Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change
AUTUMN 2022
Friday, Sept. 16, 2022: Joseph Manning, Classics, History, and Law, Yale University
“Climate and Society from Egypt to India to China: A Regional Crisis at 160BCE?”
Followed by a comment by James Stagge, Civil Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, Ohio State University.
Listen to the podcast:
Abstract:
The 160’s BCE was the critical decade in Ptolemaic history. Environmental factors have never been considered until now in the understanding of social dynamics, or in the economic, military and fiscal history of the dynasty. The decade has often been marked as the beginning of serious state decline. The causes of this decline have often been identified: internal problems (ethnic tension between Greeks and Egyptians; over-extraction of resources leading to unrest, sometimes serious and sustained,, currency inflation), depravity of the kings themselves, and the increasing political and military domination of the Mediterranean by Rome. Polybius adds political neglect, moral decay, and Ptolemy IV’s love of opulence and a succession of young kings after Ptolemy IV. A new chronology of volcanic eruptions from polar ice core analysis affords us an opportunity to reevaluate historical dynamics within Egypt, to examine more critically how shocks to the annual Nile flood may or may not have played a role in “decline” and social unrest. Ice cores also allow us to tie events in Egypt to those across the Indian Ocean in the same years.
Author of The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome (Princeton, 2018).
Event co-sponsored by the Departments of Classics and Anthropology, the College of Earth Science, Center for East Asian Studies, and the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.
Friday, Oct. 7, 2022: Sarah Muir, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
“When Crisis Becomes Routine: Notes from Argentina, 2001-2022.”
Listen to the podcast:
Abstract:
At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina seemed to embody the hopeful promise of modernity: a fast-growing and democratizing country of immigrants where anyone could find work and build a prosperous future. Over the next hundred years, repeated political-economic crises rendered that promise more and more outdated, a process of obsolescence that culminated with a massive financial crisis in 2001-2002. In those years, half the population plunged beneath the poverty line, there were deaths from malnutrition in one of the most agriculturally productive nations on earth, the country declared the largest sovereign default in world history, and the value of its currency declined overnight by three-quarters. A seemingly endless stream of historical research has sought to explain this dramatic, century-long transformation by attributing causation to factors such as populist politics, international finance, oligarchic monopolies, mistaken monetary policies, and cultural predilections, just to name a few. Whatever its causes, one result has been that, in the aftermath of 2001-2002, a wide range of Argentines took up the paradoxical historical stance of routine crisis, in which crisis is unsettling and unmooring but utterly unsurprising, and in which the future is not one of assured progress but of inevitable decline. Building on an engagement with the past twenty years in Argentina, this talk considers how the concept of routine crisis can offer analytical purchase on the political impasses and obsolete commitments that inhere within other contexts—a continually evolving pandemic, a looming climate catastrophe, a rising tide of neofascism, perhaps—in which the capacity to imagine the future is structured by the grim sense that, as bad as things may be, something worse is on the horizon.
Sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Anthropology.
Friday, Oct 28, 2022: Bedour Alagraa, African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University, 2022-2023.
“Bad Infinities: Catastrophe and its ‘Changing Same’.”
[This talk was not filmed.]
Abstract:
In this paper, I present the first half of my re-conceptualization of the catastrophic, via the invocation of the lens of ‘cruel mathematics’ (quoting from Camus), ‘breathless numbers’ (to quote from McKittrick) and an engagement with Hegel’s conceptualization of ‘the bad infinity’ regarding the idea of terminality (which burdens the anthropocenic lens). I extend Camus’ question, posed in The Myth of Sisyphus: “what are these cruel mathematics which command our attention?” I offer my own extension of this verbiage, following the openings provided by Katherine McKittrick’s conception of ‘breathless numbers’ and thread the needle backwards, to the conversations which dictated early empiricist and theological debates concerning ‘calamity’—including Cuvier’s preoccupation with extinction, and Darwin/Malthus’ theorizations of ‘natural scarcity’ , which set the scene for the development of what Sylvia Wynter calls ‘the non-human archipelago’, tied the rise of capitalism, and the biocentric conception of the human, all of which might be aggregated into a meta-paradigm called cruel mathematics. I also consider the manner in which interminability might be thought of inside of the concept of cruel mathematics. I consider the interminable in/against Hegel’s conceptualization of the ‘Bad infinity’, which he argues ‘sets itself over and against’ the finite, delaying the infinite and stabilizing the idea of the finite, rather than giving us an understanding of the infinite itself. As such, I consider the manner in which the interminable sets itself ‘over and against’ the terminal, leading to what Hegel calls ‘a piling up of numbers’ but not an approximation of infinity itself – as such the interminable catastrophe appears to be never ending despite drawing its coherence from a conception of the End. Ultimately, this chapter charts this computational language in its many forms, and considers how these conversations concerning calamity, scarcity, labor, and speculation, laid the groundwork for what we understand as the ‘breathless’ numbers, the cruel mathematics, and the ‘piling up of numbers’ in this bad infinity/interminable catastrophe.
Event co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies
Friday, Nov. 18, 2022: Serhy Yekelchyk, History and Germanic & Slavic Studies, University of Victoria
“The Long Prehistory of Russia’s War against Ukraine”
Listen to the podcast:
Abstract:
This talk will discuss the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations and its representation in both countries following the Soviet collapse in 1991. It will demonstrate how Putin’s nostalgia for the tsarist empire made Ukraine the likeliest target of Russian aggression and how Russia’s rejection of democracy determined the timing of the invasion.
Born and educated in Ukraine, Serhy Yekelchyk received a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta. He is the author of seven books on modern Ukrainian history and Russo-Ukrainian relations including the award-winning Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford University Press, 2014). A professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk is current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies.
Author of Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (2020); Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War ( 2014); Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (2007).
Event co-sponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Political Science.
SPRING 2023
Friday, Feb. 17, 2023: Edward Foley, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University
“The Unrepresentativeness of American Elections: How the United States Developed Electoral Structures that Defeat the Preferences of the Electorate”
Listen to the podcast:
Abstract:
Despite the expectation that elections are designed to identify the preferences of voters, American elections have evolved in ways that distort the translation of inputs into outputs, so that the results of which candidates win no longer match the candidates that the voters would most prefer to win. Gerrymandering is one practice that has developed with increasing intensity over recent decades to magnify the disparity between the electorate’s preferences and winning candidates. Equally important, but less well understood, is the way that primary elections cause the defeat of candidates whom the general election voters would most prefer to win. Once the distorting features of America’s election procedures are understood, it is possible to consider procedural reforms that would enable elections to produce results that voters actually want.
Edward Foley is author of Presidential Elections and Majority Rule (2020), Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (2016) drafted Principles of Law: Non-Precinct Voting and Resolution of Ballot-Counting Disputes, and co-author of Election Law and Litigation: The Judicial Regulation of Politics (2014).
Event co-sponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Friday, Feb. 24, 2023: Adia Benton, Cultural Anthropology, Northwestern University
“On Pandemic Potential”
(Video of this presentation is not available.)
Event co-sponsored by the College of Public Health and the Department of African American and African Studies.
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the West African Ebola crisis, the World Bank along with WHO, reinsurers and a catastrophic risk modeling firm, developed the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). The aim of the PEF was to leverage private investment to rapidly finance pandemic emergency responses in poor countries. The construction and design of the PEF hinges upon a definition and formal mathematical rendering of what they’ve described as ‘pandemic potential.’ Pandemic potential—the idea that certain pathogens are more likely than others to cause mass sickness across national borders and over a short period of time — signals a particular relationship between pathogens and public health scientists’ prophetic relation to the past. While much has been written about temporal ideologies governing pandemic preparedness and discourse, less has been said about the categories of person/human and place/geographies that ‘pandemic potential’ also presumes and produces. In this conversation, I hope to discuss what all of this means in relation to race, finance capital, and geography, via a close reading of the bond’s documentation, interviews with key players in the development of the bond, and other critical analyses of the public health’s financialization.
Adia Benton is author of HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone ( 2015), Winner, 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, Society for The Social Studies of Science.
Friday, April 7, 2023: Dorothy Noyes, Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University
“Exemplary rescue? Volodymyr Zelensky and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order”
Listen to the podcast:
Abstract:
Volodymyr Zelensky is not the first actor to have come to the rescue of liberal principles in a time of crisis. Indeed, a charismatic gesture of self-sacrifice is the inevitable turning point in liberalism’s formulaic narrative of decadence and recovery. In accounts built on this formula, the personal performance serves as a general call to order, an example that not only validates neglected norms but inspires both active emulation and mimetic identification. A year on from the Russian invasion and Ukraine’s remarkable response, I will examine the Western uptake of Ukraine’s and Zelensky’s astute self-presentation as exemplars of liberal democracy. While this well-coordinated performance complex has served the immediate purpose of garnering Western resources for the war effort, the chain of emulations prompted by it has generated its own logic. The exemplary lineage claimed in Zelensky’s performances has arguably encouraged a Zeitenwende straight back to the twentieth century. In contrast, Ukraine’s earlier involvement in another chain of emulation, the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring, evoked the forward-moving, foundational episodes of the liberal order rather than its subsequent defense. This second exemplary network became highly consequential for Ukraine’s relationship with Russia, but was insufficient to garner meaningful Western support.
Dorothy Noyes is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. Noyes studies political performance and the traditional public sphere in Europe, with an emphasis on how shared symbolic forms and indirect communication mediate coexistence in situations of endemic social conflict. She also writes on folklore theory and the international policy careers of culture concepts. Among her books are Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy, co-authored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her current book projects are Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics and, co-edited with Tobias Wille, The Global Politics of Exemplarity.
Friday, April 14, 2023: Ling Zhang, History, Boston College
“Seventy Meters Below Is My Home: Geotrauma and Earthly Memories of East China”
(Video of this presentation is no longer available.)
Abstract:
This talk introduces part of my new book entitled 108 Meters. The Xin’an river valley in east China historically sustained an affluent society with a dense human population. When a major dam was installed in the river in the mid-twentieth century, the valley experienced a dramatic transformation. The transformation was first and foremost geological. Following that was the changes to the physical, socioeconomic, and emotional relationships between people and the land that went under water. Seventy years have gone by. Mourning of the lost land has passed on across three generations. It has evolved into diverse forms and prompted different actions. The various earthly memories those men and women have made and continue making, as my oral history and ethnography reveal, are reshaping that watery world, especially in the new historical context of environmental degradation, resource shortage, and climate change.
Born and raised in a river town in east China, Ling Zhang studied literature, philosophy, and history at Peking University in China and economic and environmental history at University of Cambridge. Her first book The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) received the 2017 George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History by the American Society for Environmental History. Ling is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Shanxi University in China. With John McNeill, she co-edits the “Studies in Environment and History” book series published by Cambridge University Press. As an associate researcher at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, she convenes a research series called “Environment in Asia.”
Event co-sponsored by the Institute for Chinese Studies, the East Asian Studies Center, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.