Events

Hiroaki Kaido, Boston University Topic: TBA

2024 Distinguished Alumni Lecture TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California “Utopian Funk: What Video Games Can Teach Us About Failed Utopias and Black Arts”

Where is utopia in games? While games are now considered to be works of art, video games have also long been considered escapist fantasies—convenient distractions, even. If such accusations could possibly be true, where do we go when we escape in the art worlds of contemporary games? When we retreat to slay dragons and zombies, conquer as soldiers of war, best our friends in games of skill and strategy, do we ever find ourselves in the classically theorized worlds that comprise the “good no places” of utopia? This lecture embarks on an earnest—and urgent—search to locate utopia in games while taking a high concept detour through the Black arts traditions of funk music, Blaxploitation film, and speculative fiction. Put another way, what can Black arts teach us about games, play, and our ever-elusive visions of utopia? Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage as we explore digital dreams, sights, and soundscapes together.

TreaAndrea M. Russworm (PhD, English, 2008) is the Microsoft Endowed Chair and a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is also the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author or editor of three books: Blackness is Burning; Gaming Representation; andTheorizing Tyler Perry. With research expertise in digital culture, video games, and popular African American media, Professor Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been shared on CNN, The History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter, and she is currently writing a new monograph on The Sims and a book on race and the politics of play.

2024 Distinguished Alumni Lecture
TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D.
Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California
“Utopian Funk: What Video Games Can Teach Us About Failed Utopias and Black Arts”

Where is utopia in games? While games are now considered to be works of art, video games have also long been considered escapist fantasies—convenient distractions, even. If such accusations could possibly be true, where do we go when we escape in the art worlds of contemporary games? When we retreat to slay dragons and zombies, conquer as soldiers of war, best our friends in games of skill and strategy, do we ever find ourselves in the classically theorized worlds that comprise the “good no places” of utopia? This lecture embarks on an earnest—and urgent—search to locate utopia in games while taking a high concept detour through the Black arts traditions of funk music, Blaxploitation film, and speculative fiction. Put another way, what can Black arts teach us about games, play, and our ever-elusive visions of utopia? Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage as we explore digital dreams, sights, and soundscapes together.

TreaAndrea M. Russworm (PhD, English, 2008) is the Microsoft Endowed Chair and a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is also the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author or editor of three books: Blackness is Burning; Gaming Representation; andTheorizing Tyler Perry. With research expertise in digital culture, video games, and popular African American media, Professor Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been shared on CNN, The History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter, and she is currently writing a new monograph on The Sims and a book on race and the politics of play.

On the eve of Scav 2024, find out how it all started in 1987 from the founders themselves. Chris Straus, Cassie Hallberg, Diane Kelly, Rick Jeffries, and Nolan McCarty will tell us how it all began.  

This panel discussion is held in connection with the exhibition Scav Hunt at UChicago: Seeking Fun—Finding Tradition at Regenstein Library.

Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

This event will be recorded.

The Center for Digital Accessibility is celebrating the 13th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) this April and May, focusing on digital equality for the one billion people in the world living with a disability.

The CDA and more than 50 Digital Accessibility Advocates will celebrate one academic year of learning, sharing, and promoting digital inclusion across campus. We are so proud of the progress being made. For in-person attendees of this hybrid event, cupcakes will be served. If you’re not an Advocate, we would love to have you join us to learn more about becoming part of this network of committed peers.

This virtual meeting will include Zoom’s automated closed captions.

Undergraduate Honors in Psychology poster session

Please join us in celebrating the undergraduate Psychology majors who completed an honors project.  View the posters and enjoy a reception on the first floor of the BPSP building, 970 E. 57th Street.

In the second event for the Silk Road Imaginaries project at the Neubauer Collegium, Tamara Chin (Brown University) will share work from her book manuscript The Silk Road Spirit and the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970, in which she argues that the modern colonial encounter in and around China prompted unprecedented interest in the connected past. In this talk, Chin will discuss the narrative frameworks and tropes that modern historians in East Asia, South Asia, and East Africa introduced over the period 1870–1970 for the systematic study of historical contact, showing the profoundly local figurations of the connected past for diverse histories of colonialism, enslavement, and religion. Prasenjit Duara (Duke University) will serve as the respondent.

Reception to follow.

About the Speakers

Tamara Chin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014).

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford, 1988), Rescuing History from the Nation (UChicago, 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman, 2003), and The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Enjoy some zine-making in the Library and chat with Student Wellness about how to recharge with self-care and hobbies.

“Copycats at the Forefront of Knowledge Production in the Era of Imperialism”

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

Thursday May 2, 5:00 pm

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

As cotton mills emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, China witnessed the concurrent development of small-scale machine shops that specialized in the repair of imported industrial equipment. When repair was performed by someone other than the original maker, it inevitably involved sourcing replacements by copying the original parts. Copying thus formed the flip side of repair in an era when faraway machine suppliers failed to provide spare parts in a timely manner. Not only Chinese-owned but also foreign-owned mills in China willingly relied on locally made reproductions even as they condemned the rampant copying practice. Moreover, this “unethical” practice was by no means peculiar to China. American machine suppliers were likewise active in reproducing British machines and parts to broaden their market share in China and Japan, in which preference for British products remained persistent. The “copycats” on both sides of the Pacific approached their job as a serious technological undertaking. 

Yuan Yi is an assistant professor in the History Department at Concordia University, Montreal. Her current book project, “Industrial Craft: Machine and Knowledge in the Global Making of Chinese Cotton Mills, 1890-1937,” examines the mechanization of cotton spinning in China with emphasis on the transpacific circulation of spinning machines, cotton varieties, and technical experts. 

You are invited to the Inaugural Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society Distinguished Lecture on May 2, 2024 at 5 PM in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB 224). Jo Guldi, Professor of Quantitative Methods at Emory University, will deliver the lecture titled “The Administration of Land, Water, and Atmosphere in the Longue Duree and How to Study It.” A reception will follow.