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Strategic Working Groups

Stage 2:CALL FOR APPLICATIONS for participation in the Strategic Working Group on
“Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits”

The Townsend Center is pleased to announce a Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits for 2008-2009. The directors of the group will be Charles Briggs (Anthropology) and Deniz Göktürk (German)

Who is Eligible?

All ladder-faculty members

Application Deadline:

Friday, March 14, 2008

Program Details:

We are now seeking to identify faculty who will participate in the Group at weekly meetings to be held in one semester during the 2008-2009 academic year. The Townsend Center provides funds for one course release per faculty, which will be funded at the Assistant Professor II level, approximately $12,500.

The purpose of the Strategic Working Groups program is to provide both humanities faculty and faculty working in humanities-related fields with a framework for thinking about curricular innovations that grow out of new research areas. The program encourages the selected groups to translate their work into courses, programs, and other concrete and ongoing activities that involve faculty and students at all levels.

See below for a description of this year’s Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits. or click here to download a Word document description.

For questions about the program, please contact Harris Kornstein at 510/ 643-9670 or harriskornstein@berkeley.edu.


Application Guidelines:

Ladder-rank faculty interested in participating should send a letter of application explaining how the topic relates to their past and/or expected future teaching and research and what they would expect to contribute to the group. Please note any commitments and/or preferences for both the fall and spring semesters (as the group has yet to be scheduled). Please include an updated CV.  All applicants are expected to have secured the endorsement of the department chair regarding the release time.

Applications should be addressed to Director Anthony J. Cascardi and mailed, delivered, or emailed to:

Harris Kornstein, Fellowships Coordinator   
Townsend Center for the Humanities
220 Stephens Hall #2340
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2340

Email: townsend_applications@berkeley.edu

 

Applications must be received by the application deadline: Friday, March 14, 2008, by 5:00 pm.


Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits – 2008-2009

In a world that is transnationally connected through migration, markets, and media, our intellectual maps, cultural policies, and academic departmentalization still rely heavily on categories and labels of identification—defined not in terms of interdependence but territorial fixation, national origin, and “authentic” heritage. Recent critiques suggest that our attempts to think beyond national borders and fixed social domains have been shaped by naïve notions of global and local, of flow and circulation, and of how cultural forms are produced, owned, and valued. When sites of production, translation, and reception are dispersed world wide, each shaped by global/local assemblages of language, interest, and capital, how do we adequately document the complex ways that objects, practices, capital, and bodies circulate between them?

The Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits will bring into conversation researchers who are studying shifting and emerging objects. The goal, however, is not to compare notes but to collaboratively discover new ways of thinking beyond efforts to “update” concepts and scholarly practices. The problem goes beyond disjunctures between the pace of change in the world and the snail-like pace of “academic time.” The digitization of scholarly writing and its fusion with other modes of knowledge production and exchange over the Internet suggests how deeply corporations, states, and NGOs are influenced by their readings of academic writing. How can we replace established boundary-work practices that promote the illusion of autonomy between disciplines and between “the academy” and “the real world” with intimate understandings of unequal exchanges of knowledge between social domains, thereby generating new ways of enabling scholars to handle the complexities of the twenty-first century?

A focus on channels of circulation, and valuation is common to research projects in our various disciplines (such as Anthropology, Folklore, Music, Film and Media Studies, and Literary Studies in Dutch, French, German, and other languages). Discussions will explore both differences and unexpected points of intersection in how we deal with material, practices, and conventions (voice, image, music, style, genre, audience) in our respective disciplines, looking critically at scholarly narratives in relationship to the cultural forms and social relations that they purport to represent or engage.  Questions of circulation concern us in terms of shifting technologies, locations, subject positions, and forms of capitalism and how they are imbricated in debates regarding area studies. We hope to move beyond the current scholarly tendency of simply replacing problematic notions of “globalization” with equally reified and totalizing understandings of “circulation." Instead, we propose a dynamic rethinking of the ways in which scholarship, policy-making, and cultural practices construe local specificity, national cultures, and global scenarios.

Possible Topics for Group Discussion

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