NEWS & EVENT REGISTRATION
Posted April 26, 2021
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WEBINAR W/ NERMEEN MOUFTAH, "SACRIFICIAL SKINS: THE VALUE OF PAKISTAN'S EID AL-AZHA ANIMAL HIDE COLLECTION" & JUNO SALAZAR PARREÑAS, "EMPATHY BEYOND THE HUMAN IN AN ERA OF INHUMANITY"
Webinar | Thursday, May 6, 2021 | 3:30–4:45 PM PDT
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EVENT: In this series conversation, Nermeen Mouftah discusses how in Pakistan, NGOs compete annually to collect and auction the animal skins of Eid al-Azha (Feast of the Sacrifice). Mouftah's talk examines how the welfare branch of the Islamist party, Jama’at-i-Islami, invests in a risky fundraising ritual that animates the value of sacrifice in their humanitarian work. And Juno Salazar Parreñas explores two contemporary crises: species extinction and the fortressing of nation-state borders that deny the nature of people, who like many other earthly beings, move around the world. What empathies can emerge in this contemporary age that is dually characterized by inhumanity towards humans and humanitarianism towards animals? FEATURING: Nermeen Mouftah is Assistant Professor of Religion at Butler University. Her ethnographic research examines the political and religious implications of Muslim social welfare practices. Juno Salazar Parreñas is Assistant Professor of Science & Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, and is the author of Decolonizing Extinction (Duke UP, 2018). |
Posted April 12, 2021
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WEBINAR W/ DEAN SPADE, "MUTAL AID: RADICAL CARE IN CRISIS CONDITIONS" & CRISTIAN CAPOTESCU, "ECHOES OF THE 'NEW SOVIET MAN': HUMANITY AND THE ETHICS OF GIVING IN LATE SOCIALISM"
Webinar | Thursday, April 22, 2021 | 3:30–4:45 PM PDT
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EVENT: In our first spring series, Dean Spade (Seattle University) and Cristian Capotescu (University of Washington) discuss mutual aid today and its analog in the socialist period. Dean Spade shows that humanitarianism, saviorism, and charity have been extensively critiqued as logics that undergird and legitimize war, colonialism, racialized-gendered control, and extraction. How do people organizing immediate survival support for each other in the face of crisis work together to resist these methods and build practices of solidarity and collective self-determination? Cristian Capotescu, in turn, investigates how, in the late 1980s, for many citizens of the former socialist bloc, practicing and living socialism involved helping the less fortunate, the sick, and the poor through acts of giving. Such volunteer work and private assistance often invoked moral claims of a better life based on an ethics of shared suffering, dependency, and radical equality. This talk traces how socialist giving opened the possibility for ordinary people to enact notions of shared humanity in alternative ways that frequently eluded capitalist, Western modernity. FEATURING: Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law and author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020). Cristian Capotescu is the Postdoctoral Scholar for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Humanitarianisms at the University of Washington. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan in 2020 and is currently working on his first book, Disasters and Solidarities: The Transnational Remaking of Crisis Socialism. |
Posted March 21, 2021
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ANNOUNCING NEW SPRING QUARTER 2021 SAWYER SEMINAR PROGRAM
Spring Quarter 2021 Series | Program
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EVENT: Explore our Mellon Sawyer Humanitarianisms spring quarter program featuring our third thematic cluster Rethinking the Human. We look forward to seeing you! SPRING QUARTER 2021 PROGRAM: Thursday, April 1, 2021, 03:30-04:45 PM PDT Sinan Antoon (New York University), “Rescuing the Dead.” Register here. April 22, 2021, 3:30 PM–4:45 PM PDT Dean Spade (Seattle University), “Mutual Aid: Radical Care in Crisis Conditions” & Cristian Capotescu (University of Washington), “Echoes of the ‘New Soviet Man’: Humanity and the Ethics of Giving in Late Socialism.” Register here. May 6, 2021, 3:30 PM–4:45 PM PDT Juno Salazar Parreñas (Cornell University), “Empathy Beyond the Human in an Era of Inhumanity" & Nermeen Mouftah (Butler University), “Sacrificial Skins: The Value of Pakistan’s Eid al-Azha Animal Hide Collection.” Register here. |
Posted March 16, 2021
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WEBINAR WITH SINAN ANTOON, "RESCUING THE DEAD"
