2008-2009 grant proposal

Materials, Materiality and Material Worlds (MMMW)

Proposal for a Humanities Research Group Grant
The Cogut Center for the Humanities
Brown University

Introduction:

The Material Worlds Working Group, established in 2007 through a seed grant from the Cogut Center for the Humanities (please see our website at http://proteus.brown.edu/cogutmaterialworlds/Home) has served as an intellectual space in which a growing number of faculty from across the university (and beyond) can develop and explore a common interest in things as central problem for the intellectual and material labor of the academy. The role of things – be they materials, antiquities, commodities, art, tools, fetishes, or nature – has served as an underlying element of social theory and the materialist/idealist dialectic that some claim to have overcome, subverted, or avoided altogether. In order to bring our conversations to a broader audience and to develop an institutional framework for the study of material culture on campus, the working group seeks to initiate a series of workshop seminars in which to present ongoing research and engage invited outside scholars to share their own perspectives and scholarship. Following the successful model of our spring symposium it seems that one of the most effective strategies is to provide a venue in which scholarship is pre-circulated either in the form of a paper or some other medium that will allow for more focused discussion and digestion of work in progress.

Relevance for the Humanities:

The prominence of text and language has been a hallmark of the humanities. However, there has been increasing realization that theoretical work is done not only through the production of writing but through other media, as well as performances and the crafting of things. The goal of this workshop is to investigate how a world of materials is not a mere epiphenomena of ideologies but itself constitutes forms of argumentation and world views. One of the central questions guiding our inquiries is how we might write, fabricate and even perform that material world back into the methodologies of humanistic inquiry. This will ultimately force us to look at how this is done elsewhere in the academy, whether the natural and applied sciences or the performing and visual arts. It is therefore our intent to engage artists and scientists to share their work within this framework of open discussion.

Following from this there are a number of integrated scholarly and institutional goals that are expected to result from the organization and execution of this workshop.

1. Continuing the inter-disciplinary dialogue among faculty with interests in material culture, but transmitting that to the wider university context and establishing links especially with graduate students whose research intersects with the activities of the working group.

2. Providing a forum for the discussion of ongoing research by Brown faculty and scholars from neighboring institutions. We have already seen important links formed with researchers at RISD, Harvard, MIT and Columbia.

3. Building the institutional support for some level of programmatic research and teaching unit dedicated to the study of materials and materiality

Proposed Activities of the Research Group:

The main activity of the working group will be to organize a biweekly workshop during both the fall and spring semester. These meetings will consist of a faculty member, an outside scholar or a graduate student who will pre-circulate a significant working paper/project that will serve as the basis for discussion. This format, combined with short commentary by the author and brief formal discussion, has proven and effective strategy for facilitating conversation and diverse feedback within an interdisciplinary setting. For the academic year of 2008-9 we will expect to have a total of ten such meetings with roughly five reserved for Brown faculty, three for outside scholars, and two for advanced graduate students. The intent is to bring together scholars from different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological backgrounds in order to open the possibilities for the kinds of connections between scholars that emerged from the symposium which the working group organized this past semester. Some of the themes that we hope to address in these conversations include: consumer culture, material theory, the intersection of art and technology, heritage and urban planning, and sustainable design. These, among others will serve to provide the kinds of directions that a future curricular program at Brown might seek to develop. Thus the end goal will be to apply for larger grants that would support more sustained curricular development along these lines.