Public Humanities Infrastructure

Thursday, January 24

Herring Hall, 100, 5:30pm

Public Humanities Infrastructure: A Post-Harvey Introduction to Critical Infrastructure Studies

"Critical Infrastructure Studies: A Primer" Alan Liu Distinguished Professor, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara Work in Progress: Against the Cultural Singularity "Curating our Technological Ruins: Towards an Aesthetics of Disaster Archiving" James Smithies Director of King's Digital Lab at King's College London Author, The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern (2017)

cistudies.org/events Thursday, January 24, 5:30pm Herring Hall, 100 Reception to follow

As Houston rebuilds in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, we find that our vision of infrastructure, whether gray or green, is defined almost exclusively in terms of civil engineering and the social sciences. The task of reimagininging cities like Houston in the age of climate catastrophe demands humanistic perspectives, both to critique core assumptions of and to provide alternative visions for our common existence. This joint public talk with Alan Liu and James Smithies introduces the emergent, interdisciplinary field of “Critical Infrastructure Studies” and considers the institutional dimensions of the public humanities and higher education, in order to help articulate how the humanities can critically and productively contribute to public debates on topics such as “preparedness,” “resiliency,” “disaster,” and “infrastructure."

Contact John Mulligan (jcm10@rice.edu) with any questions!

Event listing: https://events.rice.edu/#!view/event/date/20190124/event_id/25147