Division of Social Sciences

February 27, 2024

February 7, 2024

Mandel 303 (12pm - 1pm)

Speakers: Sarah Mayorga and Alexandra Pineros-Shields

Get Curious! is a new speaker series organized and co-sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Department of Sociology. The series aims to offer brief, one-hour introductions to important current topics that students and community members might be interested in but haven’t had the opportunity to take a class on. Covering a range of topics, both national and global, and led by two faculty presenters from different fields, the idea is to both pique and satisfy students’ curiosity.

February 14, 2024

Mandel Center for the Humanities Presents:
Lunchtime Talk: Land, Labor and Identity

12:00 - 1:30 pm
Mandel Center for the Humanities Reading Room (303)

How is identity shaped for those who labor on the land, and how do these identities shape our narratives about industrialization and economic history? Mandel Dissertation Innovation Award winner Hong Zhang (Anthropology, pictured) and Mandel Graduate Research Grant winner Joseph Yauch (History) discuss how their projects intersect with the theme of land, labor and identity.

From Joseph Yauch's project description: "My research fuses Native, environmental, and labor histories to investigate 19th and 20th century logging in Northern Maine. By comparing the different harvesting strategies, economic incentives and labor structures of settler agriculture, industrial lumbering, and industrial pulp and paper production, I complicate narratives of industrialization and settler colonial expansion."

From Hong Zhang's project description: "My dissertation examines the everyday lives of the Chinese miners brought to the camp by the Chinese state-owned mining company Zijin to Buriticá, Colombia, in 2019. As the core intersection of the company, the Chinese state, the Colombian state, Colombian workers, and the local communities in the mining area, these Chinese workers provide crucial knowledge to my research on how Chinese mining complicates the economic, cultural and ecological violence engraved in Latin America by neoliberal extractivism since European colonization, and investigates Chinas role in the the global economy and ecology."

For more information, please contact Esha Senchaudhuri. 

March 20, 2024

Speakers: Brian Horton and AJ Murphy

Mandel 303 (12pm - 1pm)

Get Curious! is a new speaker series organized and co-sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Department of Sociology. The series aims to offer brief, one-hour introductions to important current topics that students and community members might be interested in but haven’t had the opportunity to take a class on. Covering a range of topics, both national and global, and led by two faculty presenters from different fields, the idea is to both pique and satisfy students’ curiosity.

March 20, 2024

Time: 2:30 - 3:45 pm
Location: TBA

Part of the Global Community Engagement Program’s Spring 2024 “Focus on Cambodia,” marking the 45th anniversary of the end of the Cambodian genocide.

Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who usually lead unsettlingly ordinary lives. Drawing on his co-authored book Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (Stanford, 2023), and decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide and mass violence in Cambodia, and more recent research on white power extremism in the U.S., Professor Alex Hinton's talk will discuss what his research reveals about the dark side of humanity.

Dr. Alexander Hinton is director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers. Read more. 

Coordinated by Global Community Engagement Program Assistant Director and Anthropology Cooperating Faculty member Toni Shapiro-Phim. Sponsored by the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Asian American Pacific Islander Studies, COMPACT Global Community Engagement Programs, and Anthropology.

March 25, 2024

Time: 12:00 - 1:15 pm
Location: Mandel Center for the Humanities Reading Room (303)

Speakers: Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Elizabeth Bradfield, Aida Wong

This panel asks how visual images operate in different kinds of scholarly and creative production... Read more. 

Sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities. 

April 2, 2024

Mandel Center for the Humanities Presents:
Lunchtime Talk: Law, Legality & Social Identity

Time: 12:00-1:30 pm
Location: Mandel Center for the Humanities Reading Room (303)

How does law and legality shape people's perceptions of themselves and their social identities? In this lunchtime talk, Jessica Brewer (English) and Sarah Han (Anthropology, pictured), winners of Mandel's 2023 Graduate Dissertation Innovation grants, discuss their research.

From Jessica Brewer's project description: "As the turn of the 19th century saw a shift in prison architecture and reform, the emergence of solitary confinement and increasing incarceration of the poor, I aim to examine mainstream authors and alternative/street literatures to map how social narratives develop around incarceration. My research asks: how did Victorian narratives create social others and how did these narratives affirm/challenge public opinion and policy? How do dominant narratives continue to shape social attitudes about specific groups? And can narratives be reshaped for social good? What tools do the Victorians offer us for modern social, political and/or police reform?"

From Sarah Han's project description: "Originating from the Balochistan region spanning Western Pakistan, Eastern Iran, and Southern Afghanistan, some Baloch have obtained Emirati citizenship, while other Baloch have passports from their "country of origin," as part of the nearly 90% of non-citizen workers living in the UAE on temporary visas, and still others remain document-less and stateless. Across all the three documentary categories, Baloch women share in the experience of being perceived as Arab and assumed to be Emirati citizens because they wear the unofficial national dress of the abaya [a long black robe] and shayla [a loose black headscarf] in many public spaces. As a result, they are treated with respect as presumably high class, socially advantaged women with social power, regardless of the reality of their legal ambiguity."