Conference Schedule
9:30 am
Breakfast
10:00 am
Welcome
Laura Hoeger, PhD Student, Visual Arts, UCSD
10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Panel 1 : Spaces
Moderator: Leah Cluff, PhD Student, Visual Arts, UCSD
Sarah Cluff
Anthropology, Indiana University Bloomington
The Unacknowledged Role of Government in Development: Public Service Provision in The Gambia
The Gambia’s years of independence not plagued by economic difficulties have since been lost as the country returned to dependence upon foreign entities. The development programs the nation implemented in response to economic crises have yet create sustainable growth, as is the case with much of the rest of Africa. Is this process of development a collective right of the world’s people to follow predetermined patterns of growth offered by international aid agencies; is it a collective right of developing governments to improve technologies and infrastructures in order to make their way into the world market; or is it the individuals’ right to demand development on the collective front, to utilize such organizations within the public domain to in turn affect their own private spheres?
Cara Chang
English (Cultural Studies in Asia and Pacific), University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Orality and Literacy at Kukaniloko
As Cristina Bacchilega asserts in Legendary Hawaii and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism, "In most, if not all Hawaiian mo'olelo (connected story), "place" situates events, heroes, tellers and listeners, memories and emotions in ways that connect the creation and transformation of landmarks with familial or genealogical relations", this paper explores the way in which orality and literacy have been inscribed on Kukaniloko, a sacred Hawaiian historical, cultural, and astronomical landscape found in Wahiawa, Hawaii, located in central O'ahu. Through the consultation of interviews, literature, and newspapers, in relation to the foundational scholarly works of Walter Ong, Ruth Finnegan, etc., I briefly explain the importance and history of Kukaniloko, elucidate how oral tradition is connected to the place, while uncovering some of the stories tied to the rocks, and analyze how Kukaniloko has been translated and portrayed in print in the past. Because of the impact oral tradition has played in Kukaniloko, this paper should be read in conjunction with the video I have produced. While this essay is a compilation of previous written works gathered on Kukaniloko, I also bring to light stories told from a non-Western perspective, while elevating and upholding the power and significance of the oral tradition in a society where print is hegemonic.
Faculty Response: Dr Kyong Park
Questions and Panel Discussion
12:00 pm - 1:00pm
Lunch
1:00 pm -2:30 pm
Panel 2 : Discourses
Moderator: Micha Cárdenas, MFA Candidate, Visual Arts, UCSD
Danicar Mariano
Asia Pacific Studies, University of San Francisco
Filipina Subaltern Counterpublics in Cyberspace: Analyzing Downelink as an Online Social Networking for Filipina Lesbians
To avoid the pitfall of viewing the Internet in overly optimistic or pessimistic terms, it is necessary that we demystify this vastly unexplored tool by critically studying the complex and mobile cultures found there. But although many studies have tackled the impact and use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), few discourses really deal with how they intersect with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Moreover, there is a dire lack of scholarship on new ICTs outside the west. To fill this gap, this work hopes to problematize the Eurocentric and heterosexist assumptions of this masculinist new media by looking at how Filipina lesbians, doubly discriminated for their race and sexual orientation, are claiming spaces within it as their own. It interrogates how Filipina lesbians are constructing their identity, community and sexuality in Downelink, a social networking site for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders (LGBTs). It also looks at whether Downelink is a site that enables legitimate lesbian feminist counterculture and revolt ultimately leading to the greater question of whether or not LGBTs are creating effective counterpublics online as well as how. I focus my study on Filipina lesbians since I wish to explore Ann Travers’ assertion in her essay “Parallel Subaltern Feminist Counterpublics in Cyberspace.” Travers posits that new ICTs provide women from developing countries with unique opportunities to both access and create alternative counterpublics, while feminist on-line activity also contains the potential for public spaces with more inclusive tendencies, revealing a necessary “globalization from below” to counter the hegemony of global capitalism.
Karen L. Ishizuka, Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles
and
Tadashi Nakamura, Social Documentation, University of California Santa Cruz
Can I Say One More Thing? Frames from Ethnocommunications Film Practice
The qualitative method variously called life story, oral history, life history and personal narrative seeks to capture the complexity and richness of the felt quality of the lived experience within its social, cultural, political and historical milieu. When conducted with digital video technology and in tandem with a counter-hegemonic film practice we call Ethnocommunications that, in the tradition of Third Cinema, is a liberative cinema of self-representation, the resulting visual life stories provide layered, nuanced and compelling visual evidence that mediates histories and memories, the personal and the political, hegemony and resistance, the past and the present. Illustrated with clips from a documentary film in progress that we are producing, this presentation will explore the capacity of Ethnocommunications theory and practice to document lost or endangered histories, preserve collective memories and personal meanings and present dynamic moments of being and becoming.
Faculty Response: Dr Norman Bryson
Questions and Panel Discussion
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Panel 3: Spaces
Moderator: Eduardo Navas, PhD Candidate, Visual Arts, UCSD
Fabian Cereijido, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
From the Revolution to the Systematicity of the Signifier, the Left Goes to the Scene of Squalor
The current engagement of the public sphere by political art in Latin America feeds on revised notions of subjectivity, political agency and temporality, notions that have been greatly affected by the ongoing revision of ideology, universality and teleology and the long crisis (in the region) of the revolutionary projects of yesteryear. Two imperatives challenge these practices: One is the need to maximize and localize the specificity of the engaged population: socially inclined art is attempting to be sensitive to matters of locality so as not to reduce and ventriloquize the disenfranchised (like traditional Marxism purportedly did). A guiding principle of this tendency is performativity. The second one is to minimize specificity in terms of meaning and outcome: politically inclined art practices try to avoid closure, concrete promises and the imposition of reductive meta-narratives, calling attention to the "constructed" nature of subjectivity and the fertile versatility of language. A guiding principle of this tendency is polysemics. By comparing selected works by Ricardo Dominguez with a piece by the collective Allora and Calzadilla and a "Social Sculpture" by Tercerounquinto, I wish to address what happens to the determination, limits, affect, and finality of subjectivity when performativity and polysemics are called to keep totalization in check.
Eva J. Friedberg, Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
Experiments in Environment: Counterculture and the West Coast Avant-garde (1966-1968)
In the summers of 1966 and 1968 Ann and Lawrence Halprin led a mixed group of dancers and environmental designers in the San Francisco Bay Area through a series of multi-sensory workshops, titled “Experiments in Environment.” The objective was to carefully explore the body’s relationship to both the natural and built environments while simultaneously seeking to engage participants with questions of collectivity and community. In a time when “the street” had become a place for civic action and public protest, the Halprins were inspired to explore the possibilities of movement, action and interaction as they related to community participation and the expanded possibilities of a public culture. This paper will address the activities of the summer workshops and their emergence out of a specifically West coast 1960s counterculture. They will be considered in relationship to the East coast avant-garde work of Allan Kaprow and John Cage, artists similarly challenging the conventional relationships of artistic practice and production. Finally, the paper will address the ways in which “Experiments in Environment” changed Lawrence Halprin’s own architectural practice and further encouraged his efforts to include public citizens in the design process of urban planning and redevelopment.
Response: Olivier Debroise, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Questions and Panel Discussion
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Keynote Address: Susan Buck-Morss, Cornell University
6:00 pm
Closing and Reception
