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A Curricular Workshop: Civizational Thinking Friday, April 30, 1999 1:00-5:00 pm Kresge 159 Part of the Center's ongoing exploration of "Civilizational Thinking" is a curriculum project designed to strengthen undergraduate and graduate offerings in the humanities and social sciences at UCSC. Our goal is to create interdisciplinary team-taught classes that offer students a background in region, culture, and history, understood relationally and not as hermetically sealed civilizational units. Possible foci for such courses might include Asian nationalisms and civilizational thinking; civilizational temporalities and the critique of progress; shifting and contested regionalisms; colonial (or neo-colonial) "civilizations"; and civilizational thinking in world-making projects. Our hope is to contribute to the national search for curricular alternatives to western civilization courses, without sacrificing the centrality of humanities and social sciences in the university curriculum. This workshop convenes a group of scholars who have been involved in similar projects in the UC system and at the Claremont Colleges for a preliminary discussion of these questions. This workshop is one of a series of events in the Civilizational Thinking project, organized by the Center for Cultural Studies and funded by the Ford Foundation. Julia Liss is the author of The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Franz Boas and the Development of American Anthropology (forthcoming) and "Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W.E. B. Dubois 1894-1919" (Cultural Anthropology, May 1998). Douglas Northrop is the author of Uzbek Women and the Veil: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford 1999) and co-author of Transition to Democracy: Political Change in the Soviet Union, 1987-1991 (1993). Kenneth Pomeranz's works include A Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Global Environment of the Industrial Revolution (forthcoming) and The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937. Daniel Segal is the co-author of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture (1991). His recent articles address public discourses of identity in the U.S. and the Caribbean, as well as the schools' construction of secular knowledge for America's professional managerial classes in the twentieth century. He edits the journal Cultural Anthropology. R. Bin Wong is the author of China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997) and co-editor of, among other works,Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Critiques and Accommodations. Among his current projects is an examination of the nature of "regions" in different parts of the world. |
Participants History, Scripps College History, Pitzer College History, UC Irvine Anthropology, Pitzer College History, UC Irvine |