Events

Upcoming

 

January 

Infrastructures of Discomfort and Bullshit Access: Public Toileting in NYC in the 20th & 21st Centuries with Matthew Wolf-Meyer 

Wednesday, January 21, 4pm | Taft Research Center | Register

Disability rights and justice movements have spurred the development of accessibility across public and private spaces in the United States. This has included infrastructural reforms to everyday institutional and shared spaces, including curb cuts and ramps, as well as the availability of accessible toilets, with wide stalls and hand bars. But how do we reckon with accessible toilets that are actually inaccessible because they are dangerous, costly, or policed? In this talk, I develop “bullshit access” to account for how accessibility has become a means of publicity with little consequence when it is ultimately unavailable. I focus on the history of publicly accessible toilets in Manhattan to develop these ideas, showing how inaccessible public toileting shapes public life in New York City, ensuring that only some people can participate in the public sphere. I suggest that the lack of public toilets is an “infrastructure of discomfort” that some people have found ways to unsettle through social and technological practices that upset expectations of bodily comportment in the American public sphere.

February

The Breath Between Words | Mind the Gap, part 1

Friday, February 13, 10–11:30am | Taft Research Center | Register 

A conversation between artists/scholars Leniqueca Welcome and Audra Wolowiec on the limits of language, the unsaid, and the undone. Drawing inspiration from Welcome’s collages that uncover and play with the “unseen” and Wolowiec’s installations and scores that transform breath, stutter, and pause into spaces of relation, playing with the “unheard,” this discussion will ask:  What does it mean to listen to the unsayable? What are the limits of what can be said or seen? How does the body through sound or writing becomes an instrument of history? 

A World in Fragments, a collaging workshop with Leniqueca Welcome

Friday, February 13, 12:30–2:30pm  | Taft Research Center | Register 

Explore collaging as a poet(h)ical visual research practice. Mimicking Welcome’s ethnographic method, participants will be invited to engage in a short life story listening exercise, after which they will create their own paper collage that reflects their engagement and embraces ambiguity and excess.

Sonic Poetics, a zine workshop with Audra Wolowiec

Friday, February 13, 3–5pm  | Taft Research Center | Register 

Create sound scores and visual poems by mining the writing of others. Through processes of errant editing and close reading, we will locate undercurrents of sound in the spirit of Maggie Nelson’s “Writing With, From, and For Others” and Trinh T. Min-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby.” Examples of sound scores and visual poems will be introduced through Audra's own work and process, and we will learn how to make a simple folded zine through collage and photocopy techniques.

What's the Point? a faculty media training workshop with Chris Hoff & Sam Harnett

 Monday, February 16, 12–2pm | Taft Research Center | Register

For more than 20 years, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett have been working to translate academic work into media: first as reporters and producers for public radio, and now as independent audio producers. As Sam and Chris visit universities to perform their live audio show, they’re meeting with faculty to help them better communicate their work to the academic community, their administrations, media organizations, and the general public. In this 2-hour, hands-on session they will workshop media strategies tailored to faculty's research, area of expertise, and professional goals.

World According to Sound: Ways of Knowing

Monday, February 16, 7:30pm

Surrounded by an octophonic ring of powerful loudspeakers, you are going to sit in the dark for 70 minutes, wear an eye mask, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes. You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and ancient Latin, to the first piece of musique concrete, recordings of Berlin made in 1930, a sonified essay about the gendering of glial cells, and the theory of how push buttons and Tupperware act as media objects. Through these sound pieces, the show examines how our attention is often directed toward very specific modes of understanding, while other ways of knowing are left out. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

The "Destruction"—and "Reconquest"—of Louisville: Strikes, Militias, and Blue-Gray Reunion in Gilded Age America with Matt Stanley 

Thursday, February 19, 3pm | Taft Research Center | Register

This talk explores how business and political elites in the aftermath of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 leveraged Civil War veteranhood to reassert control over workplaces, boost industrial development, and promote a range of pro-owner, anti-worker ideas.  In Louisville, those direct efforts led to the reformation of the Louisville Legion, an upper crust militia and de facto anti-labor instrument, and culminated in the city's 1895 "Blue-Gray" encampment and the Legion's celebrated role in the Spanish-American War.  Idealized as an institution in which elite Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands in the name of "public order," the Legion came to serve as a powerful symbol of North-South accommodation in a mercurial border region whose civic leaders had long prided themselves on being the nation's political as well as geographic "middle."  The Legion's form and function--its social makeup and synergy with emergent business owners' associations--also underscored the central role of capital organization and anti-labor repression, in the Ohio Valley and beyond, to the broader process of sectional reconciliation.

Writing Collaboratively, Publishing Independently | Mind the Gap, part 2

Friday, February 20, 12–1:30pm 

A conversation on the (a)symmetries of collaborating and publishing Glossary of Insomnia with anthropologist and co-author Alexandra Dantzer, interlocutor-turned-friend and co-author Aleksandar Kecman, and friend-turned-publisher Micah Weber. Discussing the process of the book’s creation over three years and across two continents, they will share their collaborative writing methods and discuss the broader landscape of independent publishing. 

A Community Agreement | Mind the Gap, part 3 

Friday, February 27, 11am | 5401 Aronoff 

A conversation between artists/designers Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner on printmaking as craft and practice of community engagement and community building. Discussing recent projects that center mutual aid, slow media, and attentive listening, they will explore design’s role in creating minor archives and pose questions to the audience and one another about the transformative (and transformed) role artists and designers can play. 

 

Interwoven Spaces: Time, Pattern, and Care, a two-day community printing workshop with Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner 

Day 1: Friday, February 27, 2–4pm 
Day 2: Saturday, February 28, 10am–1:30pm | Cereal Box, 1645 Blue Rock Street, Studio 406, Northside 

In this two-day workshop, drawing from readings such as “Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid,” participants will interpret a shared space and collaboratively build a layered artwork that embodies a collective agreement and shared purpose. Participants will use patterns, collage, text, and visual marks to create a collaborative wall reflecting Community Care and Collective Power. Each participant will produce a 10×10-inch segment that contributes to a unified grid, collectively forming a wall-scale composition. This workshop emphasizes process as much as outcome, encouraging experimentation, iteration, and collaborative response. Day One focuses on developing and refining designs, while Day Two is dedicated to printing, overprinting, and assembling the final collaborative wall display. Space is limited and registration required. All materials provided.