Webinar | Thursday, April 1, 2021 | 3:30–4:45 PM PDT
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EVENT: Material and discursive resources and energies are dedicated (insufficiently and unequally) to rescue the living from harm, and to tend to their wounds. But what of the dead? What can we, the living, learn from the rituals and traditions of tending to the dead and to their wounds? Beyond the corporeal, encounters with the ghosts and memories of the dead raise crucial political questions about the ways in which humans inhabit this world. Al-Ma’arri, cautioned us a millennium ago to “tread gently, for the soil of this earth is made of these corpses.” This talk will summon al-Ma’arri’s ghost, among others, to address these questions. FEATURING: Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and scholar. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His most recent work is The Book of Collateral Damage (Yale University Press, 2019). His prize-winning translations include In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago, 2011). Antoon’s scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave, 2014). His op-eds have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times and many pan-Arab newspapers. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and Associate Professor at New York University. |
Posted March 10, 2021
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NOW ONLINE: WEBINAR WITH AMIRA MITTERMAIER & SIENNA CRAIG
Winter Quarter 2021 Series | Webinar Archive
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EVENT: In our winter conversation series, Amira Mittermaier and Sienna R. Craig discuss comparative humanitarianisms in Egypt and the Himalayas. Both articulate the need to move away from human-centric, conventional humanitarianisms by bringing to light the Islamic, Tibetan, and Himalayan logics of giving in Egypt, the Himalayas, and the U.S. |
Posted February 6, 2021
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WEBINAR WITH
BASIT IQBAL, “AMBIVALENCE AND ASKESIS IN ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP” & CHINA SCHERZ, "SEEKING THE WOUNDS OF THE GIFT: RECIPIENT AGENCY IN CATHOLIC CHARITY AND KIGANDA PATRONAGE" Webinar | Thursday, February 18, 2021 | 3:30–4:30 PM PST
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EVENT: Basit Iqbal will speak in “Ambivalence and Askesis in Zaatari Refugee Camp” about the conditions of life of an Islamic pedagogue in Zaatari refugee camp, who distinguished between the registers of divine tribulation and affliction, and between the duties and capacities of the subject. This talk will draw on the anthropology of humanitarianism and literature on political theology in order to understand this ethical project. China Scherz will problematize in “Seeking the Wounds of the Gift: Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage” the idea that gifts of charity contain hidden dangers for those who receive them. Her lecture will challenge such a reading by exploring instances of beneficiary agency in the context of charitable exchange. These instances of asking, giving, and receiving complicate arguments about charity and humanitarianism which see charitable gifts as inevitably harmful. FEATURING: Basit Kareem Iqbal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. He studies displacement, refuge, and theodicy in the wake of the Syrian uprising. China Scherz is Associate Professorof Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Uganda (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She specializes in medical anthropology, the anthropology of ethics, and the anthropology of religion. |
Posted January 5, 2021
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NOW ONLINE: WEBINAR WITH ELENA FIDDIAN-QASMIYEH
Winter Quarter 2021 Series | Webinar Archive
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EVENT: In this keynote lecture inaugurating our quarter theme Comparative Humanitarianisms from January 22, 2021, Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh from University College London discusses Middle Eastern refugee responses, including hosting, to the displacement of Syrian refugees since 2011. Her talk offers an overview of the roles played by local host communities, faith-based networks, Southern states including Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, and refugees themselves. |
Posted January 24, 2021
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WEBINAR WITH AMIRA MITTERMAIER, "GOD, HUMANS, AND AN ISLAMIC ETHIC OF CARE" & SIENNA R. CRAIG, "FROM EARTHQUAKES AND EMPOWERMENTS TO PANDEMICS: TIBETAN MEDICAL HUMANITARIANISMS"
