In its current issue, JGU Magazine covers the research of the Obama Institute’s Transnational Periodical Cultures research group.
Please find the full article and further information here: https://www.magazin.uni-mainz.de/12405_DEU_HTML.php
Access here:
Thema: Guest Lecture, Daniel H. Wilson
Uhrzeit: 16.Dez..2021 06:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81707743307?pwd=ak9YQmxqMVlKTXdnQXdvY0EzYWw0QT09
Meeting-ID: 817 0774 3307
Kenncode: 332291
Daniel H. Wilson is Cherokee author from Portland, Oregon. He is an award-winning, New York Times best-selling author and robotics engineer. He is the author of Robopocalypse, Amped, and The Clockwork Dynasty, among other publications.
He earned an M.S. in Robotics and in Machine Learning, and a Ph.D. in Robotics in 2005 at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His thesis work, entitled Assistive Intelligent Environments for Automatic Health Monitoring, focused on providing automatic location and activity monitoring in the home via low-cost sensors such as motion detectors and contact switches. He has worked as a research intern at Microsoft Research, the Xerox PARC, Northrop Grumman, and Intel Research Seattle. Also, he hosted a series on the History Channel entitled The Works, where he explained the hidden workings of everyday items.
In this guest lecture, Daniel H. Wilson is going to talk to us about his novel Robopocalypse. In the near future, a massively powerful artificial intelligence called Archos is created and cannot be contained. In those early months, only a handful of technological glitches are noticed by humans, as Archos starts to take over our cars, aircraft guidance systems, military robots, and computer networks â enslaving the entire global system that runs our lives. Then comes Zero Hour: The robot war suddenly ignites and as all the dazzling technology that runs our world turns against us, the human race is both decimated and for the first time in history, united. In the devastation that follows, humankind must destroy its own civilization to survive.
In the context of contemporary Indigenous Literature, Robopocalypse is revolutionary. It tackles issues of kinship, panhumanism, and indigenous futurism. The latter, employs tropes of science fiction to convey a decolonial narrative. Through techniques such as slipstream, worldbuilding, and First Contact scenarios, Robopocalypse constructs a speculative future that forces the reader to redefine the notion of humanity as such.
Everyone welcome!
On Nov 10 the Obama Institute will hold info sessions on its Direct Exchange programs. Please join us on MS Teams for more information about the exciting exchange opportunities!
Nov 10, 18:00-19:00 (s.t.)
Universities Group A (Click here to join!)
Nov 10, 19:00-20:00 (s.t.)
Universities Group B (Click here to join!)
Please find all details regarding each session on the flyer, which is available for download here and on the Exchange page.
Looking forward to seeing you online!
Anne Bull, Sandra Meerwein, and Nina Heydt
Als Alternative zum Mainstream wollen unabhĂ€ngige Zeitschriften, sogenannte indie mags, vieles anders machen. Trotz des oft beschworenen Niedergangs von Print boomt der Indie-Zeitschriftenmarkt seit den 2010ern ungebrochen. Im Independent-Bereich trifft auĂergewöhnliches Design auf unterreprĂ€sentierte Themen und neue Perspektiven. Zum Beispiel verwenden marginalisierte Gruppen Zeitschriften als Sprachrohr fĂŒr Anliegen, die im Mainstream-Markt keine Plattform finden. Migrantische und sexuelle Minderheiten nutzen Magazine als gemeinschaftsbildende Darstellungsformen. Andere Indies zielen auf alternative Lifestyles, Hobbies, Sport, Mode und Design. Das AlltĂ€gliche und Gewöhnliche wird durch die kĂŒnstlerische Gestaltung ungewöhnlich.
Die Ausstellung ist als walk-by exhibition konzipiert. Durch Magazine exemplarisch illustriert werden die vier Bereiche Print/Digital, Cover, Zeit/Alltag und Sprache.
Zur Eröffnung erscheinen ein zweisprachiges Begleitheft und englischsprachige Clips.
Further information: http://www.transnationalperiodicalcultures.net/paperworlds-blatterwelten/
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The Obama Institute welcomes Prof. Hugh Sheehy, author and Professor for Creative Writing and Literature at Ramapo College, NJ. Prof. Sheehy will spend the winter semester 2021/22 as a teaching fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (GAAS/DAAD) at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, where he will offer seminars on the American short story as well as a creative writing workshop.
Prof. Sheehy is the author of several award-winning short stories and two forthcoming novels. His collection of stories, The Invisibles (University of Georgia Press, 2011), has won the 2012 Flannery OâConnor Award and has since been translated into French. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Five Points, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, and Copper Nickel, as well as in The Best American Mystery Stories 2008. His critical work has been published in several outlets, including the L.A. Review of Books. He sits on the advisory board of the Hong Kong Review. In his teaching, Prof. Sheehy focuses on creative writing of long- and short-form prose as well as poetry.
