BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab Open House
March 28, 2011 4:00 pm
4:00-6:00 PM
All undergraduates welcome–regardless of majors!
Learn about BorderWork(s), a new Humanities Lab starting in fall 2011!
Refreshments Provided
Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI)
C105, Bay 4, 1st Floor
Smith Warehouse
Come to the open house to find out:
- Just what is a humanities lab? Some hints here
- How to get involved as researchers in group projects
with faculty and graduate students - How to work on human rights challenges beyond the
university through humanities research - How to do human rights research and events
Opportunities in BorderWork(s) include:
- Write a senior thesis on a human rights-related theme
- Develop a group or individual independent study project on borders, walls and partitions in history or contemporary life
- Form personal relationships with leading Duke professors working in the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia and China
BorderWork(s) draws together critical perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and policy studies to explore the acts of division and demarcation – cartographic and representational, material and physical, political and economic, social and cultural – that have parceled up the inhabited world into bounded communities. These walls, borders, and partitions serve to shape, redirect, arrest, and interrupt flows of people, goods, ideas, resources, information, and even imagination itself. Whenever frontiers change or disappear altogether, human security is affected. The very act of slicing and dicing territory, whether on the ground or on paper, has been, in essence, the basis of modern states and empires. This Lab is concerned with the making and unmaking of borders and their effects on our understanding of state, imperial, and corporate power, environmental rights and engagement with the natural world, the mobility or immobility of human communities (such as refugees), and their creative expression in a variety of artistic and visual media. BorderWork(s) is led by Claudia Koonz (History), Philip Stern(History) and Erika Weinthal (Nicholas School), with additional core faculty, including Robin Kirk (Duke Human Rights Center/International Comparative Studies), Ralph Litzinger (Cultural Anthropology) and Sumathi Ramaswamy(History). The Lab will also include other faculty with related interests as well as graduates and undergraduates.