Somatic Experiencing is a body-based approach to healing from trauma. Join us to learn more about current research on Somatic Experiencing and how it might help university students learn while coping with stress, trauma, and anxiety.

This event is a research presentation and a discussion of ways to incorporate Somatic Experiencing tools and techniques in a learning environment. The discussion will be led by UCSB’s Trauma-Informed Pedagogy project’s undergraduate Research Assistant Hailey Row.

Suggested Reading: "‘We are all in this together’: Coping with stress during uncertain times through somatic experiencing" by Dilara Özel

Location: Sankey Room (South Hall 2623)

Date: Feb 5, 5:15-7:00pm

Empanadas and beverages will be served

Please RSVP by Feb 2 by emailing Aili at apetterssonpeeker[at]ucsb.edu so we know how much food to get.

The world is full of intractable problems, and one common humanities response to them is to look for solutions in literature. (“If only we all read more Toni Morrison, we’d be in a much better state.”) This explicit or implicit promotion of literary texts as a source of answers relies, structurally speaking, on the use of interpretation as a basic method of inquiry. In this hermeneutic tradition, interpretive methods are used to extract useful meanings from the text. Cognitive approaches to literary study, by contrast, take a step back and direct their investigations onto acts of interpretation themselves—including the instincts that lead readers to seek answers, and the factors that determine whether they find them.

In this evening’s conversation, we’ll explore our own and each other’s takes on the method/object question, and ask what we might gain from trying out other ways of doing things. To get us ready to think and talk about interpretation, there are two pieces of preparatory reading:

• A 2018 article on “Interpretation: Its status as object or method of study in cognitive and unnatural narratology”—a paper whose creation involved some interestingly productive disagreements amongst the three coauthors! 
  

• A recently finished children's story called "The Shellfish Nest" to complement the critical with the creative and give us a focal point for conversation.

Do trigger warnings really help students avoid the harm of trauma? Join us to learn about current research on the problems and potentials of trigger warnings from undergraduate research assistant Bethany Clements. This event is a research presentation and a discussion of ways to teach and learn in trauma-informed ways. There will be empanadas and drinks! Please RSVP to english-litandmind@ucsb.edu, cchin@ucsb.edu, or apetterssonpeeker@ucsb.edu by November 10 so that we can plan how much food to get. For more details, see the flyer below. As always, feel free to invite friends and colleagues, and don't hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Location: South Hall 2635

Come start off the year with your fellow minds! Come hear more about trauma-informed initiatives across the campus. We invite you to join us and talk together about the trauma-informed work that is going on in Literature and Mind and across campus. Please see the attached flyer for further details, and don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns.

Location: South Hall 2623

Writing is a tricky business. In the academic context, it’s about getting qualifications, it’s about demonstrating expertise and career progression, it’s maybe about expressing things we care about, and it’s how we spend a good chunk of our working week (or how we probably ought to, or want to). Writing gets bound up with all kinds of practical, emotional, and existential questions, and sometimes the weight of all these expectations feels too much.

This half-day workshop led by Dr. Emily Troscianko is a chance for you to lighten the burden. We’ll begin by paying attention. We’ll find out what your attitudes to and experiences of writing right now actually are, and then do some simple classification: Are these real problems, pseudo-problems, or positives? Then we’ll each design our own “behavioural experiment” to attempt to solve the problem or pseudo-problem we’d most like to be rid of. In the rest of the afternoon, we’ll use two timed writing sessions with planning and review—plus a break with food, drink, and stretching—to start conducting the experiment we’ve designed, and observing and learning from the effects. We’ll wrap up with some brainstorming of ideas for protecting and enhancing your positives. You’ll come away with confidence in your capacity to adopt a spirit of curious experimentation with the macro and micro structures of your writing habits—a meta-attitude that reliably helps tomorrow feel and work incrementally better than yesterday.

The event is open to all; places are limited to 20. Please bring a writing project-in-progress that you can work on during our two timed sessions, and be prepared to be without your phone, social media, and email for the full 3.5 hours, including the break. Email Aili at apetterssonpeeker@ucsb.edu by April 26 to sign up.

Location: South Hall 2617

 Emily Troscianko is a coach, writer, and researcher at the University of Oxford with particular interests in eating disorders, consciousness, and the psychological effects of reading narrative. She is the creator of a writing program for the University of Oxford and has extensive experience in enhancing academic wellbeing and performance. She is currently a Research Associate at TORCH, Oxford University’s interdisciplinary humanities research center, and runs courses on academic writing, habit change, failure, and other aspects of what it means to work and live well.

