Priors and Priorities: Conceiving Time and Other Bodies

Harvard University | April 20-21, 2018

Barker Center, Thompson Room
Preliminary Program

Friday April 20

Breakfast: 8-9am

Panel 1: 9-11am | | Temporalities on the Move

Chair: Eli Nelson, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

Respondent: TBD

• “Road Plans and Planned Roads: Entangled Geographies, Spatiotemporal Frames, and
Territorial Claims-making in Myanmar's Southern Shan State,” Courtney Wittekind,
Harvard University
• “Apache Deportation and the Birth of the Borderlands,” Nakay R. Flotte, Harvard
University
• “Out of Time”: Spatial Temporality among Bedouin as the Struggle for Land in the South
of Palestine/Israel,” Safa Aburabia, Harvard University
• “Times New Ottoman: The Orient Express in Ottoman Spacetime,” Caleb Shelburne,
Harvard University

Panel 2: 11:15-1:15 | Beyond the Posthuman

Chair: Ahmed Ragab, Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion, Harvard
University
Respondent: TBD

• “Data Plans, Universal Assessments, and Streetlights: Technologies of Time in the

Mississippi Delta,” Marc Aidinoff, MIT
• “Alien Phones: The Limits of Disruption and the Infrastructure of Techno-resistance in
1990s US,” Gili Vidan, Harvard University
• “El Tapón del Darien and the Movement Beyond the Human,” Juanita Becerra, Harvard
University
• “The Social Life of Fossils,” Nandini Ramachandran, City University of New York

Lunch: 1:30-2:30pm

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Panel 3: 2:45-4:45pm | Tense, Epistemology, and Affect

Chair: Durba Mitra, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Respondent: Ahmed Ragab, Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion,
Harvard University

• “Imperial Temporalities: Disability, Spirituality, and the Nineteenth-Century Omaha

Nation,” Caroline Lieffers, Yale University
• “Disgust's Colonial History,” Kylie Sago, Harvard University
• “Orders, Numbers and Dimensions: Journeying in Revival Zion Religion,” Khytie
Brown, Harvard University
• “Queer Voyage at Sea: Charting a Queer Black Epistemology in the Hispanic
Caribbean,” Kedon Willis, The University of Florida

Keynote: 5-6:30pm
Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College

Art Exhibit: 6:45-7:45-pm

Instrument, Zain Alam & Juan Ledesma
Instrument is a composition and exhibition exploring the abstract practices of assemblage,
remixing, and sampling in cultural production, inviting audiences to interrogate regimes of
intellectual property, boundaries of cultural appropriation, and the valuations of craft and
creativity. Opening in Miami in February 2018, Instrument is the result of a collaboration
between DJ Zain Alam and sculptor Juan Ledesma, turning amplification tools inside out to
illustrate their inner workings and carve out a different, re-abstracted sonic presence against
consumption practice of sound abstracted away from all physical mediums. These inverted
instruments will play some of the most sampled in music history, forming an original
composition. Instrument will be activated through this performance, and the entire process will
be recorded and left on loop for the remaining duration of the exhibition.

Dinner: 7:45-9:15pm

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 Saturday April 21

Breakfast: 8:30-9:30am

Panel 4: 9:30-11:30am | Representing Other Tenses

Chair: Juanita Becerra, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

Respondent: Durba Mitra, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality, Harvard
University

• “Passing Time: Representing Rural Transgender Modernities,” Eli Erlick, University of

California, Santa Cruz
• “Rivera’s Transient Mural: Visualizing the Spectre of Empire and Aesthetics of
Revolución de Octubre,” Angel Rodriguez, Harvard University
• “To share in the spirit of the olden life upon this continent”: Keeping Time in Da-O-Ma,”
Eli Nelson, Harvard University
• “Bedia as an Ethnographer?” Celia Rodríguez-Tejuca, University of Massachusetts
Amherst

Lunch: 11:45am-12:45pm

Panel 5: 1-3pm | Troubling the Present

Chair: Gili Vidan, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

Respondent: Ahmed Ragab, Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion,
Harvard University

• “Toxic Temporalities: Limits and Possibilities of Environmental Justice in Flint,

Michigan,” Elena Sobrino, MIT
• “Decoding Temporalities in Pistol Whippersnapper (1976),” Elizabeth Muñoz Huber,
Independent Scholar
• “Considering Narratives of the Sikh Past in the Neoliberal Present,” Damanpreet Singh
Pelia, Harvard Divinity School
• “Sexual Reinscriptions of New World Times: Indigenous Women and Canada’s Sex
Trade,” Faye Fraser, York University