The Obama Institute and Johannes Gutenberg University are excited to have Prof. Sheehy join our team this semester. We look forward to offering JGU students a unique round of courses and workshops that will allow them to engage with American literature in new ways, by approaching writing from a makerâs perspective. We thank the GAAS/DAAD for making this visit possible.
â Damien Schlarb (project coordinator)
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sponsored by
This special forum of the Journal of Transnational American Studies explores how Transnational American Studies and Medical Humanities can be mutually complementary. At their core, both disciplines work on, with, and beyond phenomena of multiple crossings of geographic, cultural, linguistic, epistemological, material, and physical borders.In doing so Transnational American Studies and Medical Humanities perpetually transgress their disciplinary borders. Hence, this special issue focuses on the crossroads of the two disciplines where each of these can fruitfully enhance the other.
In Medical Humanities approaches such as Narrative Medicine, the focus has been on the individual illness experience; migration-related questions such as racialization or trauma have only recently been coming to the fore. Here, migration is inextricably linked to questions of social justice. Seen from this perspective, Medical Humanities have been enriched through the perspective on migration studies. Similarly, issues of migration have also loomed large in Transnational American Studies. Work in this field has stressed the ways in which, through migrantsâ perspectives, the US nation-state was seen from the outside and the inside simultaneously. At the same time, migrant experience has often been characterized by processes of racialized exclusion, economic poverty, and personal and collective trauma. These latter concerns have also centrally been investigated by the field of Medical Humanities. The current Covid-19 pandemic has once again shown that, in epidemiological terms, national boundaries cannot be policed. More than ever, there is a need for concepts and methodologies which enable us to think the medical and the transnational at one and the same time and ask for the role of literature and art within this process.
This special forum proposes that Transnational American Studies and Medical Humanities may fruitfully converge in reconfiguring different concepts of life. Through the lens of Transnational American Studies, this forum looks at how lives have been excluded by immigration bans and national border policing. In this context, Transnational American Studies emerges as a framework to make these lives visible by mapping them not only in a literal, but also in a figurative sense. Moreover, these border crossings often come at a price for those who cross the line in both a metaphorical and an actual sense: Migration and cultural invisibility can be accompanied by trauma and displacement. In this context, exhibitions and artworks on undocumented migration have emphasized the ways in which art and performance can go beyond narrative depictions of the traumas that can accompany forced migration and undocumented lives. At the intersection between migration and trauma, the borders that are being crossed are both land borders and waterways.
The experience of migration can also, quite literally, be combined with a lack of access to health care especially for undocumented migrants and unaccompanied minors. Seen from this perspective, migrant lives are in a form of double jeopardy as dramatically demonstrated, e.g., by the current distribution crisis of Covid-19 vaccines. In this context, literary narrativesâânovels, poems, short stories, biographies, and autobiographiesââemerge as an alternative form of representation: First, they may resist both national policies of exclusion by literally writing migrant lives into the script of the nation. Second, they may defy a mere focus on medical diagnosis, especially where this diagnosis is divorced from cultural context. Defying these categories, these narratives may revolve around âunrulyâ subjects who refuse to be contained.
Linking illness, mental health, and trauma, such representations can also serve as a critique of health care systems. Nation-states can draw a line between those who are eligible for health care and those who are seen as âundeservingâ of such care. Recent investigation as well as historical research has revealed that medical care and adequate nutrition can be withheld by state institutions. As forms of medical negligence or health injustice, such practices have been documented regarding residential schools for Native American children as well as vis-Ă -vis inmates of state prisons. In all these different contexts, Medical Humanities are closely connected to considerations of social justice and health equity. Instances of an absence of medical care, in turn, can be tied to the crossing of national or internal borders with which Transnational American Studies has also been concerned.
For this special forum, we seek contributions that explore the intricate connections between medical and migrant experiences and their cultural impact in past and present, such as
– Migration and mental health/trauma
– Migration and somatic manifestations
– Migration and challenges for health care systems
– Migration of medical knowledge
– Migration of medical professionals
– Migration and narrative medicine
– Migration and epi-/pandemics
– Migration and disability
– Migration and age
– Migration and global health/one health
– Migration and medical ethics
Please submit a 250-word abstract by September 30, 2021. The editors will review abstracts and invite full-length essays of 5,000â8,000 words. Please email abstracts and questions to Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (mita.banerjee@uni-mainz.de) and Dr. Davina Höll (davina.hoell@uni-tuebingen.de).
You can also find this call on the JTAS website.