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?
This May we will hold 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?
