming of political alliances. Researching material relations and networks among humans and nonhumans—from paintings to drones, satellites to nuclear waste—troubles categorical assumptions about science, international affairs, art and politics, and emphasizes the transnational materialization of culture. The seminars will address the disciplinary limitations of humanistic inquiry focused solely on human agents and will de-center state actors as the primary unit of analysis within international relations, to foster twenty-first-century transnational public cultures and political structures.
The collaborative and synthetic format for the seminars will activate new configurations of research around three key areas of ‘worldly composition”: media, museums, and matter. Each of the three seminars will be convened by core faculty within the Culture and Politics Program, and will feature three other faculty participants representing a mix of disciplines from the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The seminars are designed to be interactive workshops with pre-circulated papers. The four participants on each panel will be asked to contribute a short essay (1500 – 2000 words) that explores how their current research contributes to the theme of the seminar. These short texts will be circulated in advance of the panel. At the event, panelists will share brief five-minute summaries of their work—as well as responses to the entire panel synthetically. Each seminar will last ninety minutes, enabling time to develop conversation among the panelists and seminar attendees. **Students are welcome to attend and participate. The seminars are intended to maximize conversation and interaction among the faculty and any participating students.