If you’re bothered by recurring feelings of failing or being an impostor (who’s always right on the brink of being uncovered), in your professional and/or your personal life, this workshop is for you. This workshop about failure is led by Dr. Emily Troscianko. We’ll start right from the beginning, with what you actually feel, and we’ll build up a systematic framework for doing far more constructive things with the feelings than our defaults tend to allow for. We’ll cover:

• why failure and impostor syndrome matter (in academia), and how they relate to anxiety and perfectionism;

• what you want to be different;

• how to start classifying your feelings into useful categories;

• how to put failures into perspective (in the wider context of now, and as now relates to the rest of your life);

• failure and fraudulence: you, your career, and other people;

• shared and individual actions that make a difference;

• how you’ll know when you’ve succeeded in making a difference.

To prepare for the event, you’ll be asked to complete a failure/impostor-related tracking exercise and to follow the instructions provided to create your own CV of failures.

During the event, it’ll be important for you to be as open as you can about the realities of what’s going on for you. The difficulty of doing this is of course part of the problem the event is designed to address, but your willingness to overcome the secrecy and the associated shame and stasis will be crucial to achieving anything. The event will be configured so as to make this kind of openness feel as safe and supported as possible.

The event is open to all graduate students at UCSB; places are limited to 20. Email Aili at apetterssonpeeker@ucsb.edu by April 25 to sign up.

Location: South Hall 2635

 Emily Troscianko is a coach, writer, and researcher at the University of Oxford with particular interests in eating disorders, consciousness, and the psychological effects of reading narrative. She is the creator of a writing program for the University of Oxford and has extensive experience in enhancing academic wellbeing and performance. She is currently a Research Associate at TORCH, Oxford University’s interdisciplinary humanities research center, and runs courses on academic writing, habit change, failure, and other aspects of what it means to work and live well.

In this interactive 3-hour session led by Dr. Emily Troscianko we’ll explore all four parts of the author/text/reader/context constellation, asking questions about what kinds of power texts do and don’t have, and how humans might harness that power more responsibly.

We’ll start from an assumption that the effects of interacting with linguistic material (whether it’s labelled “literature” or something less grand) can be both “good” and “bad”, helpful and harmful, desired and undesired, and we’ll briefly review the evidence for helpful and harmful effects in one specific health context: bibliotherapy research for eating disorders. We’ll then put the current scientific evidence (which is still minimal) in dialogue with learning and ideas deriving from our personal experiences as writers and readers.

Our case study will be a personal dilemma that turned into a research project, when the facilitator ended up writing an anorexia recovery memoir and happened to know that such books have significant potential to be seriously unhelpful. What should she do next?

We’ll expand out from this example to consider any risk/benefit domain you’d like to work with. Focused first on the author pole, we’ll work through questions like “what should be the bar for putting something non-innocuous out into the world?”, “how confidently can we predict possible causes and effects?”, and “if we predict positive/negative effects, how can we maximize/minimize the chance of achieving them?”. Moving to the text itself, we’ll ask what linguistic/literary features might be most relevant to generating helpful/harmful responses. And turning to readers and contexts of reading, we’ll identify factors with significant potential to shape a reading process for good or ill, in terms of both background influences and deliberate strategies—doing what we can to look into our own blindspots.

We’ll conclude with some big-picture brainstorming on what it would mean for authors and/or readers to take seriously these kinds of responsible practicalities in their everyday ways of engaging with texts, and how broader institutions (schools, publishers, etc.) could help them do so.

The event is open to all and you don't need to sign up for it.

Location: South Hall 2623

 Emily Troscianko is a coach, writer, and researcher at the University of Oxford with particular interests in eating disorders, consciousness, and the psychological effects of reading narrative. She is the creator of a writing program for the University of Oxford and has extensive experience in enhancing academic wellbeing and performance. She is currently a Research Associate at TORCH, Oxford University’s interdisciplinary humanities research center, and runs courses on academic writing, habit change, failure, and other aspects of what it means to work and live well.

Join the student-organized Medical Humanities Book Club for their discussion of Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me (2012) by Ellen Forney, chosen for the group by Kass Barragan. Everyone is welcome, though it is recommended that you read the selected text prior to the meeting date.

The new Medical Humanities Book Club is an informal student meeting group devoted to reading literature about issues connected to the Medical Humanities. If you are interested in joining the mailing list or recommending a book for discussion, please contact organizer Lupita Barragan at guadalupebarragan@ucsb.edu.

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Join the student-organized Medical Humanities Book Club for their discussion of This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor (2017) by Adam Kay, chosen for the group by Kristy Le. Everyone is welcome, though it is recommended that you read the selected text prior to the meeting date.

