Humanities Center Workshops

Please consider joining us for the workshops below, hosted by Dr. Adriel M. Trott, this year's Scholar-in-Residence at the Humanities Center.

The Humanities Center invites Texas Tech faculty and graduate student participants in the humanities for three scholarly workshops with Dr. Adriel M. Trott.  Workshops will be hosted in the Center's gathering space on the 2nd floor of Weeks Hall and will be focused on a series of intellectual questions associated with this year's Value/Values theme and centered on a few short readings.

Yours, Mine, and Ours
March 27, 4pm

To be attuned to and appreciative of difference and inequality invites concern for recognizing and appreciating what belongs to others. Replacing appropriation with appreciation requires seeing how marginalized cultures and identities are taken up with a pseudoappreciation in the service of the hegemonic culture with little concern for elevating those from whom the appropriation is drawn. For some, the concept of appropriation operates through a fraught notion of ownership that depends on viewing creative work as commodities to which value is attached and through which value circulates. Much of the creative projects of art, music and literature depend on influence and an appreciative referential style drawing on the work of others. Language itself one might say draws on words one did not form to speak. Metaphor functions by moving between one thing to what is other than it in a way that moves from what belongs to one thing to what belongs to another. This workshop will consider questions around the extent to which taking up what is other functions as appropriation especially in metaphor.

Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Loraux, Brill, LaRocque.

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Community, People, Land
April 17, 4pm

Community is good for human beings. We flourish and grow and become who we are through organized engagement with others. When we think of community and political life, we tend to think of a specific group with particular practices and institutions defined in distinction to other groups. The problem with that approach is that it invariably leaves some people on the outside, and in fact, many of the ways human beings have historically construed community -- shared land, shared blood, shared parentage – function to exclude. In the service of considering that it could be possible to think community that refuses to distinguish between those who are valued and those are not, this workshop will interrogate the status and limits of the notion of “a people” as a given or natural community and the notion of land as the ground for community.  By “a people” we refer to a group with a shared history, culture, and language. This can be liberatory, especially in efforts to resist how being so construed has produced inequity, but it might also introduce restrictive and essentializing patterns. “Land” can refer to territory, property, but also to the life-giving capacities of nature, of the earth itself, which sustains all human existence. This workshop will consider issues surrounding the ways that various ways of conceiving of “a people” and “land” contribute to sharing value or to dividing between the valued and the unvalued.

Readings from Sharma, Balibar, Locke, Betasamosake Simpson

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