Events

May 6, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Platform Economies: Beyond the North-South Divide Dr. Janet Roitman RMIT University

ABSTRACT: Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South.’ Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector – Global North to Global South – overlook variability and the limits to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the fault lines of value creation that are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame.

BIOGRAPHY: Janet Roitman is Professor at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia). She is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, an associate member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (ADM+S), and founder-director of The Platform Economies Research Network (PERN). Her research focuses on the anthropology of value and emergent forms of the political. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press) and Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cultural Economy, Cultural Anthropology, Finance & Society, and Platforms & Society. Her research has received support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Institute for Public Knowledge, and The National Science Foundation. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Roitman’s talk.

Raffaele Saggio - University of British Columbia

Jacopo Perego, Columbia Business School Topic: TBA

Daniel Gilbert, PhD, Harvard University  and Timothy Wilson, PhD, University of Virginia

Panel Presentations by Students Earning a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Presented the the Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Working Group.

“Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland”

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

Tuesday, May 7 - 5:00 pm

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Series, Ruth Rogaski uncovers how natural knowledge, and the nature of Manchuria itself – a site of war and environmental extremes - have changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation. Hear Professor Rogaski talk about her book “Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland” (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

This event is co-sponsored with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

On Wednesday, May 8, 2024, the Chicago Center on Democracy will host a conversation on how countries decide to go to war. We will discuss questions such as: Who in a government makes such decisions, and what is their process for doing so? How can voters hold such decision-makers accountable? What factors are considered when making decisions to go to war. How has this process changed over time?

For this discussion, we will welcome Tanisha Fazal (University of Minnesota; author of Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War) and Elizabeth Saunders (Columbia University; author of The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace), who will be joined in conversation by Austin Carson (University of Chicago; author of Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics).

Please RSVP, lunch will be provided to those registered. 

Speaker: Christian Wolf, MIT Topic: TBA

Alfred Galichon, NYU Topic: TBA

“Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Modern Chinese Media”

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

Wednesday, May 8 · 5:00 pm

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

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series, the University of Michigan’s S.E. Kile discusses his book that argues that the maverick cultural entrepreneur, Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.