January 2--6, 2020

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Guest Scholar: Duncan Lorimer, West Virginia University

We live in exciting times! Recent developments in astrophysics include the first-ever detection of gravitational waves as well as elusive classes of objects including pulsars and fast radio bursts. These topics exemplify some of the most exotic phenomena that we are part of. In this course, we will learn about some of these exciting developments and consider some of the amazing consequences for our understanding of the very nature of space and time. No prior astronomical background is needed and we will cover every essential physical concept as we go. No matter where your career will take you in life, it is my goal in this class to inspire you to be life-long learners of the Universe we live in, and even other ones!

Duncan Lorimer got his PhD. in 1994 from the University of Manchester (UK). Since then he has held positions at the University of Manchester; the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy; Cornell University; University of Manchester and currently is at West Virginia University. While at WVU, Prof. Lorimer has served as Associate and Interim Chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Along with his wife and fellow astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin, Lorimer has helped establish the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology. Among his notable research achievements are many contributions to our understanding of the population of pulsars and the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts. Since 1994 Prof. Lorimer has been a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

January 7-11, 2020

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Guest Scholar: Karen Ho, University of Minnesota

Socio-economic inequality in the United States has now surpassed the heights of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. The 2008 U.S. financial meltdown laid bare not only the extent to which financiers and financial institutions engendered the crisis and instigated widespread socioeconomic precarity and suffering, but also the ways in which financialization – the growth of financial activities as a key source of profits for financial and non-financial corporations alike – has dominated our social economy. What is the relationship between increasing inequality and increasing financialization? How has finance’s rise to power and influence over the past thirty-five years shaped our economy and the particular values, practices, and ethics that construct business common-sense, not to mention the very nature of work, ownership, and security in the US? And yet, instead of addressing the key causes of inequality directly, the powerful in society have seized on these conditions to mobilize an avalanche of discontent among sectors of the downwardly mobile in a way that often obscures the key reasons for their predicament and scapegoats those at the social margins.  

Karen Ho is faculty in the Department Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and Director of The RIGS (Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality) Studies Initiative. Her research centers on the problematic of understanding and representing financial markets, sites that are resistant to cultural analysis and often disavow various attempts to locate or particularize them.  Her domain of interest is the anthropology of economy, broadly conceived, with specific foci on finance capital, capitalism, globalization, corporations, inequality, and comparative race/ethnicity/indigeneity. Her ethnography, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009) was based on three years of fieldwork among investment bankers and major financial institutions. Recent publications include “Finance and Morality” (A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Fassin, Didier, ed., 2012), “Corporate Nostalgia: Managerial Capitalism from a Contemporary Perspective” (Corporations and Citizenship. Urban, Greg, ed., 2014), “Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism” (Theorizing the Contemporary Series, Cultural Anthropology Online, co-authored, 2015), and “Markets, Myths, and Misrecognitions: Economic Populism in the Age of Financialization and Hyperinequality. (Economic Anthropology, 2018). Her latest projects analyze dominant finance’s production of contemporary inequality, tracing the afterlives of corporate liquidation, the worldviews of investment funds, and the relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and dominant financial markets. 

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

February 29-March 4, 2020

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Guest Scholar:  Steven Alvarez, St. John’s University (NY)

In recent years, there has been a steady increase of interest in the transnational migrations of Mexican food popularized by bloggers, television food shows, and travel journalists. In addition to the immense number of reviews, trade publications, and cookbooks, important social issues in regard to multilingualism, cultural appropriation, migrant labor, and the translation of indigenous cuisine for corporate consumption have also become topical. This seminar will examine how transnational community foodways situate different literacies, rhetorics, and forms of cultural knowledge across borders. Readings will include Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food by Jeffrey M. and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America by Gustavo Arellano.

Steven Alvarez is an associate professor of English at St. John’s University in New York, specializing in literacy studies and bilingual education with a focus on Mexican immigrant communities. He teaches courses ranging from autobiographical writing, ethnographic methods, visual rhetoric, and “taco literacy,” a course exploring the foodways of Mexican immigrants in the United States. He is the author of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (State University of New York Press, 2017) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English, 2017).

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

March 25-29, 2020

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Guest Scholar:  Randolph Lewis, University of Texas at Austin

Surveillance technology is now interwoven with every aspect of modern life---TSA scanners, Predator drones, ubiquitous social media, Big Data marketing, and “always listening” smart speakers are just the tip of the iceberg. Working from an interdisciplinary perspective that will bring the sociologically-based research of surveillance studies into conversation with humanities scholarship related to art, film, history, architecture, and affect, we will explore the psychology and politics underlying the institutionalization of insecurity in the US. What are the hidden costs of living in a “control society” in which surveillance is deemed essential to government and business? This is the central question in a seminar that will weigh the impact of surveillance on privacy, dignity, autonomy, creativity, and emotion in the contemporary US.

Randolph Lewis is Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, he is the author of Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America (2017), which has been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and NPR. He is co-editor of a book series on indigenous media for the University of Nebraska Press; co-producer of the documentary film, Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State. He is also the founder and editor of The End of Austin, a digital humanities project that explores the shifting cultural geography of the fastest growing city in the US. In addition to tracking new trends in surveillance technology, he is currently making a documentary film about post-apocalyptic faux tribalism in the Mojave desert. 

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided

April 8-12, 2020

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Guest Scholar:  Jean Hunleth, Washington University, St. Louis, School of Medicine

Children around the world face life and death situations every day. They are part of families and communities that are confronted by serious social and political problems, from the AIDS epidemic and other disease outbreaks to extreme poverty, forced migration, structural racism, and war. Numerous global health and humanitarian interventions aim to help children, such as those targeted at orphans or children outside of family care. However, very few incorporate children’s perspectives of their own needs into their programming, leading to potentially ineffective or harmful interventions. We will address the following questions: Why should we take children seriously in global health and humanitarian work? How do children participate in families and communities in ways that impact health and wellbeing? And what research methods are appropriate for working with children in adversity? We will also address head-on the longstanding devaluation of children’s knowledge, actions, and experiences in policymaking and program development. As a class, we will develop ways to get decision makers to take children seriously.

Jean Hunleth works with children and families to identify more appropriate ways to deliver public health. She uses methods from anthropology and the visual arts and is especially fascinated by the important social and political implication of children’s fantasies and play. Jean earned her PhD in Anthropology and Master of Public Health from Northwestern University. She is the author of the award-winning book, Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia, and numerous articles published in anthropological, public health, child welfare, and medical journals. She got her start in global health as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, which drove her to pursue a career focused on children’s creativity and the diversity of childhood experiences.

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!
• Housing and meals provided