The Daily Bulletin Archive

By Melissa Meehan

The “Ethnographic Dreamworlds” lecture series concludes with two seminars on Friday, April 17, and Saturday, April 18, at 4:00 p.m. in the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College. Six presenters will convene across two sessions to cover topics related to feminist cultural theory, contemporary discourse of American citizenship, science and technology, ordinary life, and public culture. The events are free and open to the public. Contact Allen Shelton, associate professor of sociology, for more information.

April 17, 4:00 p.m., Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College

Lauren Berlant, “On the Desire for the Political”
Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and the founder and chair of the University of Chicago’s Center for Gender Studies. Her work considers collective attachments and affects and pedagogies of normativity. Berlant has published The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008);The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997); and The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991).

Susan Friend Harding, “Provincializing Secularity”
Susan Friend Harding, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has published widely on fundamentalist Christianity, social movements, and cultural reform. She served as an adviser on the landmark PBS documentary With God on Our Side(1996).

Lesley Stern, “Green Fountains”
Lesley Stern, professor of visual arts at University of California, San Diego, writes about film, culture, and art. Stern is the author of The Smoking Book (1999) and The Scorsese Connection (1995) and coeditor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance (1999). She is currently completing the book Gardening in a Strange Land.

April 18, 4:00 p.m., Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College

Donna Haraway, “Speculative Fabulations and Ethical Attachment Sites for Out-of-Place Companions”
Donna Haraway is a professor of feminist studies and chair of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her academic interests include feminist theory, historical and cultural studies of modern science and technology, the relation of life and human sciences, and animal studies. She is the author of When Species Meet (2008); The Haraway Reader (2004); The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003); Modest Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1997);Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991); Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989); Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos(1976, 2004).

Allen Shelton, “Where the North See Touches Alabama”
Allen Shelton, associate professor of sociology at Buffalo State, is author of Dreamworlds of Alabama (2007). Shelton’s interests are social theory, culture, the body/commodity nexus, and ethnographic reportage. He is currently working on projects involving Proust and Marx on the life of the commodity, Kafka and Weber on “steel casings” and “iron men,” and translating methodologies based on Walter Benjamin’s mapping of urban life to rural Alabama.

Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements”
Kathleen Stewart is director of the Americo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies and associate professor in anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Stewart’s interests include cultural generativity, affect, ordinary life, public culture, political imaginaries, narrative, and ethnopoetics. Her most recent book is Ordinary Affects(2008).

These events are sponsored by the Residence Life Office, the Dean of Natural and Social and Sciences Office, the Dean of University College, and Intellectual Foundations and funded in part by an Auxiliary Services Grant.