Generously co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, The School of Visual Arts, The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, The Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music at Columbia University, and Oxford University Press.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
9:30 AM-11:30 AM  
“Conceptualism, Conceptual Art, & Aesthetics”
Chair: Edward Dimendberg (UC Irvine)
Jacob Stewart-Halevy (Yale), Eve Meltzer (NYU), Jorge Otero-Pailos (Columbia)

1:00 PM-3:00 PM
“Aesthetic Computing, Digitization, & Data Visualization”
Chair: Daniel Herwitz (Michigan)
Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum), Boris Groys (NYU), Amber Frid-Jimenez (Emily Carr, Carr), Christopher Sula (Pratt)

3:30 PM-5:30 PM    
“Decolonizing Aesthetics, Migratory Aesthetics, & Diaspora Criticism”
Chair: Gregg Horowitz (Pratt)
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo (Duke), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton), Karen Lang (Warwick), Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia)
    
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
9:30 AM-11:30 AM 
“Participatory Aesthetics, Art, & Social Practice”
Chair: Catherine Soussloff (University of British Columbia)
Tom Huhn (SVA), Michael Kelly (UNC Charlotte), Mel Chin (North Carolina)

1:00 PM-3:00 PM   
“Race, Art, & Aesthetics”
Chair: Whitney Davis (Berkeley)
Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia), Monique Roelofs (Hampshire College), Paul Taylor (Penn State)

3:30 PM-5:30 PM  
“Improvisation, Embodiment, & Experimental Art”
Chair: George Lewis (Columbia)
Eva Diaz (Pratt), Carrie Noland (UC Irvine/Clark), Lydia Goehr (Columbia), Brian Kane (Yale)

OpenDemocracy, a digital commons, published this article on April 5, 2014 by Prof. Kumru Toktamis and Emrah Celik of Keele University (UK):

Erdogan's Unwavering support in Turkey: The fear of possible military coups have never left the collective imaginary of all forms of Turkish public,including the conservative constituency.


With the March 30 local elections, the authoritarian turn in Turkish politics, and probably its regional belligerence as well, is legitimized as the ruling party gained almost 44 % of the votes. Common sense may refer to this moment of electoral victory as a democratic one. However, democracy is less about winning elections and more about how the opposition is treated....
to continue reading:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/kumru-toktamis-emrah-celik/exploring-erdogan's-unwavering-support-in-turkey

 Susie Linfield is the author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and has been translated into Italian and Turkish.  She is an associate professor in the journalism department at New York University, where she directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. Linfield writes about politics and culture for an array of publications including the Nation, the Washington Post Book World, Aperture, Dissent, the New Republic, the Boston Review, and Guernica.

 An excerpt from "The Exchange: Susie Linfield on Photography and Violence"  
The New Yorker by Ian Crouch
November 29, 2010 

"This suspicion, even dislike, of photographs was absorbed by many subsequent critics, including Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes; and certainly by the postmodern critics who came after them. Of course, that kind of skepticism and suspicion can lead to certain insights; but at a certain point, it also occludes. The Frankfurt-Sontag-postmodern critique has made it too easy for us to not look at photographs. We’re so afraid to look—we fear that looking is voyeuristic, that it’s exploitative, that it’s a cheap form of knowledge. Not-looking has been endowed with a kind of moral sanctity and intellectual respectability, which I don’t think it deserves....

Prof. Uzma Rizvi reflects on Archaeology in the recent issue of the Society for American Archaeology's The SAA Archaeological Record (May 2013)

"I love archaeology because it inspires me to understand the world around me with nuance.  I do not just have tea in my favorite mug: I know that in choosing each other, the mug and I have developed an intimate relationship rooted in the everyday. In  that choice, we have reinstated certain cultural and economic choices and changed others. I know that in the creation of that habitus we have or will let those choices merge into nothingness, into the visible affects of the vernacular, into just something we do every day—  and not every thing  in the everyday can always have meaning. In making that decision about the meaning  (or lack thereof) of  the everyday, there is a new plane of understanding between the mug and myself—  one in which we can take each other for granted, one that indexes a more intimate relationship.... It is precisely because I love archaeology that I define, deconstruct, and decolonize it...."

Read the complete text:   "I LOVE ARCHAEOLOGY BECAUSE . . ." The SAA Archaeological Record, vol. 13, no.3 (May 2013).  Scroll down to page 23.

"RAPE AND THE REPUBLIC" 

The story of Lucretia is well known. She was the virtuous wife of a Roman nobleman who committed suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the king. Her body was displayed in the forum and the enraged citizens, led by Junius Brutus, expelled the Tarquins and established the Roman Republic. Slightly less well known is the story of Virginia. Fifty or so years after the rape of Lucretia, Claudius Appius, a patrician with tyrannical ambitions, attempted to enslave the daughter of a respected plebeian in order to have his way with her. When all seemed lost, her father seized a butcher’s knife and killed her -- to ‘make her free,’ as Machiavelli had it. After Virginia’s body was displayed in the forum, the citizens and the army forced Claudius Appius into exile, and the republican order was restored.

What do these stories tell us? What is it about rape that demands a political response? Why is republican rule established – and then re-established – through the death and display of a woman? Do these stories tell us something, not merely about republican forms of political order, but about the nature of sovereignty as such? In addressing these questions, we will consider, not merely the canonical account of Livy, but also the interpretations of later writers, especially St. Augustine, Machiavelli, and Lessing.

We will also consider, though more briefly, whether these ancient stories have anything to say to contemporary liberals anxious to keep the state out of their bedrooms, or to fathers ready to murder daughters in the name of honor.