2021-23 Crisis Program Abstracts

Edward Foley 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).

Adia Benton 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.

Dorothy Noyes 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.

Ling Zhang 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.”

Joseph Manning 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).

Sarah Muir 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.

Bedour Alagraa 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.

Serhy Yekelchyk 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).

Media & Materiality: Category Crisis and Transitional Moments in East Asia and Eastern Europe Symposium Description:

The language of “crisis” is pervasive in our neoliberal pandemic world, but the term is so capacious as to demand more rigorous scrutiny to become critically useful. The goal of our symposium is to theorize what crisis means at the level of lived experience, in the media and in the materialties that create historical subjectivities and relationalities. In other words, what happens when the mediated environments that we are enmeshed in are suddenly forced to function differently? When categories understood as structures (of feeling) and (medium) specificities come into question? Furthermore, if media and materialities mediate our experience, how do we account for media’s own crises at moments of historical shock? For example, what can we learn if we consider that the inflection point between socialism and postsocialism is also a moment in which film loses ground to video and data? How do we read a doubly critical crisis when the very thing that anchors us in specific historical life worlds changes at the same moment in which social structures shift? We are eager to untangle these interrelated meanings of crisis by turning to East Asia and Eastern Europe, two locales in which much of the 20th century was experienced as crisis and shock and whose careful study can help us develop historical methods and theoretical tools necessary to understand an age of crisis.

Michael Berry Abstract:

Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang began as a blog which ran for sixty days from January 25 through March 25, 2020, documenting the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. The blog quickly became an online phenomenon, attracting tens of millions of Chinese readers. Wuhan Diary also provided an important portal for Chinese around the world to understand the outbreak, the local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. The diary featured a curious mixture of quotidian details from Fang Fang’s daily routine under quarantine, medical insights from the author’s doctor friends, and brave observations about the official response. Eventually, Fang Fang’s account would become the target of a series of online attacks by “ultra-nationalists,” spawning debate about COVID-19, Sino-US Relations, and nature of civil society in China. As the English translator of Wuhan Diary, this lecture will alternate between first-hand insights from the translation process and broader observations on how the diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate in China, ultimately hinting at the power of writing.

Author of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York, 2008).

Jacob Soll Abstract:

There have been numerous attempts to explain the origins of the French Revolution, and the politics that took place during event. However, historians have ignored that a crisis in public finance and accounting was the central spark of the Revolution. Indeed, I discovered a trove of pamphlets that show just how focused French leaders and the public were on questions of accounting and accountability, and that, for the first years of the Revolution, attempts to improve accounting and public balance sheets were at the fore of the political actions of the first revolutionary governments. However, this was not an isolated event. Early modern Europe saw a number of political crises emerge over accounting and accountability so that we might see the two subjects as central to a useful approach in looking at the origins and mechanisms of financial and political crises in general.

Author of The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York, 2014).

Julia Keblinska Abstract:

The lauded Polish art film of late socialism and the cinematic avant garde that emerges during the Chinese transition to postsocialism deal with the failure of the socialist project and in this talk stage a collapse of a certain generic expectations. These films mediate, and to a degree, “premediate” the looming crisis of historical transition that would rock both nations on June 4^th, 1989. In the former case, the date marks Poland’s democratic elections that led to the dismantling of the socialist system, and in the latter, the Tiananmen massacre that violently reconfigured the future of Chinese socialism into neoliberal autocracy. Indeed the coevolution of these two June 4ths vis a vis the collapse of the Soviet Union is provocatively explored by perhaps the most well-known public intellectual of crisis, Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine. In this talk, I consider the political and economic aesthetics described by Klein, but read these two postsocialist transitions comparatively through the forms and aesthetics of media that, quite simply, mediated them.

Scholarship on the “high culture fever” of early postsocialist China (1978-1989) repeatedly notes the significance of Polish texts, be they philosophical reconsiderations of socialist humanism or the “cinema of moral anxiety” (kino moralnego niepokoju) and absurdity that gave such doubts visual form. In the first part of the talk, I will show how the late socialist “high anxieties” of such elite texts manifest cinematically in director Huang Jianxin’s modernist oeuvre to repeatedly stage breakdowns and collapses across several genres (comedy, sci fi, noir) that Huang creatively infuses with the late socialist anxiety that suffused Polish film production of that period. I will then use Huang as a pivot away from a comparative reading of high registers into new territory that considers the importance of low genres, pulp cinema, circulated in both Poland and China on VHS to the consternation of both national film industries. Ultimately, I suggest that the explosion of multiple new genres on non-cinematic audiovisual media precipitates not only a crisis of socialist cinema in the face of new histories and new markets, but also creates postsocialist subjects who learn to navigate the political media ecologies of postsocialist transition by recourse to new generic modes.

Julia Keblinska earned her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2021, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her dissertation is titled “New Era, New Media: The Postsocialist Chinese Media Ecology.”

Steve Kern Abstract:

Commentators judge that new speedy communication, transportation, and production technologies over the past forty years have created many unforeseen problems including unemployment, mental illness, alienation, addiction, and environmental degradation, problems that some interpret as crises. This paper traces dialectically the impact of these new accelerating technologies from 1880 to the present and shows how they also stimulated new thinking about and experiences of slower paces. It argues that a fuller understanding of an acceleration of experience should interpret how contrasting paces as faster or slower arise out of each other. The new technologies also increased choices for whatever pace was appropriate for many human needs, presto or adagio, that those increasing choices had positive existential value.

Roberto Barrios Abstract:

In the case of Western European historiography, the origin of the crisis concept is often traced to Classical Greece, where it was used in the medical and legal fields to denote decision or a judgement. During the Middle Ages, the latter meaning of crisis as judgement lent itself to application in Christian teleological histories of salvation, with the Final Judgement being conceived as a crisis that would mark the transition between two qualitatively different temporalities: the history of humanity and the eternal utopia of the Kingdom of Heaven. This Christian Medieval meaning of crisis would eventually permeate 18th Century historiography, where the term came to describe critical moments of upheaval that marked transitions between different epochs, a meaning that endured in 19th Century evolutionary social theory. At the same time, crisis’ classical meaning as judgement is also commonly seen as the origin of the 18th Century Western European notion of critique. In 20th Century social science, this connection between crisis and critique resurfaced when a number of scholars came to see upheaval as a methodologically opportune moment that makes visible socio-political fault lines, contradictions, and structures that are more difficult to document during times of “normalcy.” Most notable among these scholars was Marshall Sahlins, who popularized the term crise révélatrice. But proponents of the revelatory merits of crises drew a modernist blindside as they assumed the vantagepoint for beholding a crisis was one that was informed by Marxist or political ecological theory, granting these analytical perspectives status as universally applicable transcendental critiques. Since the 1960s, post-structural deconstructions of Marxist analyses have helped us recognize the situatedness of Eurocentric social theory. In light of these contributions and in the context of global challenges such as anthropogenic climate change and the COVID 19 Pandemic, this presentation explores the following questions: If crises are, indeed, revelatory, what role does the beholder’s epistemological vantagepoint play in what is revealed to the observer? If crises are laden with the potential for social change, can they also bring about epistemological change and if so, for whom and how?

Professor Barrios is the author of Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction (Nebraska, 2017)

Robin Wagner-Pacifici Abstract:

This talk describes how time, space, and identity are reconfigured by the ruptures of historical events. It does so through a consideration of the intertwining of the Covid 19 pandemic and the social uprising against police violence targeting African-Americans in the United States. These ongoing intertwined ruptures have opened up a ‘double exposure,’ for a society riven by racism, disease, and inequality, an exposure that makes problematic conventional categories associated with events, like those of past and future and inside and outside. While we feel compelled to respond to these events, we simultaneously experience a crisis in our very categories of understanding the events, and in our relationships to them.

Professor Wagner-Pacifici is the author of What Is an Event? (Chicago, 2017)
This event is co-sponsored by the Ohio State University Office of Diversity

Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter Abstract: