Racing Minds Events
All “Racing Minds” Images Are Original Works by Enrica Costello
Racing Minds presents: An inter-disciplinary discussion of Josie Gill's Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel with geneticist and author Dr. Jason Morris
On Tuesday, March 1st, Literature and Mind will host a discussion of Josie Gill's Biofictions with Dr. Jason Morris.
Dr. Morris is a writer of literary fiction and professor of genetics at Fordham University in New York, whose teaching and research interests span the natural sciences and bioethics. His recent course, Diverse Biology/Shared Humanity, incorporates readings and approaches from biology and literary studies to provide students with an understanding of the diversity of human experience.
Our discussion will focus on the introduction and conclusion to Gill's Biofictions. We will draw upon Dr. Morris' expertise as a geneticist and novelist throughout the discussion, exploring how the book raises questions and forms connections across multiple academic fields.
If you wish to leave us a message about this event, please do so via the form below- All comments and inquiries are welcome!
Racing Minds presents: An inter-disciplinary discussion with Professor Sowon Park, of the English Department, and Professor Kyle Ratner, of Psychological and Brain Sciences on Park’s: "Minoritization: Why This Is an Issue"
For this our first reading group of the winter quarter, which took place on January 25th 2022, we read Sowon's "Minoritization: Why This Is an Issue," and explored how her paper raises questions and draws connections across multiple academic fields. Points of discussion included:
What gets to exist in the world and why?
How/why do things get erased in certain circles and not in other circles?
How does what gets filtered out and knocked down in society emerge within literary texts?
The human psychological urge to categorize and how this affects discussions of minoritization.
Born-translated authors/works and the question of diversity within global literature.
The Psychological Science Accelerator.
Moving away from “construct validity” in favor of “ecological validity” within psychological studies.
If you wish to leave us a message about this event, please do so via the form below- All comments and inquiries are welcome!
All “Racing Minds” Images Are Original Works by Enrica Costello
Racing Minds presents: a discussion of Stephanie Batiste's Spaces Between: Black Performances Of Death and Violence in Millennial Los Angeles.
For this reading group, which took place on November 8th 2021, we read Batiste’s "Krump time: Kinetic Affect, Resurrections, and Black Reorientations of Time" & "My’s Silent Scream: Memory, Traumatic Time, and the Embodiment of the Black Surreal in Rickerby Hinds’s Dreamscape" and discussed how her upcoming work, Spaces Between, explores questions of race and cultural performance.
If you wish to leave us a message about this event, please do so via the form below- All comments and inquiries are welcome!
All “Racing Minds” Images Are Original Works by Enrica Costello
Racing Minds presents: a discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay, "Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What it is like to be Black."
For our first Racing Minds reading group, which took place on October 18th 2021, we read Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle.” Points of discussion included:
Double consciousness––how does this idea help us move forward?
Pursuing cognitive mind studies from beyond an exclusively white position.
How Wynter takes Fanon’s concept of sociogeny and reframes it as the “sociogenic principle,” thereby relating it to the genomic principle of organic life (the culture-specific coding of the species-specific category of the human)
How to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between the humanities and sciences?––How do we get Dehaene to read Wynter?
