HumArts Clusters

Faculty Coordinator: Maxine Craig (Sociology)

Imagine a jogger, a kid with braces, or a timpanist. Who do you see? This research cluster will examine relationships among bodies and social positions in the constitution of the middle class. The unmarked middle class norm is implicitly racialized, able-bodied and heteronormative. The group will foster interdisciplinary dialogue regarding how the physical body is involved in Black women’s efforts to claim places in structures that resist their inclusion.

Faculty Coordinators: John Slater (Spanish & Portuguese), Daniel Stolzenberg (History)

The Early Science Workshop (ESW) brings together faculty and graduate students from various departments who share an interest in the humanistic study of science, medicine, and technology from before c. 1800. The flexible systems of categorization and idiosyncratic taxonomies of early science foreground models of hermaphroditism, amphibianism, sexuality, and race that contest modern conceptualizations of human identities. The scholarship of the last several decades—and the emerging work of UCD faculty—suggests the ways in which understanding the past helpfully moves us past rigid, Enlightenment notions of fixed gender identity and defined racial attributes. In this respect, the cluster serves not to reify or reinforce the scientific ideologies of the present, but rather to contest them.

Faculty Coordinator: Marisol De La Cadena (Anthropology)

With UC Davis celebrating the 50th anniversary of the creation of Ethnic Studies departments on this campus this year, this cluster proposes to rethink the foundations of these discursive fields through an enquiry into the philosophical question of Black non/Being. It is our contention that Ethnic Studies departments, even those organized under the reformed banner of critical ethnic studies, have been unable to integrate the philosophical insights and aporias produced by black thought. This cluster therefore proposes to create a space for these re-imaginings to be nurtured. 

Faculty Coordinator: Jessica Bissett Perea (Native American Studies)

Given how the North Pacific region is viewed as a (re)new(ed) frontier for twenty-first century economic development via the exploitation of human, water, and land resources – all of which disproportionately affect Indigenous/local communities suffering from settler colonialism, extractivism, and militarization – the futurity of Indigenous/local communities specifically, and our global relations (human and more-than-human) more broadly, depends on envisioning, developing, and networking critical new networks of thought leaders and grassroots activism. This collaborative cluster will be led by an interdisciplinary and transnational research team comprised primarily of researchers who are from the North Pacific region and rooted in forward-looking and sustainable Indigenous/local epistemologies/ontologies. ​​​​

Faculty Coordinator: Kurt Rohde (Music)

This cluster will facilitate the collaboration between graduate programs in music and creative writing. Graduate composers will be teamed with five graduate writers to create new works for words/text and music/sound. The new works will be workshopped, assembled, rehearsed, and presented in a public performance in Pitzer Recital Hall

Faculty Coordinators: Kris Fallon (Cinema and Digital Media and Director, Critical Wearables Project, Modlab), Colin Milburn (Professor of English, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Digital Media, Gary Snyder Chair in Science and The Humanities, and Director, Modlab Digital Humanities Laboratory)

This cluster focuses on the way speculative logics and media objects co-produce futures.
We want to continue to bring together the many people at Davis studying how cultural
change is materially and discursively made through anticipations, technologies, strategies,
metaphors, misrecognitions and acts of resistance. Davis is emerging as the site of a new school of critical inquiry; the Technocultural Futures Research Cluster will provide opportunities for this still-nascent community to convene, and position UC Davis a hub for the collaborative development of methods that understand speculation as a set of media practices that create (and contest) the future.

Faculty Directors: Inés Hernández-Ávila (Native American Studies) and John López (Art History)

The cluster will take utmost advantage of a confluence of factors that promise a rich and deep engagement with ancient Mesoamerica, particularly the ancient Nahuatl, Mayan, and Oaxacan indigenous cosmological, philosophical, social, cultural perspectives and their influence on contemporary expressions of Nahuatl, Mayan, Oaxacan indigenous, and Chicana/o cultures. It provides an opportunity for Native American Studies to create a bridge with Art History, engaging history, art, architecture, agriculture, culture, literature, language, geography, “religion” or belief-systems, and performance.

Faculty Directors: Lisa Materson (History), José Juan Pérez Meléndez (History), and Julie Sze (American Studies)

The cluster examines the implications of Puerto Rico’s latest and perhaps most acute crisis brought on by Hurricane Maria in fall 2017 by exploring the effects over tropical environments, emergent rights regimes, and migratory phenomena. Building upon a Global Affairs seed grant, the cluster will coordinate two symposia featuring faculty from U.C. Davis and from several higher education institutions from Puerto Rico. Through these activities, the faculty cluster will expand on an emerging working relation with Puerto Rican scholars and institutions while inquiring into the past, present, and possible futures of the fraught U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship.