Spring 2025
Taft Research Seminars are designed for advanced undergraduates and early graduate students interested in reading, thinking, and working collaboratively across the humanities and social sciences. Seminars are organized around interdisciplinary themes, with readings from multiple disciplinary perspectives and related thematic programming at the Taft Research Center. Discussions in the first half of the seminar are geared toward dissecting methods, theories, and approaches that encourage students to critically reflect on their own disciplinary training and planned research trajectory. Activities in the second half of the seminar support students in designing collaborative, public-facing interdisciplinary research projects related to the seminar’s theme.
Atmospheres
Dr. Megan Jeanne Gette
Tuesday 4–6:50pm | 3 credits
HUM/SOSC 4010-001 & 7010-001
Taft Research Center
This course aims to understand atmosphere(s) through materialisms, critical STS, sound studies and affect theory. It places particular emphasis on how atmosphere is sensed, shared, and lived through technologies of perceptibility. How is atmosphere composed? What holds it together or pulls it apart? What and whom does it affect? Crucially, we will consider how technological delimitations of the senses prefigure and/or foreclose experience, and explore methodological interventions, objects and forms that make room for uncertainty. Topics and readings may include: air, heat, smog, tear gas, weather, noise, soil, elements, traffic, algae, concrete, humidity, deep sea, 5g, shadows, lightning, the stars, ghosts, earthquakes, balloons, or breath.
Race & Data
Dr. Harshavardhan Bhat
Wednesday 6–8:50pm | 3 credits
HUM/SOSC 4010-002 & 7010-002
Taft Research Center
What does Race and Data mean in your field of study? What are their materialities, technologies, ecologies, politics, and stories? How does Race work in the machine of your knowledge production? How are these categories invented, accounted, entangled, and disentangled? The course aims at facilitating reflection and strategy within and beyond ongoing contexts of big data through art, the humanities, collaborative practice, critical political theory, feminist, abolitional, and decolonial thought in fabulating methods, approaches, and imagining otherwise worlds.