Social Theory's Spring Lecture Speakers Focus on 'The Archive'
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 13, 2017) — The University of Kentucky Committee on Social Theory hosts public lectures and faculty presentations throughout the academic year, including lecture series each fall and each spring, that give the public access to lectures by international scholars visiting the university campus.
The College of Arts and Sciences’ noteworthy Social Theory Spring Lecture Series is created by a teaching team. Each of the instructors of the team invites an esteemed academic to lecture on a topic that intersects with both social theory and with the topic of that semester's course theme.
This spring’s theme is “The Archive,” and team members include Melissa Adler of the School of Library and Information Science; Mónica Díaz of the Department of Hispanic Studies and Department of History; James Ridolfo of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies; and Richard Schein of the Department of Geography.
This Spring Lecture Series schedule includes:
Kimberly Christen, Washington State University
“Sovereignty in Practice: Digital Archives and Technologies of Protest”
2 p.m., Feb. 17
William T. Young Library Auditorium
Archives have their origins in assertions of state power. Colonialism thrived on the simultaneous fiction of the erasure of natives from the landscape and their memorialization in the archival memory of the nation. Current technologies shine a light on the long history of documentation and discovery used to uphold and validate violence, removal and conquest. Christen will examine how community digital archives, archivists as activists, and the practices of local archival documentation undo this colonial erasure through the purposeful use of technologies of protest.
Jorge Camizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin
“On Archives, Imperial Historiographies, and Forgotten Epistemologies”
2 p.m., March 10
William T. Young Library Auditorium
Michelle Caswell, University of California, Los Angeles
“Past Imperfect: Imagining Our Way Out of Annihilation in Archives”
2 p.m., April 14
William T. Young Library Auditorium
All Social Theory lectures are free and open to the public. The spring lecture series is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences; the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies; and the Special Collections Research Center of UK Libraries.