Calendar - School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Mar 11, 2026: "Walkie Talkies, Health, and Disability" at Robert Scott Small Building

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, will present "Walkie Talkies, Health, and Disability."

This talk introduces students to tropes about disability and about technology – and about what disabled people actually have to say about technology and disability. "Walkie-talkie" is a term from Harriet McBryde Johnson's Accidents of Nature where the other kids at camp refer to the ambulatory amputee as a "walkie-talkie" because the other kids at camp have disabilities that either make talking or walking much harder to impossible. This term will help us to look at walking and talking in the context of medical practice and social beliefs. Walking helps you get places, talking helps you communicate, but they are both good for what they do, not what they are. There are many more ways to move in the world (crutches, wheelchairs) and to communicate with others (AAC devices, signed languages). Drawing from stories and memoirs authored by disabled people, we will critically assess how society gets hung up on walking and talking in ways that limit creativity and set up a hierarchy of value that impacts people's lives and medical practice.

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Mar 12, 2026: Vanished Voices Lecture Series: "Accidentality and Mexistentialism" with Carolos Sánchez at School of Education

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:30:00 -0400

Vanished Voices Lecture Series presents "Accidentality and Mexistentialism," with Carolos Sánchez.

Central to Aztec/Nahuatl teaching is the reminder that “the Earth is slippery." This reminder means to convey the notion that regardless of how stable you think you are, your stability depends on the earth itsel – the earth on which you stand and which hurls aimlessly about the universe. If the earth is slick, slippery, shaky and slipping about the darkness of space, then everything about you, including everything you know, rests on an insecure foundation. The Aztecs insist that if the Earth can fall from its orbit, so can you. This idea of an irremediable precariousness makes its way into Mexican existentialism, or Mexistentialism, 400 years later. Emilio Uranga calls it "accidentality."

This talk is primarily about accidentality and what it means for Uranga – how he thinks it defines the Mexican existential condition. In a secondary sense, the talk is also about existentialism and Mexistentialism, how they're the same and how they are different.

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Mar 12, 2026: Lecture: Intellectual Emancipation at Education Center

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:30:00 -0400

African American Studies Program New Faculty Lecture

Intellectual Emancipation: Black Women, Education and Anti-Blackness in the Jim Crow Era

with Ashley Dennis

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Mar 19, 2026: Robert Sapolsky and Eddy Nahmias: A Dialogue on Free Will at Tate Center

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:00:00 -0400

In two recent books, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017) and Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023), Robert Sapolsky has argued that what science has taught us about human agency (and the cosmos more generally) undermines our traditional picture of free will and responsibility. Pushing back against this type of scientific skepticism about moral agency has been the focus of Eddy Nahmias' work for more than 25 years. This event is designed to bring together a skeptic and a compatibilist in order to facilitate an engaging dialogue about the nature and limitations of human agency.

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Mar 24, 2026: Black History is Not Simply the Study of Black People at Simons Center

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:00:00 -0400

African American Studies Spring Lecture for "Where Black Studies Happens: From Freedom Schools to Higher Education." See Black history as an inquiry into power, culture, imagination and the making of freedom – not a demographic category. Trace how Black knowledge traditions have always emerged in many places at once: community classrooms built during the Civil Rights Movement, grassroots organizing spaces, cultural institutions and today’s academic programs shaped by that lineage. Black studies is a living, place-making practice – one that expands wherever Black communities teach, learn and transform the world.

Livestream

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Mar 27, 2026: Political vs. Moral Criticism in Literature at School of Education

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:30:00 -0400

By thinking through a couple of novellas by Herman Melville (Billy Budd and Benito Cereno), Neufeld will argue for the importance of distinguishing moral from political criticism in literature and in the arts more generally. Recent philosophy of literature and philosophy of art often unhelpfully conflates the two in work gathered under the umbrella of "aesthetics and ethics.”

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Apr 14, 2026: WGS Intersections: Maria Britton at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Join the Women's and Gender Studies Program and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art for an interdisciplinary salon to view and discuss the current solo exhibition of artist Maria Britton, Second Sleep.

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