Current Workshops: 2012-13

The 21st century is undoubtedly the urban century, when the majority of human beings will, for the first time in history, live and work within cities. This workshop looks at the challenge that non-Western urban areas pose to our understanding of institutional, economic and cultural dynamics in cities. It seeks to redefine contemporary humanistic theory by examining these new urban landscapes.

Language plays a central role in the coordinated activity that forms our culture and is crucial to much of the abstract thought necessary in science and the arts. But how does language work? How does it interact with the other cognitive processes that shape the human experience? This workshop provides a platform for diverse approaches to the study of the same central question among linguists, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists.

Over 90% of Americans believe that equality of opportunity is absolutely essential as an American ideal. But while this ideal is widely adhered to, its very meaning is deeply contested. The core goal of this workshop is to refine our understanding of the relationship between ideals of equality—especially equality of opportunity—and the public provision of education.

Scholars involved in the study of ancient ethical and political philosophy come together with those working on contemporary political theory in this workshop. Using both empirical political science and historical methods, the group considers, among other topics, the relationship between arguments about justice and systems of law, as well as authority, legitimacy, and obedience in the development of government.

The conceptual focal point of this workshop is the minoritization of religious and ethnic communities and the uneven trajectory of their rights in both more and less democratic states of the 20th- and 21st-century Middle East and Central Asia. The group encourages comparative and transnational research among the different cultural and political zones of the region, as well between the region and its close neighbors with important structural similarities, like the Mughal Empire, British India, and modern south Asia.

The French Culture workshop brings together participants from a wide range of disciplines to examine questions relevant to French culture and society from the modern period (1650 to the present). Topics of discussion include political and intellectual history, imperialism and colonialism, nationalism and national identity, immigration and minorities, gender, and francophonie.

From centuries-old Japanese woodblock prints and political cartoons to manga, superhero serials, comics journalism and webcomics—pictures and words have been brought together by visionary artists who saw the potential to tell stories of human civilization in ways not possible via text or image alone. The Graphic Narrative Project looks at the many manifestations of this medium.

The subjective characters of our sensations—colors, tastes, pain—are immediately apparent to us. However, explaining consciousness has proved to be exquisitely difficult for both neuroscientists and philosophers. This workshop will tackle the nature of conscious experience in three case studies: the problem of qualia, consciousness and literature, and zombies in philosophy, literature, film and/or science.

The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory will draw together faculty and graduate students from across the humanities and qualitative social sciences to address current theoretical debates by reading and discussing texts that both define and disrupt disciplinary thinking. Each quarter will have a thematic focus: network theory in autumn, visual literacy in winter, humanist empiricisms in spring.

This workshop explores the diverse technological and technical conditions of mediation that bring language into being. How can we bring language back in to information technology? How do different devices and modes of inscription bring out different social forms? The goal is to build new vocabularies to reclaim language’s originary materiality and technicity, as well as its cultural and historical specificity.

This workshop brings together faculty and students interested in exploring the interstices of the arts, medicine, humanities, and bioscience. Participants come from a diversity of fields, including medical anthropology, classics, English, music, drama, philosophy, and psychology to develop connections, courses, and further programs in an interdisciplinary mode. The Stanford Arts Initiative is a co-sponsor.

This workshop will explore ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of time and the ways that these informed early modern and Enlightenment historiography and chronography. The focus will be the rhetoric (both verbal and nonverbal) by which historians engaged time in writing and visual art, simultaneously representing it and allowing it to be understood in distinct ways.

In studies ranging from micro-level laboratory ethnographies to analyses of the shifting geopolitics of science, from histories of science in early modern colonialism to theoretical approaches to technology today, this workshop will be a venue for scholars to discuss broad comparative questions that seek to understand the history and culture of science in terms of global power relationships.

By focusing on a variety of geographic and historical dimensions, the workshop introduces archaeology and its unique perspective on materiality, landscape, and environment into wider discussion. Topics are global and range from the origins of cities in ancient China to the material culture of colonial exchange to the politics of revitalizing Los Angeles’ historic center.

Gathering scholars from different disciplines and area studies, this workshop looks at various representations and theories of the global medieval past, and seeks to define their current relevance. In its discussions of such topics as crusade literature, phenomenology and the digitalization of archives, or revisiting the Annales School's interdisciplinarism, the group advances new research methods that, rather than preserve old paradigms of disciplines, envision novel ways of doing medieval studies from a practical and theoretical perspective.

This workshop brings together humanists engaged in visualization projects with experts from the fields of geography, cartography, communication design, the visual arts, and computer science to look at visual techniques as scholarly method. Using specific projects as case studies, the workshop will look for ways to convey the complexity and nuance of humanistic modes of inquiry.