On May 2025 we held an inaugural workshop to kick off a new project, “The No-Body-Problem,” developed by Sarah Tindal Kareem (UCLA) and Sean Silver (Rutgers). “The No-Body Problem” names a cluster of concerns that emerge from the proliferation, in the eighteenth century, of new forms of remote media–epistles, periodicals, novels–the very forms of which engaged the question: how do utterances operate differently when there is nobody there to utter them?
A two-day workshop held on December 12 and 13, 2024, at UCLA, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’, the workshop consists in 15 core members composed of faculty and graduate students, who will meet together in 6 sessions, each of 90 minutes, held across two successive days.
Inaugural workshop held during September 2024 at the Institute for Society & Genetics at UCLA on the topic of midcentury brain science. Cross-fertilizing cultural, political, intellectual, and technical-scientific history, this workshop’s contributions ask: How did the midcentury brain sciences ramify across cultural and political discourses, and simultaneously, how did these discourses shape the technical affordances and practices of these brain sciences?
