Mike Chin (Classics) is an Associate Professor of Classics at UC Davis, also working as a Bay-Area-based multimedia artist. His academic area of specialization is the intellectual history of the later Roman Empire. His most recent book, Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe, is forthcoming from UC Press in 2024.
"Diocletian: A Reckless Autobiography"
Diocletian: A Reckless Autobiography combines a short, illustrated, public-facing monograph, multimedia installation, and object-theatre-based graphic art. The project is based on the life of the Roman emperor Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305 CE, and on the legends surrounding him. These legends existed across Roman, Egyptian, North African, Iranian, Eastern and Northern European traditions, and touch on religious traditions from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as ancient Mediterranean polytheism, Zoroastrianism and its variants. Stories about Diocletian have been used in modern creations of queer iconography and in conservative monotheisms, in racializing orientalisms and in idealized masculinities. The historical and affective meanings attached to this multi-dimensional figure call for a multivocal, multimedia, and experimental form of historical representation. The project thus experimentally combines traditional historical research with a variety of artistic and performance genres to create a nuanced, sensory historical analysis, accounting for the ways that the distant past is recreated in contemporary anxieties and fantasies.
Mairaj Syed (Religious Studies) is an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, specializing in religious studies and Middle East/South Asia studies. He has published extensively on Islamic law, theology, ethics, and hadith literature (narratives about the Prophet Muhammad). His current project, "Digital Hadith Studies" involves the use of computational and statistical methods to analyze hadith literature and has received numerous awards for his work. He holds advanced degrees from Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin.
Project Description
Syed's Digital Hadith Studies project seeks to address questions about the origins and authenticity of hadiths. These were only compiled into written collections about 200 years after the Prophet’s demise, and their authenticity and usage for understanding Islam's evolution has been debated due to the intricate process of dating and locating their origins.
Acknowledging the potential of automation, Syed initiated research to simplify searching and collating hadiths. Automation will enhance accessibility to a previously hard-to-reach source of early Islamic scholarship. The study will facilitate individual hadith exploration and introduce a new analytical angle: the hadith social network. By investigating the unique citation structure of hadiths, combined with data from prosopographical sources, Syed aims to trace the evolution of hadith literature during Islam's first 400 years using social network analysis. This approach will foster studies on early Islamic gender and sectarian identity development, and religious thoughts.
While most of Syed’s research findings are published in academic journals, Syed intends to work on a monograph to contextualize the project’s innovative methods within broader hadith scholarship. Alongside the monograph, he'll create a website featuring datasets, visualizations, code, and tutorials to ensure research development and dissemination are synchronous.
Elisa White (African and African American Studies) is an associate professor of African American and African Studies at UC Davis. Her research and publications consider Black European Studies, global racism, media studies, migration and human rights. She is the author of Modernity, Freedom and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris (Indiana University Press) and co-editor of Relating Worlds of Racism: Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the Normativity of European Whiteness (Palgrave MacMillan).
Project Description:
Never Helped: A Qualitative Examination of The Role of the Researcher
Never Helped is a book project that takes on the question of the impact of an individual researcher’s work through the navigation of approximately twenty years of field work conducted in vulnerable African Diaspora and Black communities in Europe. The sites and communities addressed in the project include detention camps, squatter sites and street vendors in Spain, asylum seekers, direct provision recipients and anti-racism activists in Ireland, and the aftermath of uprisings in France. The anticipated outcome will be a relatively unconventional academic and accessible volume, in that it will be written and formatted to mix media with scholarly exposition and perspectival reflections of the researcher, incorporate field notes, consider the methodological experience of researching, apply a critical and interrogating eye to the ethical components and related outcomes of research, contain elements of memoir and – centering the visual aspect of the observations reflected upon – incorporate photographic data.
Veronica Lerma (Sociology) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research utilizes intersectionality theory and methods to examine criminalization processes and experiences. Her work has appeared in Social Problems, Sociological Perspectives, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
“Criminalizing Chicanas: Intersectional Criminalization and Resistance in California’s Prison Alley”
Criminalizing Chicanas investigates how the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, age, and carceral status condition the criminalized experiences of system-involved Chicanas living in California’s rural Central Valley. Drawing on life-history interviews with 60 formerly incarcerated and system-impacted Mexican American women, findings reveal three unique processes of punishment that differentiate Chicanas’ experiences of criminalization from those of their racialized male counterparts: criminalization through interpersonal relationships with Latino men and boys, criminalization of efforts to survive interpersonal and institutional violence, and criminalization of Chicana sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood via the unfit hyper-breeder controlling image. Taken together, Criminalizing Chicanas argues that criminalization is a multi-level, ethno-racialized, gendered, and heteronormative process and experience that is reflected in everyday interactions, reproduced in social institutions, and embodied in larger systems of white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy. The analytical framework “intersectional criminalization” is introduced to capture this process. This more comprehensive framework captures how intersecting identities and systems of oppression criminalize and reproduce inequality for previously unaccounted groups. What is more, by centering the voices of a group of women who have been traditionally overlooked, this research makes visible Chicanas’ resistance to interpersonal and structural-level forces that uphold the carceral state.
Julie Wyman's (Cinema and Digital Media) work engages embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship- all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Her 2012 ITVS co-production STRONG! aired on Independent Lens. Her work is supported by Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, Creative Capital, Princess Grace, Siena Art Institute, Logan Nonfiction, CalHumanities and NEH. She is an Associate Professor of Cinema at UC Davis.
I became a filmmaker as a response to living in a body that was always seen as different but didn’t fit clearly into well-established categories. My decades-long filmmaking practice has focused on stretching our cultural perception of whose bodies belong, and has familiarized me with the ethical tension of telling other people’s stories. When I received a diagnosis of hypochondroplasia, I committed to mobilizing that tension into a personal and participatory storytelling process.
My current projects, a documentary with the working title UNTITLED DWARFISM PROJECT and a series of short narrative films called HOW WE LOOK, both grapple with what it means to bring LP stories and bodies to the screen. Unlike many minorities, our legacy as LP's is not invisibility, but rather hyper-visibility: we have been displayed throughout human history, but always by and for an average-height able bodied audience. In my current projects, I work with disabled and LP-led teams to re-imagine how we are seen. In spring 2024, I will be engaged in writing an essay that describes my own cinematographic gaze over the course of the 7+ years that I’ve been engaged in this work, detailing critical perspectives from disability studies, art historical research, and hands-on process that I / we have used to explore what it looks like when we are the storytellers and holders of the gaze.
Marian Schlotterbeck (History) is an Associate Professor of History at UC Davis. Her research and teaching center on social movements, human rights, gender, and childhood in modern Latin America. Her first book, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile (California 2018) is about radical politics in the decade before the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Her new book project examines how 17-years of military rule and neoliberal economics transformed childhood in Chile.
Project Description: Making Neoliberal Citizens: Childhood in Pinochet’s Chile
Making Neoliberal Citizens examines how and why the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-90) fashioned children as its most consequential constituents. It contends that the Pinochet regime treated children not as individuals with social rights, but as commodities that reflected the value of parental and state investment. The same market values guided the creation of a privatized education system and children’s political socialization. Drawing on government records, NGO reports, popular culture, print media, and oral histories, the project balances an analysis of Pinochet’s top-down policies to reform childhood with bottom-up responses by Chileans. While neoliberalism is often cast as a retreat of the state, the Pinochet government played a profound role in reorganizing Chilean families and consumer attitudes, an intervention best seen through the lens of childhood.