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Reproduction Working
Group: Continuing Activities
This is a record of the continuing activities
of the Reproduction Working group. Click here for quick links to
Session I: 2002-03;
Session II: 2002-03
Session I: 2001-2002
Participants (9): Christine Cooper (English); Susan Di Giacomo (Anthropology);
Henry Geddes (Communication); Elizabeth Krause (Anthropology); Laetitia
La Follette (Art History); Marla Miller (History); Patricia Mills
(Political Science); Mari Paredes (Communication); Nina Scott (Spanish
and Portuguese); Patricia Warner (Consumer Studies)
Speakers and Abstracts
Oct. 29, 2001
Working for the Media: Facing the Facts about EEO Policy in the
Broadcast Industry
(Mari Paredes, Communications)
Abstract
This paper examines the history of Equal Employment Opportunity
policy at the Federal Communications Commission, especially in the
broadcast industry. Recent court rulings have rejected the EEO program
at the FCC and the commission, as well as the broadcast industry
are now without a framework for promoting diversity on the airwaves
and across the media sector. Broadcasters claim that equal employment
rules not only limit free speech (and thus are unconstitutional);
but also are unnecessary in the emerging digital environment of
500-plus channels. It is believed that eventually a diversity of
workers and voices will emerge in the new media landscape. Across
the US, however, private and public institutions are feeling the
backlash effects against affirmative action and EEO programs; cultural
and gender intolerance is rising once again. What are the implications
for the broadcast industry, particularly if television and radio
constitute the very fabric of American popular and democratic culture?
What kind of future are we forging?
Nov. 19, 2001
Reproducing the Past: the symbolic fragment in Roman Architecture
Laetitia La Follette (Art History)
Abstract
In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of spolia, pieces of earlier
public buildings which are showcased in new construction starting
in the third century C.E.. Roman architecture is known to have used
‘recycled’ material prior to this time, but such materials
were invariably hidden or camouflaged to obscure the fact they were
reused. After the middle of the third century, however, it became
increasingly popular to display such reused elements prominently
in public monuments, so much so that the use of spolia is recognized
as a characteristic feature of Late Antique construction. As best
as we can make out, at least some of the spolia were stripped from
extant public works, despite legislation prohibiting this. How might
we explain such a striking change in practice, which appears to
flout both earlier convention and Roman law? While recent scholarship
on spolia has focused primarily on its connection to other forms
of reuse and on trying to determine whether the motivation was to
honor or denigrate the past by reusing it, I am interested in what
this novel practice might tell us about Roman attitudes towards
the shaping of memory, and history, as captured in their public
monuments.
Dec. 3, 2001
Early American Artisanry: Why Gender Matters
Marla Miller (History)
Abstract
In the introduction to her manuscript on women's work in the New
England needle trades before industrialization, Marla addresses
the way the definition of the artisan in Colonial America (as male
and politically engaged) reproduces 20th c. cultural bias. She draws
on correspondence, diaries, account books and the material culture
of the Connecticut Valley between about 1760 and 1810 to tease out
information on women's participation in the clothing trades. Although
the clothing trades were the largest employer of early American
women, that whole sphere of artisanal work has been almost entirely
lost to the general public and even to historians in the haze of
nostalgia surrounding early American domesticity, and needlework
in particular. Marla's work seeks to restore women to the world
of early American artisanry, and to rethink early American artisanry
and the economic transformations of the era to boot.
Feb. 11, 2002
Chance Encounters with 'the Peasant': Quiet Revolution and Emergent
Identities in Central Italy
Elizabeth Krause (Anthropology)
Abstract
In 1995-97, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in Prato, Italy,
into the economic, historic, and cultural aspects of Italian women's
record-low fertility practices. Cultural struggles about family-making
surround Italy's population paradox: that is, as international demographers
sound alarms about global overpopulation, local demographers express
concern about Italian women's record-low, "below-replacement"
fertility. These scientific as well as popular anxieties about demographic
"desertification" create pressure for Italian women, in
particular, to make babies. Building on previous work on population
politics and fertility decline (e.g., Schneider and Schneider 1996),
I suggest that gender and class ideologies, in the context of the
new Italian economy, play a key role in influencing Italian couples
to form small families.