The new Medical Humanities Book Club is an informal student meeting group devoted to reading literature about issues connected to the Medical Humanities. If you are interested in joining the mailing list or recommending a book for discussion, please contact organizer Lupita Barragan at guadalupebarragan@ucsb.edu.

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The Medical Humanities Book Club at UCSB invites you to join us for a reading of Blood Sugar Canto by auhtor ire’ne lara silva. The event will be followed by a panel discussion focusing on how the sciences and the arts can both contribute to healing.

Register here.

This event is co-sponsored by The Global Latinidades Project and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB.

Join the student-organized Medical Humanities Book Club for their discussion of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009) by TR Reid, chosen for the group by Manuel Guzman. Everyone is welcome, though it is recommended that you read the selected text prior to the meeting date.

The new Medical Humanities Book Club is an informal student meeting group devoted to reading literature about issues connected to the Medical Humanities. If you are interested in joining the mailing list or recommending a book for discussion, please contact organizer Lupita Barragan at guadalupebarragan@ucsb.edu.

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Please join us in celebrating the Lit and Mind specializers for 2021! This informal event is open to all, with special recognition given to those that have completed their coursework to receive the Lit and Mind specialization certificate from the English department this year.

We would like to acknowledge and introduce these wonderful students to our larger community, so if you are specializing please be prepared to say a few words about yourself and/or your research interests during this online celebration. Are you an undergraduate working on a specialization on Literature and Mind and about to graduate? Then please consider presenting your work at this event. If you are interested in sharing your work, there are a wide arrange of things you could do. You could for example read a section from a paper you've written that you like, share creative work of yours, share a passage from an author that really struck with you, or reflect on ideas you have learned through Lit and Mind classes. The presentations should be 3-5 minutes and will be followed by informal discussion.

If you are interested in presenting, please send us an email at english-litandmind@ucsb.edu, or to Professor Carlson (jcarlson@english.ucsb.edu), Maddie (roepe@ucsb.edu), or Aili (apetterssonpeeker@ucsb.edu).

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Aili Pettersson Peeker is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Lit and Mind Undergrad Celebration

Time: Jun 1, 2021 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Join the student-organized Medical Humanities Book Club for their discussion of The Cancer Journals (1980) by Audre Lorde, chosen for the group by Victoria Sanie. Everyone is welcome, though it is recommended that you read the selected text prior to the meeting date.

The new Medical Humanities Book Club is an informal student meeting group devoted to reading literature about issues connected to the Medical Humanities. If you are interested in joining the mailing list or recommending a book for discussion, please contact organizer Lupita Barragan at guadalupebarragan@ucsb.edu.

Please join Lit and Mind for this presentation of "Trigger Warning! Reading, Politics, and Mental Wellness,” an Arnhold Collaborative Research Project featuring two Lit and Mind affiliated graduate students, Milena Messner and Aisha Anwar, and facilitated by Jesse Miller.

This event will introduce the research publication and the podcast mini-series that the researchers have created. There will be short presentations and time for Q and A. Join to learn more about the history and politics of trigger warnings, and to check out inspiring and collaborative research! All are very welcome.

Art by Mina Nur Basmaci.

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Aili Pettersson Peeker is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Trigger Warning! Reading, Politics, and Mental Wellness Arnhold Project Presentation

Time: May 24, 2021 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Please join Lit and Mind for the Story and the Brain undergraduate discussion group! Undergraduates are especially welcome. This Story and the Brain session will be dedicated to a little "experiment." If you choose to participate, you will be helping Dr. van de Ven with her research project ‘TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read): Close and hyperreading of literary texts and the modulation of attention’.

There are three different levels on which you can contribute and be part of the meeting:

1. Read the selected short story (“Where are you going, where have you been” by Joyce Carol Oates), and attend the discussion. Tip: pick a quiet moment in your day and try to read the story in one sitting. Try to detach yourself from your surroundings and limit distractions. Warning: this story can be sensitive as it has stalking as a theme. However, it is not of a graphic nature.

2. Same as [1] but monitor your attention. While reading the story, color-code the words / lines where.....

   1. you experienced a heightened, focused attention (red)

   2. you experienced a more shallow mode of attention, or felt the urge to skim (green)

   3. you skipped certain words or zoned out (blue)

3. Same as [2] but in addition: annotate the text with the thoughts that pop into your head while reading the story. Use comments in Word to attach a description of the thought to the exact place where you had it. If you want, you can include thoughts that are related to the story (associations, aesthetic judgments, and memories), as well as unrelated ones, that distracted you from following it (e.g., "I shouldn’t forget to walk my dog after this"). If you notice your attention is interrupted by external factors, like an incoming text or ringing doorbell, you can make a note of this as well.

You can upload your color-coded and/or annotated files anonymously in this Google drive folder. You could also send them in by email to Aili Pettersson Peeker: apetterssonpeeker@ucsb.edu. It would be great if you could do this by Friday May 14, so that Dr. van de Ven can give an overview of our collective attentional modulations and mind wanderings during the session. However, if you prefer to upload or send your document after the session, it would still be very useful. And, again, people are most welcome to join the meeting without having annotated their reading experience too.

Please find the Zoom link for this event below and feel free to spread the word and invite people who might be interested. No prior knowledge or familiarity is needed to attend!

Please note that this meeting will be recorded (for research purposes only).

Aili Pettersson Peeker is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Story and the Brain with Dr. Inge van de Ven

Time: May 17, 2021 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Join the student-organized Medical Humanities Book Club for their discussion of Night Theater (2017) by Vikram Paralkar, chosen for the group by Maddie Roepe. Everyone is welcome, though it is recommended that you read the selected text prior to the meeting date.

The new Medical Humanities Book Club is an informal student meeting group devoted to reading literature about issues connected to the Medical Humanities. If you are interested in joining the mailing list or recommending a book for discussion, please contact organizer Lupita Barragan at guadalupebarragan@ucsb.edu.

Zoom information to follow shortly.

Join the Disability Studies Initiative for this exciting talk! Rachel Lambert (Assistant Professor in Special Education & Mathematics Education, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara) will offer a workshop on Universal Design for Learning. She will shed light on its development, including roots in Universal Design, and will describe the radical possibilities in UDL as well as critiques. She will also present her own work, which seeks to integrate design thinking as a process for educators to use UDL to (re)design curriculum, spaces, and systems.

Lambert's scholarly work investigates the intersections between Disability Studies in Education and mathematics education. She has conducted longitudinal studies of how Latinx students with learning disabilities construct identities as mathematics learners, and how mathematical pedagogy shapes how teachers perceive students as disabled.

Please email disabilitystudies@english.ucsb.edu for more information. The Zoom link for this meeting can be found below.

Zoom link

Join the student-organized Medical Humanities Book Club for their discussion of Blood Sugar Canto (2016) by ire'ne lara silva, chosen for the group by Lupita Barragan. Everyone is welcome, though it is recommended that you read the selected text prior to the meeting date.

The new Medical Humanities Book Club is an informal student meeting group devoted to reading literature about issues connected to the Medical Humanities. If you are interested in joining the mailing list or recommending a book for discussion, please contact organizer Lupita Barragan at guadalupebarragan@ucsb.edu.

Zoom information:
Lupita is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Lupita's Zoom Meeting
Time: Apr 13, 2021 08:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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This is a meeting for the IHC Research Focus Group “Sustainability and the New Human” with Dr. Marco Caracciolo. All are welcome but registration is required (read on for registration link)!

Uncertainty is a central psychological dimension of the ecological crisis. The science of climate change brings into view widely divergent scenarios; the discrepancy between these more or less catastrophic visions of the future undermines our ontological security (in Anthony Giddens’s terminology). Dr. Caracciolo argues that literary narrative has an important role to play in cultivating readers’ ability to live with uncertainty. He describes this process as a shift from a primarily negative understanding of uncertainty (as something to be avoided at all costs) to a more complex, nuanced appreciation. The presentation will be followed by a discussion moderated by Professor Sowon Park.

The meeting is open to all but we do ask you to register to attend so that we can spend our time in the meeting as productively as possible. Please register by April 15. After you’ve registered, you will receive a Zoom invitation as well as a 1,000-word document introducing the research that we ask that you read before the meeting. Please see the information sheet “Sustainability and the New Human IHC Research Focus Group Meetings” for more information about this and the structure of the meeting.

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. He is the author of five books, including most recently Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (University of Virginia Press, 2021).

Sowon Park is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Together with Professor Sangwon Suh, she is one of the conveners of the Sustainability and the New Human Research Focus Group.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Sustainability and the New Human Research Focus Group

This event is devoted to undergraduate feedback: “I would like help with X.” Here, a small number of undergraduate specializers (3-4) sign up in advance to have the group consider together a paragraph of their writing that is giving them difficulty, joy, or some combination; a passage from a literary or theoretical text on which they seek input; a problem or response to the campus climate crisis, however defined. The event is structured as a peer workshop led by the current Lit and Mind RAs Maddie Roepe and Aili Pettersson Peeker and the aim is to help each other with writing and thinking.

This event is limited to graduate and undergraduate specializer students ONLY. If you are interested in participating, please email english-litandmind@ucsb.edu by Friday, February 26. We’ll be in touch with details and zoom links to all participants.