Throughout the academic year, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) to the next seminar of the Fall 2021 quarter, happening next Thursday, November 11 at 12-1 PM US CT. Professor Héctor Beltrán (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will give a presentation entitled “Making Latinx Makers.”

Abstract: Popular “diversity in tech” discourse proposes ways to encourage “different” participants to join events aimed at empowering these communities through technology. Here I examine ethnographically how members of racialized groups are called upon to manage these differences themselves within maker and hacker collectives. To explore constructions of Latinidad within makerspaces I bring together scholarship on prototypes and participatory models with conceptual work on incompleteness advanced by Latinx Studies scholars.

Héctor Beltrán is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his background in computer science to understand how the technical aspects of computing intersect with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScvzEbT1vQPJltIjXlDq2luFGdMJTtvCgd5WldPE68TA0HubA/viewform

Learn more information on the Center's website: https://ldm.soc.northwestern.edu

AI (Artificial Indigeneity): re-mattering Native America in an age of technological settling

David Shane Lowry, Distinguished Fellow, History MIT

Tuesday October 12, 3:30-5:00pm

Room E51-095

The Association of Puerto Ricans at MIT, Latino Cultural Center, and Office of Multicultural Programs present:

La Borinqueña book exhibition and talk with author, creator, graphic novelist, and illustrator, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez.

Wed. Sept. 29^th at 7pm

Room W20-307

Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez is the writer and creator of the critically acclaimed and best-selling graphic novel La Borinqueña.

Learn the story of the superhero La Borinqueña, a student at Columbia University named Marisol Rios De La Luz majoring in Earth and Environmental Sciences.  During her study abroad trip to Puerto Rico, Marisol makes a discovery that gives her superhuman strength while exploring the island's caves, transforming her into La Borinqueña.

Co-sponsored by: Anthropology, Hermanas Unidas, Institute Community & Equity Office, MIT Libraries, Women’s and Gender Studies.

Wounding Wall: Infrastructure, Injury, and Rescue on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Ieva Jusionyte, Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology, Brown University

Tuesday, September 28, 3:30-5:00pm

Room E51-095

This seminar is part of the Making the unknown knowable seminar series. Click here to read more

Abstract

How do oceanographers apprehend ocean waves? This presentation draws on anthropological work I undertook among wave scientists in the United States to argue that what oceanographers take ocean waves to be has been strongly imprinted by the techniques, technologies, and media — maritime, photographic, filmic, information theoretic — through which waves have come to be known. I offer an account of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted on board the FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), a seagoing vessel managed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in La Jolla, California. FLIP is a singular vessel, one that, once at sea, can “flip” 90 degrees into a vertical position —with all the instrumentation inside swiveling correspondingly—to become a stable platform from which to measure wave action. Moving from an examination of the contemporary use of infrared and laser imaging to study waves from FLIP, I place the platform within a longer history of wave science, reaching back into the Cold War, when ocean observation projects were conditioned by nuclear-age American maritime expansion, particularly in the Pacific. I then flip to the recent present, as scientists turn from understanding waves not only as a kind of infrastructure for maritime networks, but also as avatars of anthropogenic climate change.

Join via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/92462817781

Please note: a passcode is required. Email makingtheunknownknowable@gmail.com to request it.

Christine Walley hosts MIT Anthropology Program Talk on "Caste of Merit" with author Ajantha Subramanian, Dwai Banerjee from MIT STS will be the discussant.

from Harvard University Press "Caste of Merit" webpage:

"How the language of “merit” makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India.

Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post‐racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post‐caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions."

The Office of the Associate Provost for International Activities and the MIT Africa Steering Committee invites you to an online panel discussion which will feature leading voices from the African continent and the African diaspora who are engaged in critical public discourses around race and reform across diverse African contexts and different media.

Agenda:
12:30p – 1:30p Panel discussion
1:30p – 2:00p breakout sessions with panelists (open to MIT community only)

Video Release: Friday, April 2, 2021 / 9:00am EST

Live Q&A: Monday, April 5, 2021 / 5:00–6:00pm EST Livestreamed Q&A

How do tools in computation shape the models that scientists, artists, and engineers make of the world and universe?

