Spring 2008 Disciplinary Innovation Grants

“The Historical and Contemporary City”

The study of cities is an area of emerging interdisciplinary activity, reflected on campus in the Global Metropolitan Studies Initiative and in the Department of Anthropology (which is considering a special concentration on cities), as well as in the College of Environmental Design and the Information School. This thread introduces students to historical and other approaches to the city as well as to a variety of (inter)disciplinary methodologies.

Among the many questions that the study of cities raises are those of relationship: between time and space; center and margins; national, ethnic, and urban identities; mapping and narrative; everyday life and material culture; all of these relational questions engage such topics as modernity, modernism, geography of power (class, ethnicity, and gender), representations, visual culture. So if a student chooses to follow this thread, s/he will be exposed to the study of history and modern theory defined by a topic of global significance, yet one providing special focus for the student’s undergraduate learning experience at Berkeley outside the major/minor.

A sampling of departmental offerings at UC Berkeley reveals a wide range of city courses that can be linked by a thread. These include courses on European cities in Classics and History, and on North American cities in departments as diverse as Geography, English, and Public Health. There are also more general city courses that emphasize a particular approach such as the city as text (“Reading Chinese Cities,” in East Asian Languages and Cultures) and the city as chronotope (“The Age of the City,” in History).

“Cultural Forms in Transit”

The course thread on “Cultural Forms in Transit,” co-directed by Charles Briggs (Anthropology) and Deniz Göktürk (German and Film Studies), arises from the need to rethink the ethnocentric framing of culture in the fields of anthropology, folkloristics, ethnomusicology, national philologies, area studies, and globalization studies. In a world transnationally connected through migration, markets, and media, our intellectual maps, cultural policies, and academic departmentalization still rely heavily on categories and labels of identification that are defined not in terms of interdependence but territorial fixation, national origin, and “authentic” heritage.

The team is made up of interdisciplinary group of faculty who are already doing cutting-edge research and teaching on transnational connections in the fields of Anthropology, Folkloristics, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Music. Together are developing ideas and resources on such topics as the global circulation and valorization of aesthetic forms, performances of ethnicity and national identity, multilingualism and archives of cultural memory, digital media and new forms of deterritorialized spectatorship.

Although individually faculty at Berkeley already focus on the close analysis of cinema, music, literature, and popular narratives, this project promises to open new dialogues among them from a transnational perspective.  Under the leadership of Göktürk and Briggs, the group Is addressing the deep epistemological and social connections among these fields by drawing attention to the forms in which they circulate transnationally.  Their project hinges on the views that the forms of cultural circulation are value-laden and that value can be made or reduced in relation to the forms in which cultural materials circulate. 

Other faculty who are participating are Jocelyne Guilbault (Music), Candace Slater, (Spanish & Portuguese) and Jeroen Dewulf (German/Dutch).  As part of its work, the group is reviewing descriptions of all existing Berkeley courses relevant to this thread and compiling materials for a course thread web presence.