Events

Nigel Smith is the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University

Jo Guldi, Professor of Quantitative Methods at Emory University, will lead a masterclass on her book, The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,on April 30 from 9am-12pm in the Tea Room (SSRB 202). 

From the publisher: The Dangerous Art of Text Mining celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors….The book ends with an impassioned vision of what text mining in defence of democracy would look like, and why humanists need to be involved.

Please RSVP by 3 PM on April 25 for a lunch.

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.

Join us and our Ivy+ peer institutions during GAAD to share information about strengthening digital inclusion. Topics include accessibility practices in the design process, do-it-yourself accessibility testing, lightning talks on implementing institutional best practices to enable progress, and a Q&A session on emerging digital accessibility topics for higher education institutions. Learn how you can take action to create a more accessible digital experience. Hosted by: Stanford University

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

CHD Colloquium - Neil Gong, Assistant Professor, Sociology, UC San Diego

Title: “Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles”

Abstract: This talk compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles to show how inequality shapes the very meanings of mental illness, recovery, client choice, and personhood. In Downtown LA, the crises of homelessness and criminalization mean public providers define recovery as getting a client housed, not in jail, and not triggering emergency calls. Given insufficient treatment capacity, providers eschew discipline for a “tolerant containment” model that accepts medication refusal and drug use so long as deviant behavior remains indoors. For elite private providers serving wealthy families, on the other hand, recovery means normalization and generating a respectable identity. Far from accepting madness and addiction, providers use a “concerted constraint” model to therapeutically discipline wayward adult children. Turning theoretical expectation on its head, the ethnography shows how “freedom” becomes an inferior good and disciplinary power a form of privilege.

Bio: Neil Gong is assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He uses diverse empirical cases to study power and social control in modernity, with a particular focus on understanding American liberalism and libertarianism. To this end, he has investigated civil liberties dilemmas in psychiatric care and the maintenance of social order in a “no rules” fight club. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics (UChicago 2024) and co-editor (with Corey Abramson) of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press 2020). Neil’s public writings appear in such venues as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Kevin J. McMahon (the John R. Reitemeyer Professor of Political Science at Trinity College) will discuss A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People. He will be joined in conversation by Alison L. LaCroix (the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at UChicago).

In A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other, McMahon provides “A data-rich examination of the US Supreme Court’s unprecedented detachment from the democratic processes that buttress its legitimacy.”

The book delineates the current standing of the Supreme Court in comparison to its historical standing, showing the court’s tenuous relationship with the democratic processes that help establish its authority.McMahon makes the point that previous Supreme Courts were more in line with “the promise of democracy” than today’s is.

Come learn more about McMahon’s arguments, and the developments that have led to McMahon’s modern take on today’s Supreme Court.

Our amazing speakers will be introduced by David Lebow, associated director of Law, Letters, and Society.

Please RSVP, lunch will be provided for registrants. 

Brian Phelan - DePaul University

Speaker: Christina Brown, UChicago Topic: TBA

Collin Raymond, Cornell University Topic: TBA