Part of “Unfolding Intelligence: The Art and Science of Contemporary Computation” -  third in a series of MIT CAST symposia that bring together artists, scientists, engineers, and humanists from a variety of disciplines to address topics of common concern in areas of rapidly evolving research and urgent social relevance.

Register to participate in the Symposium

ACMS Virtual Panel Series: “Twentieth-Century Mongolia”

Title: Twentieth-Century Mongolia (Register here)

The March Virtual Speaker Series panel will focus on the twentieth century Mongolia. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Marissa Smith, and have three speakers presenting on the following topics:

• “Science in Socialist Mongolia: An Introduction” by Dr. Morris Rossabi (Columbia University)
• “Why Revolution Did Not End: International Relations and the Mongolian Women” by Dr. Manduhai Buyandelger (MIT)
• “The Soviet Hero in Post-War Mongolian Literature” by Dr. Simon Wickhamsmith (Rutgers University)

Tackling legacies of Europe’s colonial past in the wake of Black Lives Matter

The Justice Now? symposium gathers scholars, activists, and policymakers from Europe, North America, and Africa to examine current movements for justice for the impacts of Europe’s colonial past in Africa in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through virtual panels and roundtable discussions over the course of five days, speakers in areas such as transitional justice, racial justice, museum, legal, colonial and decolonial studies will discuss experiences and share strategies in the development of anti-racist and decolonial movements in and across their respective contexts. The symposium is convened by M. Amah Edoh and the Anthropology department at MIT in collaboration with international human rights NGO Avocats Sans Frontières and the European Network Against Racism.

Attendance is free, but registration and respect of rules of conduct are required.

Please direct inquiries to conveners at justicenowsymposium@gmail.com.

Please join the Association of Central Eurasian Students (ACES) at Indiana University for the keynote address of the 27th Annual ACES Conference, "Elections, Virtual Reality, and Climate Change: What Can Anthropology of Mongolia Offer?" given by Dr. Manduhai Buyandelger, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Amy Moran-Thomas on Covid-19 as post-truth disease. 

Harvard Friday Morning Seminar. 

Details and registration here. (advance registration required).

Please note: This event requires a password to attend. Please email Sadeq Rahimi (sadeq_rahimi@hms.harvard.edu) to receive the meeting password.

What are some unexplored ways that online environments can help us rethink “the archive”? How might i-doc storytelling tools expand what an archive can be as well as public engagement with history itself?

Manduhai Buyandelger on "Trading History for Sheep: Memory, Migration, and Buryat-Mongol Identities through Shamanic Practices." talk sponsored by Center for East Asian Studies at UPenn.

More details TBA.

Access the recording of this event here

Join MIT Anthropology for a virtual lecture and discussion

Co-sponsored by MIT History and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)

A conversation with Celia Lowe and Heather Paxson

Join Amy Moran-Thomas and LACIS for their Lunchtime Lecture Series: she will present research from her book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic which ethnographically explores issues of “planetary health” and debility.

Registration is encouraged, full details at https://lacis.wisc.edu/event/lacis-spring-lecture-series-2020-03-24

The concept of microbiopolitics means to call attention to how the governance of human social life may take microbial life into account.

In this talk, Heather Paxson will provide an overview of the microbiopolitical terms of debate in the United States over safe means of food production (taking as her case study raw-milk cheese), juxtaposing this with a different set of (micro)biopolitics at stake in the metabolic regulation of the national food supply through food import restrictions. Registration required, more info at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/29360

Amy Moran-Thomas on REPAIR WORK: What Diabetic Limb Salvage Reveals about an Overlooked Epidemic

Part of the Global Health Colloquium Series Hosted by Princeton University's Global Health Program at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Register here

Héctor Beltrán will be giving a talk on October 23rd from 11:30am - 12:45pm on "Code Work: Thinking with the System in México” as part of Charles Babbage Institute's "Just Code: Power, Inequality, and the Global Political Economy of IT" Symposium taking place Oct. 23 - 24.

The symposium is free - registration is required. Register here: https://justcode.cbi.umn.edu/home.