New Work Lecture Series
ISAAC BALBUS, Professor of Political Science: September 22, 2005
This series of lectures will highlight recently published work (since 2004) by University of Illinois at Chicago faculty in the humanities and social sciences. Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Institute for the Humanities.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
3:00 p.m. in the Institute for the Humanities, lower level Stevenson Hall
ISAAC BALBUS
Professor of Political Science
Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society (Other Press, New York, August 2005)
"Toward a Green Recovery: Thoughts on the Relationship Between Deep Ecology and 12-Step Recovery Programs"
Professor Balbus argues that the modern cycle of compulsive production and consumption can usefully be understood as a cultural defense against depressive anxiety and guilt and that a reparative response to that anxiety and guilt is the key to a more mature relationship to our world and our products. This argument makes it possible to penetrate the depth-psychological affinity between deep ecological challenges to compulsive production and 12-step struggles to recover from compulsive consumption, and to conclude that a bridge between these two movements is both necessary and possible.
Isaac Balbus has been teaching social and political theory at UIC since 1976 and is the author of The Dialectics of Legal Repression (1973), co-winner of the 1974 C. Wright Mills Prize of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; Marxism and Domination (1982); Emotional Rescue: The Theory and Practice of a Feminist Father (1998); and, most recently, Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society, published this August by Other Press.
Cosponsored by the Department of Political Science
MARGARITA SAONA Associate Professor of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese: November 9, 2005
This series of lectures will highlight recently published work (since 2004) by University of Illinois at Chicago faculty in the humanities and social sciences. Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Institute for the Humanities.
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
3:30 p.m. in the Institute for the Humanities, lower level Stevenson Hall
MARGARITA SAONA
Associate Professor of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese
Novelas Familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, 2004)
"Portraits of the Family as the Dysfunctional Nation"
A long critical tradition has conceived the family as the site for the reproduction of social structures. From the reproduction of the labor force to the education of the citizen, the family fulfills specific roles in the nation-state. In Latin American countries, from Independence on, the State’s official discourses of legitimization, as well as many discourses emerging from civil society and aspiring to a hegemonic position, have made of the family a fundamental element of the national imagery. However, the representation of the family found in contemporary Latin American novels reveals that the allegorical power of family romances does not necessarily propose an harmonious image of the nation, but rather elicits the marginal and illegitimate elements that the concept of the nation cannot assimilate.
Margarita Saona has been teaching Hispanic and Hispanic American Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1998. She is the author of numerous articles and short stories in addition to Novelas Familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, 2004). Her current research focuses on memory, testimonio, and discourses on gender in Latin America.
RASMA KARKLINSM, Professor of Political Science: January 26, 2006
This series of lectures will highlight recently published work (since 2004) by University of Illinois at Chicago faculty in the humanities and social sciences. Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Institute for the Humanities.
Thursday, January 26, 2006 3:00 p.m. in the Institute for the Humanities, lower level Stevenson Hall
RASMA KARKLINS
Professor of Political Science
"The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies"
Most people in post-communist societies believe that corruption is widespread, and that they must play along because the system compels them to do so. But what exactly is "the system"? Or to ask the question in a different way: what are the structures and mechanisms of corruption in post-communist societies? And why is this corruption so pervasive and hard to fight? This lecture argues that the answer lies in the joining of institutional and democratic reforms, with the latter involving substantial civic activism and possibly a revolution "from below" as recently experienced in Georgia and Ukraine.
Rasma Karklins is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her most recent book is The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (M.E. Sharpe, 2005). Her work on post-communist corruption has been recognized by an Ed Hewett Public Policy fellowship (2004/2005) for conducting research in the Baltic states, and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2002/2003. She has published widely on comparative ethnopolitics, transitions to democracy, and now corruption.
