Mellon interim report 2012-13

Interim Narrative Report, Award #11100658, for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

PIs: David Theo Goldberg, UC Humanities Research Institute David Marshall, UC Santa Barbara Carolyn de la Pena, UC Davis

Overview: Currently concluding year two of the grant, we had a successful year of programming that included three graduate seminars, five working groups, eight summer research grants for individual faculty projects, and two global seminars. Each of these projects were engaged in quarter to yearlong activities that included working group meetings, conferences, interviews, public exhibitions, graduate student conferences, and much else. Looking ahead to the 2013-14 academic year, we are convening a hybrid working group/ residential research group and hosting a series of dynamic events and conversations around the work of the initiative.

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Graduate Student Seminars In year two, faculty representing the UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Berkeley campuses led graduate student seminars on work. These courses, taught in Classics, English, and Art History, provided an opportunity for UC graduate students to examine work from particular historical periods, mediums, and theoretical perspectives. In addition to meeting regularly to discuss material, the seminars engaged in student-run symposiums, colloquia, field trips, and blog posts to the UC Humanities Forum http:// uchumanitiesforum.org.

Fall 2012

“Comparative Approaches to Work in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the Middle Ages” Andromache Karanika, Classics, UC Irvine

This historically-focused seminar introduced students to the changing conceptions of labor and work from different genres of texts that stretched from the archaic to classical Greece to Roman times and finally to the early Middle Ages. As part of the TriCampus Graduate Program, this course included students from Classics, English, Comparative Literature, and Visual Studies at UC Irvine and in History from UC Riverside. As a culminating event of the seminar, students co-organized a graduate student conference and a symposium entitled “Reflections on Work and Labor in Ancient Greece” that included student-moderated faculty paper presentations by Page duBois (UCSD), Anthony Edwards (UCSD), Laura McClure (UW Madison), and others. Students reflected on

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the experience of organizing and running this symposium as a “unique experience of professionalization.” In this way, the theoretical work they did as students in the graduate seminar was complemented by a practical exercise in academic professionalization.

Seminar students were also regular contributors to the UC Humanities Forum, where they reflected on reading and topics from the seminar as well as their research foci.

Links to course-related activities: • Syllabus • Additional Poster for Graduate Conference Blog posts on: • Plato and Aristotle on work • The Concept of Work in Hesiod • Photographic Labor

REFLECTI O NS O N WORK AN D LABOR I N ANCI ENT GREECE December 7, 2012 2:00-5:30 PM Humanities Gateway 1010

Part I. Labor, Work, Class, Slavery

Part I I::. Women, Ch i ldren, Labor

2:00-3:15 PM

3:30-5:30 PM

“Hesiod’s Etiology of Labor" Anthony Edwards, UCSD

"Women, Textiles, and Social Networks in Ancient Greece” Laura McClure, UW–Madison

Discussion Leaders: Elizabeth Parker, UCR/UCI Robin Murray, UCI

Discussion Leaders: Matthew Ferguson, UCI Lauren Brenner, UCI

"Work, Class, Hegeso, and Her Slave" Page duBois, UCSD

"Maternal Ponos and War in Athenian Tragedy" Angeliki Tzanetou, UIUC

Discussion leaders: Christy Cones, UCI Vicki Hioureas, UCI

Discussion leaders: Katie McClelland, UCI Teresa Yates, UCI "All Work and No Play? Child Labor in Graeco-Roman Egypt" Mar yline Parca, UIUC Discussion leaders: Nat Murphy, UCI Shawn Ragan, UCR

Sponsored by the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the UCI Classics Department and the Tri-Campus Graduate Program in Classics.

For questions and comments please e-mail Andromache Karanika, (karanika@uci.edu)

Winter 2013 “The Refusal of Work: Precarity, Scarcity, Affect” Maurizia Boscagli, English, UC Santa Barbara This seminar studied the nexus of work and happiness today, at the time when work has changed into new forms (immaterial, cognitive, affective), and has become scarce. If the contemporary precarity and scarcity of work are the reasons for the most widespread psychopathology of post-Fordism and depression, what does the refusal of work (from Jules Lafargue's celebration of laziness to Italian Autonomism's experiments with a life against the routine of productive and leisure time during the 1970s) promise? Can the "aesthetic" quality of this life against work, which echoes both the aristocratic distance of the dandy and the opposition of the political agitator (the Surrealists, the Situationists) become the means to new social relations, to new economic forms, to a new understanding of happiness? Can the refusal of work illuminate in new ways the work we do in the humanities in today’s academy?

Students in the seminar engaged in weekly discussions of readings and films that touched on neoliberalism, immaterial work, feminist viewpoints on precarious labor, and student debt, among many others. In addition to the seminar, students participated in a two-day conference entitled “Commoning Precarity: No Work, Refusal, Autonomy” that included graduate student presentations and invited speakers such as Kathi Weeks (Duke University) and Douglas Kellner (UCLA).

Course Syllabus

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Spring 2013

“Art and Labor/Art as Labor” Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art History, UC Berkeley

Poster designed by Joey Enos, UC Berkeley

Course Syllabus

This seminar, which included an interdisciplinary group of students from Anthropology, Art Practice, History of Art, Performances Studies, and Rhetoric, considered how artists and theorists alike have understood art—making as a form of labor—as purposeful effort structured by class relations and economic imperatives. Within art history, art making is viewed as a mode of production much like any other, and as such is open for categories of analysis such as valuation, distribution, and consumption. How does this assertion stake a claim for the political relevance of art?

How do theorists conceive of how art itself works—how it acts, functions, and performs?

Art has been explicitly contrasted to work—the “free,” “unproductive” counterpoint to the grind of alienated wage labor.

This seminar examined a range of writings that variously assert that art is labor and that it is leisure.

What theoretical work does art do? And how do we make sense of starkly opposing opinions about the relationships between art, autonomy, the culture industry, and elitism? Case studies focused on art since 1960, including dematerialized conceptualism, task-based dance, feminist craft, and artistic organizing within the Occupy movement.

In addition to regular seminar meetings, the seminar travelled to Utah to view Robert Smithson's massive earthwork “Spiral Jetty,” to shed light on the politics of construction and the production of place. In addition to these activities, seminar participants presented their work from the course in a culminating event.

The class in Utah viewing Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty”

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Working Groups The UC Humanities Network funded seven working groups for the 2012 and 2012-13 year. These working groups, comprised of faculty and graduate students, were designed to catalyze collaboration between individuals from different disciplines, locations, and UC campuses around a specific problem, theme, object or topic within the larger theme of the humanities and changing conceptions of work. Some of these groups performed their work during the 2012 year but were so engaged and committed to the project that they continued their projects through the 2013 academic year. Other working groups began their projects a bit later (due to administrative issues) or will begin work in the 2013 year.

Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity PI: Eileen Boris (UC Santa Barbara) Overview:

The Year in Review

This working group explores the social relations of precarious labor, both formal and informal, from an interdisciplinary, global, and intersectional approach that considers how sociocultural inequalities are and have been magnified and countered during times of financial crises, technological development, and increasing unemployment.

Attentive to social contexts that shape, even as they are shaped by, constructs of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, ability, age, and citizenship, it considers categorical questions of what counts as work and who counts as a worker from feminist, ethnic, and cultural studies perspectives.

The Working Group brings to the conversation insights from the humanities sometimes missing from investigations of the informal sector and too often ignored in discussions of the global economic and employment crisis.

Over the past year, the Working Group held four in-person meetings, one virtual meeting, and several small working group meetings. They also hosted a webinar with Ai-jen Poo and Premilla Nadasen on the topic of working at living and the domestic worker. They likewise hosted Selma James— “legendary women’s rights activist, anti-racist campaigner, and author” at UCSB to talk about reproductive and caring labor performed by women and the way in which women are critical in the struggle against the hegemony of the logics of the market economy in everyday life. The year’s engagement concluded with a conference entitled: “Working at Living: A Conference on the Social Relations of Precarity.” The group also contributed posts to the Humanities Forum about the progress of their work.

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Blog posts on: • Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity • Working at Living: A Webinar with Ai-jen Poo and Premilla Nadasen • Working at Living from the Perspective of Winning: Selma James visits UCSB 5

Santa Cruz Commons: Activist Research and the Public Humanities PI: Nancy Chen (UC Santa Cruz) Overview:

The Year in Review:

Increasingly, members of the working

Santa Cruz Commons had an exceptionally vibrant year of programming. The Working Group undertook a mapping project of community organizations in Santa Cruz to aid in the planning and facilitation of university-community dialogues. They also administered surveys of community interests and faculty research foci in order to develop shared topics for exploration.

Through their conversations, the Working Group, in collaboration with other community partners, identified housing and homelessness, criminal justice, health, education, and art and democracy as areas of particular interest.

and middle classes feel excluded as economic agents in a society shaped by globalization and technological innovation, by massive unemployment and a devastated housing market, by deepening social inequities and the truncation of public resources. In social, political and psychological terms, those who are unemployed experience themselves as marginal to an economy that rests on waged labor, commodity markets, and capitalist enterprise. For these reasons, citizens, community activists and activist academics around the country have begun to seek solutions at the local level to economic and social problems that seem intransigent in a national context. Their goal is the conceptualization and mobilization of alternative economies that can support forms of work that are creative, innovative, productive, collaborative

—and committed to social justice.

Strategies and forms of knowledge that humanists have defined can be particularly effective in helping to advance this kind of effort. They are pivotal in the conception of "Santa Cruz Commons: Activist Research and the Public Humanities." The project's Working Group considers how humanists can help to create such an alternative economy by redefining the meaning of work.

Interactive image from the SCC Website 6

...Continuation of Santa Cruz Commons Outgrowths of initial funding: • In collaboration with the local Santa Cruz chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Helene Moglen (UCSC, Emerita) and Sheila Namir (a local psychologist and psychoanalyst) co-taught a writing workshop for veterans entitled “Fighting for Words.”

• Sharon Daniel (UCSC) taught advanced undergraduates a course on community documentation. In the advanced digital media class students developed interactive, narrative maps of progressive community groups, conducted interviews, assembled oral histories, and designed prototypes for an interactive web interface for recorded interviews and research.

• Created a website to feature their work (Santa Cruz Commons).

• Held a webinar with Grace Lee Boggs, author and activist, around the topic of community engagement.

• Gave three community mini grants to local organizations that (1) assist women to successfully reintegrate and become contributing members of society after incarceration, (2) provide low-income rural Californians with free legal assistance, and (3) provide after-school arts and music programs for at-risk youth.

• Faculty continued research and organized meetings regarding the work of the Working Group. For example, George Lipsitz continued his work with community organizations in Watsonville regarding housing and the foreclosure crisis and Moglen and Nancy Chen organized a dialogue at the Museum of Art and History entitled “Realizing a progressive vision of Santa Cruz.”

• Blog post: Redefining the Public Humanities

Future activities include the work of a steering committee to foster community dialogue and engagement. The steering committee has identified future projects that include a series of dialogues and presentations around democracy and education, homelessness, and North/South Santa Cruz County relations.

Changing Work, Changing Workforce: Immigrants and their Impact on the Meanings of Work PI: Steven McKay (UC Santa Cruz) Overview: The working group explores the relations between the changing economy, changing meanings of work, and the changing labor force by addressing a central animating question: how does WHO does the work affect the conceptions of work itself? The group examines the topic by focusing on a particular type of work: “immigrant work” and a particular locus of labor: immigrant workers in California. The working group explores immigrant work and workers across a broad range of historical periods in California as well as from multiple disciplinary perspectives and methodologies. Most generally, the working group addresses the theme of the humanities and the changing conceptions of work by highlighting the roles work and the workplace play in the quest for human dignity.

The Year in Review The Working Group held a workshop in October at UCSC on the theme of immigrant labor. They are also developing a website and have contributed a post—Highlights from Immigrants and Working Group—to the Humanities Forum blog.

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2012-13 Working Groups Social Media, Insecure Work and New Conceptions of Labor Solidarity PIs: Chris Benner (UC Davis) and Jesse Drew (UC Davis) Overview: Social media has become a powerful means for connecting people and supporting social movement organizing. At the same time, rapid technological change, globalization and volatile competitive conditions have contributed to growing insecurity in work, in which the workplace is less frequently a site of long-term stability and collective conceptions of work have been eroded as a basis for solidarity. As a result, on-line solidarity networks have rarely focused on work, while traditional labor organizations have rarely been innovators in their use of social media. This Working Group focuses on exceptions, particularly in transportation and food chain industries, where social media have been powerful tools for connecting people around labor issues across multiple and disparate places. What are the conceptions of work that underpin these new formations of labor solidarity, and how do they compare with formations of solidarity amongst similar insecure workers in the past? What role do social media play in shaping the nature of solidarity within these labor networks, and how do these roles differ from more traditional media in the past? At the intersection of history, media studies, and labor organizing, this working group brings new insights to our understanding of shifting conceptions of work and solidarity.

The Year in Review The Working Group began the year with a daylong conversation among 13 UCD and UCLA faculty and representatives from the Food Chain Workers Alliance, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, ACLU of Northern California, and the United Latinos of the UFSW National to discuss project goals and outcomes for the Working Group. Alongside regular meetings (both in person and virtual), the group: • Created a blog to feature their work • Hosted a “hack-a-thon” to develop a prototype of a new electronic tool that addresses the needs of practitioners • Held a conference at UCLA that addressed labor, communication, and power; immigrant worker organizing; food system organizing; and transport/ goods movement. Goals of the conference included developing a mission statement for collaboration between academics and labor in California, creating plans for strengthening the online resource, and engaging in conversation about how research, teaching, and other resources of the academy can be most helpful in supporting innovative social media strategies and organizing over the next 3-5 years.

For more information about this event, please see the agenda and list of participants.

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Working Class Cultural Labor of the Central Valley PI: Jan Goggans (UC Merced) Overview:

The Year in Review In the first meeting of the Working Group, members met to establish collective and individual goals, determining in the process a shared interest in the topics of fashion, food, and literature as related to working class cultural labor. From these conversations faculty embarked upon a dynamic set of activities, including: • Focused projects on those who labor in the fields, those who produce and distribute food, and those who consume these products • Creating an interactive map of food trucks to accompany the food production and distribution research (see bullet above) • Production and screening of the film Open Country, which focuses on the roots of country music and its white working class tradition • Continuing projects on (1) the poetry and (2) performative fashion of Central Valley working class culture

The Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work

What roles do music, literature, fashion, and food have in the contemporary life of the worker who produces, distributes, and consumes them? While traditional explorations of class have long begun with a Marxist model emphasizing institutional formations of resistance, the new working class studies model calls for a broader understanding of work and class, looking at “how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community.”

Understanding class as a subjective position as well as an economic position is particularly relevant to work in California’s central valley since it opens working class studies to a wider range, one that includes economics and material culture. Focusing on this site of exploration, this Working Group reformulates California studies by intersecting with a new concept of labor studies - an intersection that allows us to rethink both. Our focus on cultural expression by the working class in the central valley revolves around a mix of the contemporary and historical, allowing a range of UC scholars to work at defining a new cutting edge of labor, working class and cultural studies, an intersection made especially rich through material culture in this diverse and understudied region of California.

The Working Group experienced some difficulties around the budget, and in particular the approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for community-based interviews (what IRB would call working with “human subjects”). The Working Group persisted, however, and designed a program of events and projects for the upcoming year. The budget issues have been resolved, and the group is looking forward to September, when they will host an exhibit at the Merced Multi Cultural Center entitled “Central Valley Threads: Picking out Strands of Life and Art in the Central Valley” (with accompanying website and Facebook page). Alongside this major activity, the Working Group members will continue their individual projects in ways that engage the public in new and exciting ways. Those who produced Open Country, for example, are interested in conducting oral histories with elderly music fans as well as creating a “video jukebox” that allows for increased audience participation. Those working on issues of food and food production will be looking at the issue of hunger and homelessness, combining text and sound to create an entirely new product geared to their viewing publics.

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Graduate Student Training and Faculty Assessment in the Humanities PIs: William Ladusaw (UC Santa Cruz) and Julia Lupton (UC Irvine) Overview: The past decade has brought increasing concern about the future of the university as it navigates strong currents of change in the national and global ecology of higher education. These changes bring opportunities for creative innovation and broadened access; they also create anxiety within the academy when they call into question traditional assumptions of value, consequence, and privilege. This working group focuses on changing criteria of assessment for new modes of work in the Humanities and the role and place for graduate student training. As new modes of work, especially multimedia work, have materialized in the Humanities, they have tended to be assessed on the basis of older established assessment criteria especially in the case of hiring, tenure, and merit promotions. The Working Group considers the range of new assessment criteria, their relevance and viability as well as how graduate student training may adapt and adjust its traditional protocols.

The Year in Review This Working Group included 11 UC faculty, administrators, staff, and graduate students who met to examine graduate student training and faculty assessment across the UC system. The group met for three in-person meetings (two in Irvine at UC Irvine and one in Oakland at the UC Office of the President) and virtually via Google Hangout at least 8 times throughout the year. In these meetings the group discussed the current state of graduate student training and faculty assessment, reviewed relevant literature, and created a white paper (see ATTACHED). In addition to these activities, the group co-sponsored a visit by Stanford Professor Russell Berman to UC Irvine on the topic of graduate student training (including the controversial topic of time-to-degree).

Looking forward, the group is discussing the best way to disseminate the white paper so that UC campuses— and in particular, faculty and graduate students by way of their departments—can engage in conversation about the white paper’s recommendations, providing additional suggestions and topics for continued conversation. They are considering hosting a series of regional in-person and UC-wide virtual town hall-style meetings in the winter and spring quarters.

Working draft of the white paper.

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2013-14 Working Groups Rethinking the Purpose of Work Through the Pleasures and Displeasures of Food PI: Melissa L. Caldwell (UC Santa Cruz) Overview: This Working Group brings together a group of scholars from the humanities and humanistic social sciences who work at the intersection of food studies and labor to critically examine how food-related activities challenge categories and practices pertaining to labor such as service, profit, desire, pleasure, and leisure. Potential topics to be addressed include distinctions and relationships between work and leisure, work and voluntarism, economic capital and cultural capital, utilitarianism and aestheticism, and profit and pleasure. Conversations will be deliberately cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and transhistorical, and will engage both empirical and theoretical materials. Ultimately, the crossfertilization of these approaches will contribute new forms of scholarship, teaching, and mentoring.

The Year in Review The Working Group requested and was given an extension for their grant. Due to administrative difficulties on the PI’s home campus, the award was not processed in time for the Working Group to begin. As a result, they will be conducting their working group in the 2013-14 year. An update regarding their work will be provided in the concluding narrative report (June 2014).

The Work of the Humanities/The Humanities as Work PI: John Marx (UC Davis) Overview: In fall 2013 UCHRI will host a hybrid working group/residential research group on the topic of “The Work of the Humanities/The Humanities as Work.” We anticipate that this Working Group will function as a follow-up to the Faculty Assessment and Graduate Student Training Working Group, as both engage in an interrogation of the humanities as work. This Working Group, however, will examine the topic from a more theoretical and philosophical point of view, engaging in a performative self-interrogation of the work of the humanities as humanist scholars at work. This group combines the model of the working group with the model of the residential research group to create a hybrid group that will meet one week/month during the fall quarter, and communicate virtually throughout the fall and the rest of the year. This group, convened by John Marx, UC Davis, includes faculty, post-docs, and graduate students from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, UC Los Angeles, and UC San Diego. They met at UCHRI in May for a pre-convening planning meeting, and are already hard at work developing a digital platform that will support the full spectrum of activities for the upcoming year.

For more information on the working group, including a list of participants, please visit the forum.

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Global Seminars This past year we also held a series of global seminars—workshops on the work of critical theory in the humanities. The seminar in Hong Kong included faculty from a number of different UC campuses in discussion with faculty from the University of Witwatersrand, and faculty and graduate students from City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University. The workshop topic focused on the “social life of forms,” discussing how we experience forms in their

interaction with social life, and how the life of the form alters over time and space/ place. A number of university faculty in Taiwan invited David Theo Goldberg to visit Taipei following Hong Kong, where we discussed the possibility of ongoing interactions concerning critical theory. The visit will likely lead to a series of workshops involving Taiwanese and UC faculty. The first workshop, next academic year, will likely focus on the topic of “waiting” as a growing condition of contemporary social life.

We held two workshops on race, one in Irvine (November 2012) and one in Johannesburg (February 2013)

involving faculty from across UC, Wits in Johannesburg, and two from Duke University and one from Boston University. The workshops focused on new analytics of racial conception and arrangement, including new developments in digital and genetic articulations, and will lead to a small online and print publication. Two additional workshops are planned next academic year, in Senegal and Sao Paulo, also involving support from the Goethe Institute, and will serve to help prepare a joint UCHRI SECT/ Wits Social and Economic ResearchJohannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism institute in July 2014 in South Africa focusing on “Archives of the Nonracial”.

Faculty Research Grants We awarded eight summer research grants totaling almost $49,000 to faculty working on issues pertaining to work and the humanities; these faculty, who represent six UC campuses, were competitively selected by our advisory committee, some of whom will be spending the summer conducting overseas and archival research. Funded projects include: • Amalia Cabezas, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside, “From Love Muse to Sex Worker: The Transformation of Mexican and Puerto Rican Cantineras”

• James Kearney, English, UC Santa Barbara, “Work and Debt” • Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon, Women and Gender Studies, UC Davis, “Cooking Up a Second Act: Narratives of Entrepreneurial Domesticity in a Postfeminist Neoliberal Economy” • David Pan, European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine, “The Work of Interpretation” • Babak Rahimi, Literature, UC San Diego, “Digitizing Production of Carpets & Tiles: Social Media, Design/Decorative Economy, and the Changing

Nations of Work in PostRevolutionary Iran” • Janet Sorensen, English, UC Berkeley, “Eighteenth-Century British Imaginings of Work and the Work of the Humanities” • Kim Voss, Sociology, UC Berkeley, “Worker Identities in a New Era of Immigration” • Tobias Warner, French and Italian Studies, UC Davis, “The ‘Work’ of Wolof Literature and Film in the Age of Neoliberalism”

For more information on each of these projects, please visit the forum.

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Other News of Interest • The Social and Cultural Studies Librarians at UC Davis were interested in the Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work Initiative and coordinated a symposium that included over 40 undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from the humanities and social sciences in conjunction with a bibliographic exhibit in the lobby of Shields Library (UC Davis). The project, “On Work: Changing Relations of Value and Labor,” highlights UC Librarians David Michalski’s and Michael Winter’s interest in the critical study of work in our changing society. In addition to the exhibit and conference, they maintain a list of resources/ texts on relevant work-related topics on their website and blog. Although not funded by UC Humanities Network, this project is in conjunction with the work of our initiative and is exciting evidence of how important this topic is for the university. For more information, please visit their website.

• Stuart Parnes, Director of the Connecticut Humanities Council, contacted us early this year to talk about the initiative. Ralph Lewin, Cal Humanities Director, put him in touch with us since the Connecticut Humanities Council will be developing a yearlong initiative around the topic of work. We had a productive phone call with Mr. Parnes, and provided some contact information for scholars working on topics that might be of interest to his constituency.

Future Projects

The upcoming year proves to be a busy one!

• In Summer 2013, we will redesign the Humanities and Changing Conceptions of Work website to create a more dynamic and complete showcase for our programs.

• We are currently planning a winter quarter think tank meeting that will bring selected Humanities Deans, Center Directors, faculty, and staff into conversations around the grant, examining the work that has been done in the past two years and looking ahead to future projects about the humanities and work. This three-day meeting will be held at Westerbeke Ranch in Sonoma Valley, California.

• We are also currently planning a concluding conference for late spring quarter, 2014,“How the Humanities Work,” that will draw on UC faculty and graduate students who have participated in initiative activities over the three years of the research initiative. Non-UC faculty working in the area also will be invited as key interlocutors. The proceedings will be videotaped, and an edited version will be aired on UCTV, the University of California satellite and cable television network reaching 8 million households in the tri-state region. We anticipate holding this event at either UC Berkeley or UC Los Angeles so as to attract a robust group of participants.

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Logistical and Programmatic Challenges As the previous descriptions demonstrate, it has been a productive year for the initiative. Nonetheless, we experienced some challenges around making grants and receiving deliverables from the grantees: • Although the transfer of funds from UCHRI to each campus were expeditiously made, some of the individual campuses were not well prepared to quickly disburse the funds to the recipients.

As a result, one working group had to postpone their project until the next academic year.

• We gave out summer research grants to eight faculty for summer research projects. Although most of these projects asked for funds for particular research trips, three faculty requested funds to support their summer salaries. Due to administrative procedures these faculty have had to battle with their departments in order to receive the full amount of the award. In the future we want to clarify that summer funds should be for research expenses.

• Each funded Working Group was asked to assign one graduate student blogger to write frequent blog posts for the UC Humanities Forum about the status of their work, topics of interest, etc.

Although some of the groups were actively engaged in this activity, others were less inclined to fulfill this requirement of the grant. As a result, we did not have the number of blog posts that we had initially anticipated.

• We grapple with the discrepancy between the vibrant and engaged work being done by our grantees and the static progress reports we receive. We recognize that more work needs to be done on our end to help grantees record and convey their work in a manner that better reflects their project. Although we have some ideas in mind, we want to begin by conducting oral interviews with the incoming working group, encouraging all funded groups to share their visual materials with us, and have UCHRI staff attend Working Group events when at all possible.

We have been extremely pleased by the wide variety of projects we have funded over the past two years, and are excited to see how the separate conversations of each Working Group and seminar intersect in interesting ways. We look forward to planning a culminating conference that will begin to showcase the vibrant work being done on the humanities and changing conceptions of work across the UC system.

Report prepared by Dr. Kelly Anne Brown, Research Programs Manager, UCHRI

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