Events

Quirky, at times impossible, yet always fun, Scavenger Hunt—or Scav—has set UChicago students dashing on multiday searches for eclectic lists of miscellany since 1987. Simultaneously a break from coursework and a thinly veiled learning exercise, Scav has become an enjoyable rite of spring for undergraduates, as well as some graduates and alumni.

Beyond the dorms, Scav unifies the student body in a way that sports teams build school-specific spirit at some colleges. Students recognize Scav as uniquely UChicago and players back the game with fierce intensity and school pride.

For nearly four decades, Scavenger Hunt has evolved, adapted with technology, and garnered local, national, and international press, yet throughout time, it has retained its characteristic spirit of humor, playful rigor, and inclusion that reflects core UChicago values and has become an endearing student tradition.

This exhibition features materials donated to the University of Chicago Archive and items on loan from the Scavenger Hunt’s founding members, former judges, past players, and current teams. Notable items include the first Scavenger Hunt list and items used in the 1999 creation of a breeder reactor, along with an array of t-shirts, photographs, and judges’ notes that document the lengths Scavvies will go to in search of fun and to be part of a beloved UChicago tradition.

Luigi Pistaferri, Stanford University Topic: TBA

April 29, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall What the hell is biocultural? A productive friction for Anthropology Dr. Agustín Fuentes Princeton University

ABSTRACT: Seeing bodies and evolutionary histories as quantifiable features that can be measured separate from the human cultural experience is an erroneous approach. Seeing cultural perceptions and the human experience as disentangled from biological form and function, and evolutionary history, is equally misguided. Anthropology is the academic field that, arguably, has as its raison d’être the correction and avoidance of these errors. But disagreements and lack of integration and communication within and across anthropologies continue to hinder the quest to achieve such lofty goals. Here I offer a view of the biocultural, with examples from human development and multispecies relations, as productive friction for anthropology. (Re)Engaging the concepts/dynamics of culture and biology, rejecting a bio/cultural binary, and placing them in dialogue as co-constructors of the human I hope to drive home what a biocultural approach is and how it is generative for a 21st century anthropology. Not every anthropological question must touch on the biocultural nor should all anthropologists be doing biocultural work. However, everyone who seriously wants to do an anthropology should know what a biocultural frame is, what the possibilities such a context offers, and why and how it can be integral to serious engagement with the human.

BIOGRAPHY: Agustín Fuentes, a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. Earning his BA/BS in Anthropology and Zoology and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, he has conducted research across four continents, multiple species, and two-million years of human history. His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, gender/sex, and engaging race and racism. Fuentes’ books include Race, Monogamy, and other lies they told you: busting myths about human nature (U of California), The Creative Spark: how imagination made humans exceptional (Dutton), and Why We Believe: evolution and the human way of being (Yale). 

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

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.