Work-in-progress research seminar: June Hwang
Friday, November 16, 2018
Noon - 1:30 p.m.
Lattimore 540
Work-in-progress faculty research seminar
SBAI work-in-progress faculty research seminar
June Hwang, Associate Professor of German
Friday, November 16th at 12pm
Lattimore 540
Lattimore 540
Register here by November 13th
Faculty and graduate students are invited to join SBAI for lunch and a discussion of "Diversifying Diversity" with June Hwang, Associate Professor of German. We will send along a draft of Hwang's work to those who register prior to the seminar.
About "Diversifying Diversity":
I have spent most of my career thus far avoiding explicitly talking or writing about my ethnic identity in any kind of professional context. I have let my name and appearance “speak” for me, taking advantage of the fact that few colleagues and students were willing to risk seeming unenlightened or worse still, racist, by broaching the topic directly. Yet I have become suspicious about my comfort with this silence. The advantages it confers upon me are contingent on a complicity with certain concepts of race, privilege, gender and intellectualism that course through the world around me, the institutions I work in and in my own relationship to my work. To give voice to my objections and critiques, I find that I also need to articulate in a more direct manner who I am and how my life experiences shape my understanding of the world. This decision has meant a radical rethinking of how I position myself in my work, and the current project is a series of experiments both in form and content that attempt to foreground questions of process, subjectivity and institutional expectations.