“‘What do you mean I speak better Mandarin than you? I’m American!’: Heritage Mandarin Speakers in Taipei, Taiwan”

The Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies presents a talk by Foreign Language Education PhD candidate Daniel Steve Villarreal .

Monday, December 1, 12-1pm
E. P. Schoch building – EPS 1.128
University of Texas at Austin

Dan Villarreal, Ph.D. Candidate in Foreign Language Education, has been traveling to Taipei, Taiwan for work, language study, and fun for the last couple of years. While studying at the Mandarin Training Center of National Taiwan Normal University in the summer of 2007, he noticed that were a lot of students from Mandarin-speaking families studying there as well. His curiosity turned into an exploratory study in which he sought to find out why Chinese people would travel to another Asian country to study their own language, and what makes some of them more skilled at Mandarin than others. Dan’s presentation is a combination of his fledgling steps toward a dissertation and “How I Spent My Summer (and Christmas) Vacation(s).”

“Culture Jamming: Ideological Struggle and the Possibilities for Social Change ”

The Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies presents a talk by Radio Television Film PhD candidate Afsheen Nomai.

Monday, November 24, 12-1pm
E. P. Schoch building – EPS 1.128
University of Texas at Austin

Culture jammers tend to critique dominant ideologies and ways of life by appropriating the languages, images, and texts of the dominant and inflicting them with a critical bent. It can be a rather nuanced and subtle way of attempting to bring about social and cultural change. How the activists associated with the Yes Men, Adbusters Media Foundation, and the Billboard Liberation Front critique the prevailing modes of globalization, consumerism, and advertising is the focus of analysis here, with special attention paid to the challenges their tactics face. Can consumerism be challenged by selling a shoe? Can prevailing policies overseeing world trade be changed by a World Trade Organization “official” suggesting people eat hamburgers made of reconstituted human waste? These are only a few questions raised when considering the actions of culture jammers who, in their quest to bring about progressive change, mimic what they wish to alter.

“Publishing and Cultural Politics: Russia and Argentina in the 1920s.”

The Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies presents a talk by Comparative Literature PhD candidate Marina Potoplyak.

Monday, November 17, 12-1pm
E. P. Schoch building – EPS 1.128
University of Texas at Austin

“Publishing and Cultural Politics: Russia and Argentina in the 1920s” explores how the 
1920s institutionalization of the literary public 
sphere, and rapprochement between the state and 
literary groups mediated by influential cultural 
figures, helped to usher in 
anti-democratic regimes of the 1930s in Russia 
and Argentina. The 1920s was a decade of 
remarkable artistic and literary achievements in 
both countries, marked by intense debates over 
the future of the national culture and the essence of national identity. The analysis of the dominant trends in 
publishing in these two apparently very 
different countries sheds light on the striking similarities between 
cultural processes in Russia and Argentina.

“Scenes of Secrecy/Scales of Hope”

The Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies presents a talk by Queens College, CUNY, Professor Patricia Clough.

Monday, November 10, 12-1pm
E. P. Schoch building – EPS 1.128
University of Texas at Austin

“Scenes of Secrecy/Scales of Hope” offers a psycho-geographic tracing of personal and cultural trauma set in a genealogy of family relations, immigration, racial and gender difference. Moving from 1950’s urban planning in a borough of New York City to present day national governance of counter-terrorism and security, Clough explores affects of fear, despair and hope in geographies of intimacy.

Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007). Clough’s work has drawn on theoretical traditions concerned with technology, affect, the unconscious, timespace and political economy. She is currently working on Ecstatic Corona an ethnographic historical research and experimental writing project about Queens New York. Clough is joined by students at Queens College who are also doing work on where they live in Queens and the parts of the world they or their families come from.