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GRADUATE STUDENT WORKSHOP 2008-2009
scheduled talks

Fall 2008 Term


Welcome Coffee Social

Wednesday, September 25th 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N

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Debra Thompson

Nation, Miscegenation and the Census: the Regulation of Mixed-Race in Comparative Context

Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto

Thursday, October 30th 2008, 2-4 pm
Munk Centre, room 108N

Abstract: This dissertation explores the changing legal definitions of “mixed-race” in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. It will compare the regulation of “mixed-race” within institutional classificatory regimes such as anti-miscegenation laws and censuses, demonstrating the existence of global trends of institutionalized “race-making” and challenging conventional domestic explanations for racial categorization. Ultimately, this research seeks to understand the processes by which “race” and “mixed-race” categories are created or negated, manipulated or abolished.

Bio: Debra Thompson received a Bachelor of Public Affairs and Policy Management and a Master of Arts in Legal Studies from Carleton University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to returning to academia, she was a policy analyst in the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Her research interests include the politics of race and gender, law and public policy, comparative politics, and critical legal theory. Her most recent article, "Is Race Political?" is published in the September 2008 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science.  Debra Thompson is also a recipient of the 2008-2009 Graduate Research Grant in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States.

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Samantha Ann Majic

COYOTE's daughters: exploring the evolution of the American prostitutes' rights movement and the radical possibilities of nonprofit service provision

Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at Cornell University

Thursday, November 20th 2008, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N

Abstract: My research traces the evolution of the prostitutes' rights movement in the US, considering in particular the formation (by various sex workers involved in the movement) of 2 nonprofit health service organizations, the California Prevention and Education Project (CAL-PEP) and the St James Infirmary (SJI). Both are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, receive funding from different levels of government and-- contrary to historical precedent--are run by sex workers who provide free, nonjudgmental health services to other sex workers. Drawing from various social movements literatures (particularly Piven & Cloward), and literature regarding nonprofits' engagement with the welfare state, the SJI and CAL-PEP are used as cases to consider what happens to the radical impulses and claims-making activities of an oppositional social movement when they are institutionalized into service provision organizations and partner with state agencies. Through participant-observational fieldwork, I find these organizations must negotiate 2 "vectors of political constraint": their status as nonprofits under section 501c3 of the IRC, and the data collection requirements imposed on them by various granting agencies. However, this is not simply a co-optation story: the SJI and CAL-PEP have maintained a commitment to prostitutes’ rights both discursively (they hold that sex work is WORK like any other) and operationally (by involving sex workers in the provision of health services and employing a non-judgmental harm reduction philosophy of service provision).

Bio: Samantha Majic completed her undergraduate degree in political science and economics at the University of Toronto in 1997. She spent the following year as an intern at the Ontario Legislature and then completed an MA in political science at York University, Toronto, in 2003 before beginning the PhD program at Cornell. Her current research interests are in American politics, looking specifically at domestic public policies and gender, with a focus on sex work laws and activism in the United States.

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Alexandra Rahr

From Weedpatch to Yellowstone: Migrant Labour Camps, the National Park System and Expansionist Asylum in 1930s America

Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto

Thursday, November 22nd 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N

Abstract: My research traces the evolution of the prostitutes' rights movement in the US, considering in particular the formation (by various sex workers involved in the movement) of 2 nonprofit health service organizations, the California Prevention and Education Project (CAL-PEP) and the St James Infirmary (SJI). Both are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, receive funding from different levels of government and-- contrary to historical precedent--are run by sex workers who provide free, nonjudgmental health services to other sex workers. Drawing from various social movements literatures (particularly Piven & Cloward), and literature regarding nonprofits' engagement with the welfare state, the SJI and CAL-PEP are used as cases to consider what happens to the radical impulses and claims-making activities of an oppositional social movement when they are institutionalized into service provision organizations and partner with state agencies. Through participant-observational fieldwork, I find these organizations must negotiate 2 "vectors of political constraint": their status as nonprofits under section 501c3 of the IRC, and the data collection requirements imposed on them by various granting agencies. However, this is not simply a co-optation story: the SJI and CAL-PEP have maintained a commitment to prostitutes’ rights both discursively (they hold that sex work is WORK like any other) and operationally (by involving sex workers in the provision of health services and employing a non-judgmental harm reduction philosophy of service provision).

Bio: Samantha Majic completed her undergraduate degree in political science and economics at the University of Toronto in 1997. She spent the following year as an intern at the Ontario Legislature and then completed an MA in political science at York University, Toronto, in 2003 before beginning the PhD program at Cornell. Her current research interests are in American politics, looking specifically at domestic public policies and gender, with a focus on sex work laws and activism in the United States.

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Winter 2009 Term

Kathryn Della Bitta

The Cosmopolitan Cyborg: American Images of an Automated World,
1952-1965

Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto

Thursday, March 26th 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N

Abstract: During what Walt Rostow came to call "the era of high consumption", a
precarious sense of humanity was not all that emerged from popular discourse about "Giant Brains". Out of the period's visual culture came new ways of imagining the time-space compression promised by automation. Taken together, texts, photographs, illustrations, and ephemeral film produced tensions in and transformations of an American cosmopolitanism at mid-century. This paper will look in particular at print advertising and promotional films for computers produced by such companies as IBM, Control Data Corporation, and Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand), and in early commercial adopters' promotional campaigns of these systems, such as those of the Bank of America, American Airlines, and Monsanto. We will see, however, that in some popular magazine editorial images (including those of illustrator Boris Artzybasheff) celebrations of the mid-century American "cyborg" -- a term brought into circulation by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Klines in 1960 --  were inflected by darker visions.

Bio: Kathryn della Bitta is a Ph.D. candidate in history, with research interests in the history of technology, globalization, and twentieth and twenty-first century aural, visual, and audio-visual culture. In her dissertation, "Miniature Modernity: The Pocket Transistor Radio in American Culture, 1954-1965," she is exploring the influence of mid-twentieth century new media forms on the development of modern American cosmopolitanism.  Kathryn della Bitta is also a recipient of the 2008-2009 Graduate Research Grant in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States.

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Zoë H Wool

Producing Patriots: An Economy of Patriotism at Walter Reed Army
Medical Center

Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Toronto

Thursday, April 23rd 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N

Abstract: During fieldwork with injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007-08, I was continuously struck by the circulation of images and objects of American patriotism.  But their presence was less remarkable than their source: While the soldiers were at the center of this circulation, its source was nearly always external. The accoutrements of patriotism, the evidence of its invocation and performance discursive and material alike, were most often imported and distributed by the wide variety of visitors and volunteers who are a continuous presence at Walter Reed.  This paper, a draft section of a dissertation chapter, presents the idea of an economy of patriotism and explores its heuristic possibilities through the analysis of ethnographic vignettes drawn from my work at Walter Reed.  Drawing on a Bourdieuian notion of social capital, I use the idea of an economy of patriotism to understand the interactions of soldiers and visitors and explore the production and valuation of a particular brand of American patriotism in a context of wa.

Bio: Zoë H. Wool is a PhD student in Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her work examines the discursive construction of the “war on terror” and the experiences of those drawn into it, highlighting the spaces between them to understand the scalar perspectives which allow various incongruous narratives to exist simultaneously within the discursive space of the “war on terror”. Her dissertation is based on a year of fieldwork at three American military installations (Ft. Dix in New Jersey, Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center part of the Kaiserlautern Military Community in Southern Germany) and on interviews with American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and 9-11 responders, survivors and victim family members.  It also draws on linguistic analysis of American political speeches, government documents and news reportage of 9-11 and the subsequent “war on terror.”  Her dissertation research is supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.