Webinar | Thursday, February 4, 2021 | 3:30–4:30 PM PST
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EVENT: For this webinar, we have invited two guests to speak on the topic of comparative humanitarianisms. Amira Mittermaier (“God, Humans, and an Islamic Ethics of Care): Caring for those in need is a central pillar of Islam. But caring for is not necessarily the same as caring about. Drawing on fieldwork in informal spaces of giving in post-2011 Egypt, this talk lays out an Islamic ethics of care—one not driven by compassion or pity but centered on divinely prescribed rights and responsibilities. Sienna R. Craig (“Himalayan Humanitarianisms: Crisis Response from Earthquakes to Pandemics”): How does “humanitarianism” surface in contexts that are primarily non-biomedical and that emerge from Tibetan Buddhist worldviews? What ideals, materials, and practices shape such encounters? Building on ethnographic research that focuses on Tibetan medical camps in India and Nepal, and incorporating recent events related to Tibetan medical responses to COVID-19 in North America and Asia, Craig considers how local logics of care intersect with a global politics of compassion. FEATURING: Amira Mittermaier is Professor of Anthropology and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (U. of California Press, 2011) and Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (U. of California Press, 2019). Sienna R. Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is the author most recently of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York (U. of Washington Press, 2020). |
Posted January 15, 2021
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WINTER QUARTER KEYNOTE: "SHIFTING THE GAZE - SOUTHERN-LED HUMANITARIAN RESPONSES TO DISPLACEMENT" BY
ELENA FIDDIAN-QASMIYEH Webinar | Thursday, January 21, 2021 | 9:30-10:30 am PST
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EVENT: Displacement is primarily a "Southern" and "South-South" phenomenon, to which Southern actors have historically responded in ways that resist, reject, and provide alternatives to the hegemonic aid regime. In this webinar, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh focuses on responses to Syrian displacement since 2011 and develops a multiscalar analysis of the roles played by Southern states, local host communities, faith-based networks, and refugees themselves. She argues that a focus on “refugee-refugee humanitarianism” can challenge dominant and exclusionary Northern humanitarianism paradigms of refugee studies. FEATURING: Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at University College London, where she directs the Refuge in a Moving World interdisciplinary research network. |
Posted January 5, 2021
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NOW ONLINE: WEBINAR WITH JESSICA WHYTE & EMMA MEYER
Fall Quarter 2020 Series | Webinar Archive
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EVENT: In this webinar from December 4, 2020, our panelists Jessica Whyte and Emma Meyer invite us to rethink the concepts of humanity, humanitarianism, refuge making and law by focusing on the formerly unrecognized arenas and actors of humanitarianism in the Global South. If you missed the live event, you can rewatch the conversation in our webinar archive. Future recordings will be posted approximately two weeks after airing. |
Posted January 1, 2021
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ANNOUNCING NEW WINTER QUARTER 2021 SAWYER SEMINAR PROGRAM
Winter Quarter 2021 Series | Program
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EVENT: Our new quarterly program for Winter 2021 is now available! The second cluster of the Sawyer Seminar Comparative Humanitarianisms will bring an excellent group of scholars to our webinar series. We look forward to seeing you at our events soon! WINTER QUARTER 2021 PROGRAM: Thursday, January 21, 2021, 9:30-10:30 am PST Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh - Shifting the Gaze: Southern-led Humanitarian Responses to Displacement Register here. February 4, 2021, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST Amira Mittermaier (University of Toronto), “God, Humans, and an Islamic Ethics of Care” & Sienna R. Craig (Dartmouth College), “From Earthquakes and Empowerments to Pandemics: Tibetan Medical Humanitarianisms” Register here. February 18, 2021, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST Basit Kareem Iqbal (McMaster University), “Ambivalence and Askesis in Zaatari Refugee Camp” & China Scherz (University of Virginia), “Seeking the Wounds of the Gift: Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage” Register here. |
