Please join the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago for a symposium on the ordinary, the subtle, the pernicious, in sum the “micro” dimensions of inequality, identity, feeling, and togetherness. Mutual Necessary Otherness will feature research talks by literary critics, sociologists, visual studies scholars, and music theorists, together revealing innovative concepts and methods for interpreting large issues of history and sociability that turn on minor gestures and details. Our symposium creates a space for all thinkers who study the undercurrents of social interaction in order to understand sedimented systems, knowledges, histories, and meaning.
Their symposium will draw out three key lines of inquiry:
- What is the dividing line between the “micro-“ and the “macro-“? How do we define the dynamic between “micro-” moments and “macro-“ categories of race, gender, sex, ability, and class? Is their relation one of part vs. whole? analogy? Allegory?
- What can studying micro-social interaction teach us about our political and historical moment? Is the “micro-” a unique site of the political? By contrast, does the focus on idiosyncratic dynamics and situated examples exhaust efforts to generalize, unify, liberate?
- What are our methods for analyzing the micro? What tools are at the disposal of humanists versus sociologists? Do our interpretative models slant toward the reification of broad social issues? What about particular, heterogenous cases of political difference?
AFRO's own, Professor Candice Jenkins will present her work:
1-2:15PM Candice M. Jenkins (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, African American Studies and English), “Sunlight, Moonlight, and the Breeze of Black Fugitivity”
Respondent: AE Stevenson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago