FRIAS Colloquium

It is generally understood that a signature feature of the art of the novel form is its ability to “show not tell”: to convey or suggest its meanings rather than directly state them. This value of indirect presentation is generally associated with the late nineteenth-century and Modernist novel. This talk makes the case that a richer understanding of this distinction can come from paying attention to the earliest novels from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Less aesthetically self-conscious and not yet understood as fitting within an art form, these works more crudely reveal fundamental dynamics of colloquial prose that bring meaning into narrative whether intended or not, such that they do not depend upon accomplished styles or conventions. As a result, the earliest novels prove especially generative for thinking about the possiblities for the narrative arts today and in the future. The talk will briefly discuss the “saying/showing” distinction in literature and philosophy before touching upon some of the features of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century narrative that inform novels today.

Date: 27 April 2026

Time: 15:15 – 16:15

Speaker:
Thomas Manganaro, English Literature, University of Richmond

Infrastructures are attracting growing interest across the social sciences—particularly in economics and planning—as well as in applied fields such as engineering. Much of this scholarship engages dominant frameworks and idealized models of Western modernity and agency, often shaped by notions of sophistication, structure, and order. While not without value, these frameworks and ideals—whether intentionally or not—frequently produce portrayals of Global South geographies ‘apocalyptic,’ environmentally ‘destructive,’ or ‘catastrophic,’ thereby conflating forms and temporalities that do not conform to dominant paradigms with ‘chaos,’ ‘disorder,’ and ‘decay.’ Common (mis-)representations of urban ‘slums’ and ‘informal settlements’ exemplify this tendency. 

This project brings critiques of technocratic perspectives on infrastructure development into conversation with scholarship that foregrounds alternative pathways, radical political practices, ordinary systems, philosophies and temporalities of repair. I offer a series of vignettes from Eastern Africa to show how communities and populations—both within and beyond the reach of central agencies and public services—create viable forms of life (i.e., through modest, low-cost, small-scale, and often improvised interventions, and ordinary practices of repair, disruption, improvisation, and infrastructural reproduction) beyond despair. I contend that in the context of the Anthropocene’s planetary challenges, marked by intensifying exclusionary global capitalism and rapid technological acceleration, new ways of thinking, planning, governing, and ordering space and societies are urgently needed.

Date: 4 May 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Prince K. Guma, Humanities and Social Sciences, British Institute in Eastern Africa

Facing a crisis of depletion of groundwater, in 2014 the California state government passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which charges local agencies with creating and enacting plans for regulating its extraction. This paper assesses the efforts of a local water agency in California’s Cuyama Valley to make groundwater visible in ways that enable its regulation. The mantra “management is measurement” guides the efforts of local agencies to make groundwater visible through scientific well reports, satellite imagery, geological assays, streamflow and precipitation gauges, and most importantly, maps. While underground water becomes visible through these representations, what harder to see is how this science joins with water law to establish scarcity and redefine an open-access commons as the property of individual landowners.

Date: 11 May 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Casey Walsh, Anthropology, University of California

In this presentation, I expand on earlier work in which I argue that the adoption of ‘empathic’ AI in clinical settings is problematic. I share a sketch of an account of how AI chatbots may be ethically employed in patient-facing clinical care. At the outset, I make a distinction between clinical encounters involving patients who are mentally competent, for whom recognition is straightforwardly relevant, and clinical encounters involving mentally incompetent patient, in which the standard concept of recognition is not clearly applicable. For each scenario I delineate the ethical considerations that must be met. I find that the concerns around utilizing even non-‘empathic’ chatbots in clinical encounters are formidable.

Date: 18 May 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Karola Kreitmair, Bioethics / Philosophy, University of Wisconsin

GreenPulse is a mobile air quality monitoring system designed to capture high-resolution Air Quality Index (AQI) data in urban environments. Unlike traditional stationary stations, which provide coarse, averaged measurements, GreenPulse uses compact sensor nodes mounted on bicycles to collect geo-referenced, time-stamped pollution data at street level. The current work focuses on system prototyping, including sensor selection, custom PCB design, and embedded software development for data acquisition and wireless transmission. Ongoing efforts also define calibration procedures using reference monitoring stations. The presented prototype demonstrates the feasibility of mobile sensing for identifying pollution hot-spots and enabling smarter, health
aware urban mobility solutions.

Date: 01 June 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
FRIAS Project Group Green Pulse, Wanli Yu, Bargach Zakaria

This presentation will argue that anti-colonial social theory is metatheory conceived and elaborated in and through the peripheral gaze. It is a theory about theory and a reflection on the assumptions needed to formulate ways to think about academic scholarship. Its location and positionality relate to its origin in anti-colonial social thought. The latter formulates its identity in the following way: as an ontological claim that we live in a colonial world; as a methodology that debunks colonially dominant/hegemonic knowledge; and as a framework to comprehend the ‘social’ as it is constituted by colonially modernities.

This presentation will analyse how these attributes came to be incorporated in various anti-colonial social theories formulated since the 1940s, such as the emic perspectives of indigeneity and later, from the 1980s onwards the perspectives of subalternity; endogeneity and extraversion; coloniality of power; postcolonialism and decoloniality. It contends that anticolonial social theory’s methodologies are multiple and diverse and captures the unevenly organised colonial/imperial encounters across the world since the 1500s. It represents a standpoint and is a form of critical theory that alerts us to situate colonialism and its knowledges within specific time-spaces.

This presentation ends this discussion on anti-colonial social theory by assessing some challenges that it faces in context with the current geopolitical conflicts in the world.

Date: 08 June 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Sujata Patel, Sociology/Social Theory, University of Hyderabad

The 1980s were a decade of incredible social, political, and economic upheaval. In the socialist East, Glasnost and Perestroika allowed for new cultural openings and individual freedoms even as central planners struggled to keep up with the material bounties produced by post-Fordist outsourcing and just-in-time, flexible specialization. In the capitalist West, oil shocks, environmental pollution, stock market crashes, and military Keynesianism conspired to crush organized labor, but simultaneously birthed new technological revolutions and avenues for individual social mobility. As both capitalism and socialism struggled to control their own internal contradictions, the late Cold War represented a period of accelerated transformations which could have resulted in the demise of either system. This presentation dives into a political economic and cultural history of the decade of the 1980s from both sides of the Iron Curtain. I explore the dynamics of historical contingency, the historiographic erasure of this contingency, and the political uses and abuses of nostalgia in the present day. 

Date: 15 June 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Kristen Ghodsee, Anthropology/Gender Studies/East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Cultural factors in active aging determinants are important in understanding differences in the well-being of older adults worldwide. This study suggests that cultural variations in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) behavioral, social, economic, and health service determinants of active aging could influence differences in psychological well-being between individualistic and collectivistic cultural contexts. To investigate this, 1200 older adults (aged 65+) will be selected from Nigeria, a collectivistic country, and the UK, an individualistic country. Data will be analysed using a quantitative approach. The findings will have cultural implications for implementing WHO’s active aging policy framework to promote sustainable aging.

Date: 22 June 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Babatola Olawa, Psychology, University of Lancashire/North-West University

This paper examines the media used by colonial administrations to manufacture facts and coordinate information about the labor population. It is based on a historical ethnography of colonial administrative records from German South West Africa, present-day Namibia. The analysis focuses on monthly overviews of workers in the workplaces of the colony, especially in diamond fields, between 1911 and 1914. It demonstrates the role these sociotechnical objects played in the new labor regime after the genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama. The aim is to initiate a discussion about how the historical sociology of colonial knowledge can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and colonial violence.

Date: 29 June 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker: Léa Renard, Sociology, University of Heidelberg

The topic of the presentation will be announced in due course. Please check back soon for further details. We look forward to welcoming our fellows to the FRIAS Colloquium.

Date: 06 July 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Hendrikje Nienborg

University Collections of Ancestral Remains are under scrutiny for a number of contested practices and experiences – starting in a distant past, but becoming one of the evident proofs of asymmetry between colonizing and colonized societies recently. Both a) in negotiations between communities of origin and “holding institutions” (over restitution/repatriation and reparation) and b) within Universities’ memory politics controversial discussions unfold and appropriate governance is sought. Mapping relevant actors with their repertoires of action is required for improiving governance. These elements will be key in the proposed talk.

Date: 13 July 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Andreas Mehler, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, Restitution Governance, Arnold Bergstraesser Institute / University of Freiburg

What role did standards play in furniture design and production in the People’s Republic of China after 1949? How were they connected to the global history of post-war standardization and material life? This talk explores how Chinese state planners, architects, designers, and woodworkers connected questions of standardisation to the management of the everyday, economic planning, and the organisation of people, labour, and space between the 1950s and the 1980s. Furniture standards – in discourse and practice – became part of the party’s promise of giving, or at least striving to give, “the masses” equal access to living standards. The project to build socialism, in this case through design, did not equate to a formalised or total vision for material life, however. Instead, debates about and shifts in techniques and strategies to standardise furniture reveal diverse ideas about what a socialist society and its material culture might look like, from the early years of state socialism to the first decade of economic reforms.

Date: 20 July 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Jennifer Altehenger, Modern Chinese History, University of Oxford

The injunction to “know thyself” can be found in philosophical and religious traditions around the world. My intention in this essay is not to compare and contrast the contexts these searches for the self and the answers they purport to have found. That would be much too ambitious of an undertaking. Rather, the purpose of this essay is threefold: (1) to demonstrate both the importance and difficulty of knowing oneself; (2) to persuade readers that this undertaking is best pursued in dialogue with other persons, cultures, and traditions; and, as a case study, so to speak, for making an epistemological case for cross-cultural philosophy, (3) to introduce readers to what some medieval Zen masters and the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō thought about the self and about self-knowledge.

Date: 27 July 2026

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Bret Davis, Philosophy, Loyola University Maryland