In Residence - Fall 2009 | Spring 2009 | Fall 2007 | Fall 2006

FELLOWS IN RESIDENCE - SPRING 2009

UCHRI was pleased to host the "Speculative Globalities" residential research group during Spring 2009 (March 16, 2009 - June 12, 2009), convened by Bishnupriya Ghosh, English, UC Santa Barbara and Bhaskar Sarkar, Film and Media, UC Santa Barbara.

Participants:
Aimee Bahng, English, Dartmouth College
Cesare Casarino, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
Bishnupriya Ghosh, English, UC Santa Barbara, Convener
Colin Milburn, English, UC Davis
Geeta Patel, Middle East and South Asian Studies and Women and Gender Studies,
University of Virginia
Rita Raley, English, UC Santa Barbara
Bhaskar Sarkar, Film and Media, UC Santa Barbara, Co-Organizer
Sudipta Sen, History, UC Davis 

Group Proposal

Project Overview
Beginning with the premise that uncertainty is the only certitude of being in contemporary globalities, we propose to develop its logic more fully. A statistical logic having to do with unknown or unstable states, lack of information, and the tasks of apprehension and prediction, uncertainty refers to a situation where the number and nature of all possible states are unknown. Hence it can be a particularly useful critical logic for what remains invisible, unknown, and unthought in our present confrontations with global phenomena.

New global phenomena (e.g. yoga, bird flu, cellular robotics) in constant flux direct a rethinking of existing categories, established genealogies, fixed epistemological pathways, and available vocabularies. To follow the entangled circuitry of present global forms requires a radical openness to intervention from other epistemologies and, ideally, collaborative interdisciplinary investigation. We could think of such radical openness as a critical habit—informed by uncertainty—as reasoned but imaginative speculation.

The focus of the research group is to analyze multi-leveled global phenomena through the lenses of risk and uncertainty. What kinds of globalities are conjured in examining each phenomenon? What remains invisible, recessed? The corollary task is to rethink ways in which we can know, even recognize, such phenomena. Uncertainty approaches technological diffusions, pandemics, or drug use as global flows whose fluctuating states demand constant revision of existing intellectual paradigms; the wiring of genealogies in new combinations; historically and regionally comparative perspectives; and committed interdisciplinarity—if not a new vocabulary. More

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