My exploration here draws social memories concerning the peasant
past to examine the specific lived experiences of Italians in northwest
Tuscany. How does engagement with the past shape the cultural politics
of the present? This essay finds its point of departure in the suggestion
that the peasant is not an archaic category but a relevant process.
As such, I explore the range of individual and collective current-day
practices that reveal the peasant not as a remnant--a fixed thing
to be discovered only in dusty archival volumes or in quaint tales
or folk festivals--but rather as a process that emerges in ongoing
relationships. In central Italy, I argue, practices include but
have gone well beyond invented traditions to impinge upon how people
there think about themselves and their class positions as well as
how to reproduce both of these: self and class through having or
not having children. I suggest the social category of peasant occupies
a powerful position in terms of perpetuating ideologies that shape
people's decisions about making small families. Gauging from a series
of encounters with "peasants," I explore how memories
about or performances of peasants tend to evoke a range of sentiments,
from nostalgia to loathing, and have at least three significant
effects directly related to family-making in the 1990s. The first
speaks to the "culture of responsibility," or motherly
obligations; the second informs gendered social identities and the
increasing sense of the individual; and the third carries a moral
message that speaks to the importance of attaining middle-class
status.
March 11, 2002
Spolia and Memory:Ancient Fragments in Roman Architecture
Laetitia La Follette (a preliminary run-through of her Phyllis
Williams Lehmann lecture at Smith in April 2002.)
April 22, 2002
Generative Politics
Christine Cooper (English)
Abstract
I'll be submitting my chapter called "Fictions of Origination."
It focuses on competing ideas of political legitimacy during the
French revolutionary period and the role of "birth"--as
a rhetorical trope and a material process--in that competition.
I look in particular at the creation of the Constitution of 1791
and the pamphlet wars that attempt to stabilize the meaning of revolution
by marking its origins.
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Session II 2002-2003
Participants (9): Dominica Borg (Theater);
Betsy Krause (Anthropology); Laetitia La Follette (Art History);
Alice Nash (History); Mari Paredes (Communication); Teresa Ramsby
(Classics); Monika Schmitter (Art History); Nina Scott (emeritus:
Spanish and Portuguese); Patricia Warner (Theater)
Speakers and Abstracts
Sept. 16, 2002: Globalization and Critical
Media Studies
Mari Paredes (Communication)
Abstract
This article reexamines the theoretical and methodological framework
of the political economy of communication, particularly as it has
been developed in the Anglo-American tradition as a critical approach
that explains the growth and expansion of new media in the Third
World. The approach I outline is based on an effort to move cultural
studies, specifically forms of cultural studies emerging in Asia
and Latin America in the form of postcolonial and subaltern studies,
from the fringes of the political economy approach in order to create
new modes of analysis that account for the complex context of transnational
markets and contested political cultures.
Oct. 21, 2002:
Translating Popular Memory: Making Sense of a Straw Weaver’s
Global Tale of Markets, Kin, and Abandonment
Elizabeth Krause (Anthropology)
Abstract
A bold story of abandonment told to me during ethnographic research
into economic and demographic shifts in northwest Tuscany grounds
this paper. I trace the complex translation process that led to
my realization of the story's significance to transformations in
family-making, kin relations and hidden labor. The narrative is
remarkable for the way in which its author, a former straw weaver,
wove together a history of Italian fascism, political repression,
family abandonment, kin networks and the international hat market.
The former weaver's style of telling, however, did not always anchor
details temporally, but rather in a web of social relations, and
this specificity along with regional-rural dialect initially presented
a number of translation challenges. What intellectual and pragmatic
snafus are revealed through consideration of such translation challenges
involved in converting popular memory into written history? Once
this local-global narrative is translated, what conclusions might
it provoke with regard to the stakes in the past-present relationship?
This story offers direction toward understanding how the organization
of rag and straw weaving, located historically between kin, tribute
and capitalist modes of production, shaped how women negotiated
their roles as biological as well as social reproducers. This paper
connects to a larger project of Italian women's record-low fertility
and the politics of cultural struggle, including memory work, surrounding
this dramatic demographic adjustment.
Nov. 18, 2002:
Teresa Ramsby (Classics) paper TBA
Dec. 16, 2002:
Alice Nash (History) paper TBA
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